FEATURE 77 - A Bukowski Poem

Read through some late poems this morning from The Last Night On Earth by Charles Bukowski, written two years before he died in 1994 at the age of 73. Unsurprisingly there's plenty of reflection on the growing immanence of his death, and rather sanguine summaries of a lifetime lived largely on the edge of poverty and success. He kept himself afloat on a stream of sex-drink-gambling-fights -and most of all writing.

Reading this poem - Air and light and time and space - somehow resonated with me, probably because I know I've done what he's describing -waiting for the right time or space to arrive for creativity - which rarely does of course.

Bukowski spent most of his life working long hours in deadbeat jobs, but wrote none the less, mostly by depriving himself of sleep to write through the night. To write he had to make it something he just had to do, in spite of, not because of the circumstances he found himself in. In the past I know I made the incompatibility of my circumstances an excuse for my lack of creative accomplishment - if only I didn't have to work! Impatiently waiting for that right moment of air, light, time or space, to arrive.

According to Bukowski these only arrive if you're prepared to make huge personal sacrifices to obtain them, and that this will greatly inconvenience you, and be discomforting. He'd say any work arrived at without that element of personal sacrifice, will inevitably become a contrived artifice and indulgent, and what's worse would be existentially untruthful.

AIR AND LIGHT AND TIME AND SPACE

"-you know,I've either had a family, a job, something

has always been in the

way

but now

I've sold my house, I've found this

place, a large studio, you should see the space and

the light

for the first time in my life I'm going to have a place and the time to

create"

no baby, if you're going to create

you're going to create

you're going to create whether you work

16 hours a day in a coal mine

or

you're going to create in a small room with 3 children

while you're on

welfare,

you're going to create with part of your mind and your

body blown

away,

you're going to create blind

crippled

demented,

you're going to create with a cat crawling up your

back while

the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,

flood and fire.

baby, air and light and time and space

have nothing to do with it

and don't create anything

except maybe a longer life to find

new excuses

for.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

from The Last Night on Earth.

published byECCO