Monday, June 24, 2013

You Better Duck

Looking around for a Bukowski poem to complement what I was writing about women (see below). Thinking I could get a unique but confirming perspective.

Got knocked off my chair with this.

"A Smile To Remember":

"We had goldfish and they circled around and around
in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes
covering the picture window and,
my mother, always smiling, wanting us all
to be happy, told me "be happy, Henry!"
and she was right: it's better to be happy if you
can
but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week while
raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn't
understand what was attacking him from within

my mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile!
why don't you ever smile?"

and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw

one day the goldfish died, all five of them
they floated on the water, on their sides, their
eyes still open,
and when my father got home he threw them to the cat
there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother
smiled"

This is not what I was looking for. However, it mashed up my insides and tortured me with hidden, dark truths.

The kind we all bury deep in our guts.

The line that ripped the top of my head off was: "raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn't understand what was attacking him from within".

There is enormous pain there, transmitted from heart to fist from a man who just can't understand.

In defense of Charles Bukowski - he's another one of those guys - like Keith Richards - easily dismissed as a clown of a drunk.

Bukowski used to have to mow the lawn as a kid. When he was done, his father would get down on the lawn and measure the length of the grass with a ruler. If it was too tall, Bukowski got a beating.

That is just one story. He had a brutal upbringing. He was exposed to cruelty and unfairness and illogic as a child. I know nothing, but I am theorizing that leaves an impression.

His poems sometimes appear simple and direct. Until you read a line like: "raging inside his 6-foot-two frame.........................."

Then you know there is a lot more there. Analyzing the motives of the father who terrorized him.

As I think about the female connection, maybe I did get what I wanted. His mother was being a mother against all odds.

Fighting, in her own way, for the life of her child even as her life was being destroyed.

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