Two-buck Chuck: Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A storyteller of a poet, Charles Bukowski was a working guy who wrote about the seedy side of life. He didn’t just write about it, he embraced it. Of course he lived in Los Angeles, but still. After a couple small successes in his twenties, he got sick of the literary world and spent ten years working for the Post Office. Eventually he got tired of being a drunken blue-collar worker, quit, wrote the novel Post Office in three weeks after quitting his job, and became a drunken man of letters instead. He went on to skewer just about everything in his poems and other writing, going especially rough on the literary scene of his time.

This one says it all nicely, though now I guess I’ll have to up my content rating: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/charles_bukowski/poems/13004

Here’s my follow:

Pome

Some poems are like crazy guys,
the ones who walk up to you in the street
and throw words at you.
How do you figure him,
talking fruit?
Says a banana is a berry,
or an apple is a pome.
For all you know he’s right,
but still,
the knowledge of it knocks you off balance.