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Bukowski in Middle Age

Ben Macnair

When you were young, you read Charles Bukowski
for the language, for the free-wheeling sense of kinetic momentum,
the feeling that this is how a writer’s life should be.
The sense that there is always something more interesting
happening somewhere more interesting.
How it doesn’t matter how you look if you read poems
Someone somewhere will find you irresistible.

They didn’t tell you about the times your poems
sometimes went down to complete silence.
How the only time in a writer’s life
that really matters is the time they are writing,
How the one poem you are proud of will never leave your computer,
but the lesser ones that escape will find a home somewhere else.

It is not until your own middle age creeps up
and your knees go with your enthusiasm,
that you re-read Bukowski again,
and can’t get past how repetitive it is,
how boring and stifled the language is,
the misogyny that drips from every line,
the sense of importance that alcohol and the race track are given,
that you realise in Middle Age, you don’t have the stomach for it,
and if you ever did, those times are long gone

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