Bukowski - Part 2 Poem by warner treuter

Bukowski -part 2

It took me 45 minutes to upload part 1 without losing it so I can't take a chance on putting this poem there, as I was going to do. Oh, well, at least I didn't lose the first part, which I had worked on while on the computer here. This is hardly a poem, I know: I just wanted to clarify my own outlook on an unusual writer brought to my attention and recall yesterday by coming upon him on You Tube. He's the kind of writer you can hate yourself for liking or accept the best part of him and be charitable to the rest. He's the kind you don't forget, though many would not want to remember. Henry Miller is tame in comparison. I remember one bookseller telling me that he got tired of Bukowski's throwing up (puking, Bukowski likes to call it) and so quit reading him. I felt similarly but I didn't find much of that in his poems, those that I read. And I've read only a small number of the many books, both prose fiction and poetic fiction that he wrote. One cannot always tell the fiction from the embroidery from actual factual remembrance in Bukowski, for he writes in a storyteller style, with great talent for nuance. And it's usually in a Been around the Bowery and back, kind of way. And he has.
On 2nd thought, all I have written below is probably only my attempt to understand a type of person so different from me, a drunk, a good guy with extreme talent, but still, a drunk; maybe I'll never understand. But just like Bukowski, I try. Once in a very great while.


Bukowski

He's not like us.
He never neglects his
Self-awareness. If only
He could live likewise
In a sense of beauty.
But no, the ugliness
In the self-awareness
Of his neglect of beauty,
Is always there...
Being attended to by him.
He's likable because
He really tries
To be truthful to his views,
To be faithful to what he knows,
To live his way of searching
In the future for the New
Within the realm of self's
Lowest common denominator,
Leaving him to feel
A kind of anthropological
Importance exploring these
Low levels of himself.
I know there are
Mountain people
And desert people,
But I am not sure
About attic people
And basement people.
Having explored all this myself
Now I'm finished, I know
Bukowski would say to me,
And rightly so, 'What a crock.
I just like to be drunk
And when easy, stay drunk.
My God, no wonder
You can't write. Be simple,
Like me.'
I can't do that, Buk.
Not sure I'd even want to.
But, as far as your writing goes,
I'm glad you can. Oops.
Wishful thinking. I mean: could.
Goodbye. It was nice.