Playing it Safe - A Bukowski Warning

It’s been a long time since I’ve read poetry. I’ve never read a poetry book cover to cover. It almost feels weird reading it like that. Like that time I tried to read a choose your own adventure without making any choices…

I added Charles Bukowski’s The Pleasures of the Damned to my reading list based on a recommendation. When I bought it I wasn’t sure it was his poetry. It’s been good. Better than anticipated. There’s a reason Bukowski has a following. There have been quite a few of his poems that stood out.

About ¾ of the way through the book there are three poems with similar themes that happened to line up with some of my hard-to-articulate thoughts. 

For this post, I’ll focus on one of them. If you’re interested in the others you can look up “my friend William” and/or “starve, go mad, or kill yourself”.

safe

the house next door makes me
sad.
both man and wife rise early and
go to work.
they arrive home in early evening.
they have a young boy and a girl.
by 9 p.m. all the lights in the house
are out.
the next morning both man and
wife rise early again and go to
work. 
they return in early evening.
by 9 p.m. all the lights are
out.

the house next door makes me
sad.
the people are nice people, I
like them.

but I feel them drowning.
and I can’t save them.

they are surviving.
they are not
homeless. 

but the price is
terrible.

sometimes during the day
I will look at the house
and the house will look at
me
and the house will
weep, yes, it does, I 
feel it.

the house is sad for the people living
there
and I am too
and we look at each other
and the cars go up and down the
street,
boats cross the harbor
and the tall palms poke
at the sky
and tonight at 9 p.m.
the lights will go out, 
and not only in that
house 
and not only in this
city.
safe lives hiding,
almost 
stopped,
the breathing of bodies and little
else.

I am the house next door. The predictable schedule. The same day in and day out. It’s not really where I thought I would end up, but I also can’t complain about it.

Right now it’s a battle of expectations. Fighting against the vague youthful thoughts of what life would be like. Then being surprised when they didn’t materialize. I am left with the emptiness of the aftermath. Unfortunately, it’s full of self-deprecation. Questioning how I got here or why I allowed it to happen. In the same breath, I recognize everything I have.

The sobering reality is that as a kid I vowed to never be average. And I have, despite that vow, or maybe in spite of that vow become average. It’s that reconciliation that I struggle with.

I am not as important as I thought
I’m not as smart as I thought
I’m not as talented as I thought
I’m not as clever as I thought
I doubt my abilities
I doubt my motives
I doubt my intentions

When I first read this poem I assumed that it was all these things that fueled the fear that kept me in the house. I don’t think that’s the whole truth. The other side of that has been my unwillingness to recognize I was in the house in the first place. 

One of the downfalls of being a default optimist has been my natural detachment from reality. If I don’t like my reality I will ignore it.