I could rant and rave about how beautiful this is, and what it means to me and how more than a third of my conversations with Ratul about writing end up referring to it. But like most good poetry, if it doesn’t grab you by the short hairs, it’s just so much prose with broken up sentences and the occasional rhyme. So, without further ado:

man in the sun

she reads to me from the New Yorker

which I don’t buy, don’t know

how they get in here, but it’s

something about the Mafia

one of the heads of the Mafia

who ate too much and had it too easy

too many fine women patting his

walnuts, and he got fat sucking at good

cigars and young breasts and he

has these heart attacks – and so

one day somebody is driving him

in his big car along the road

and he doesn’t feel so good

and he asks the boy to stop and let

him out and the boy lays him out

along the road in the fine sunshine

and before he dies he says:

how beautiful life can be, and

then he’s gone.

sometimes you’ve got to kill 4 or 5

thousand men before you somehow

get to believe that the sparrow

is immortal, money is piss and

that you have been wasting

your time.

– Charles Bukowski

From Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame (Selected poems 1955 – 1973)