Bukowski had the Stuff

Henry waking from a dream, a dream of essence, bad and Godless essence. Not believing in God but realising God or the pure light of reason was the source of it all. 

On Sunday morning Henry would stuff as much cocaine in his nose as he could and wash it down with tequila, happy as a pig in shit— happy  he didn’t have to go to church— not missing the  rooms full of phoneys that even God avoided like the plague, God preferring the real stuff of the world, the mensch, the short-bread, the down and dirty.    

Henry would walk alone in nature sucking up and exhaling the deep cool air, quick gulps again and again,  enjoying the smell and feel of it, the wet leaf smell, the smell of clean air, the smell of old rotting bark and wild animal musk.  It was all good he thought and this was his church, nature… getting the nod from Whitman long gone.

Henry had done it all, he didn’t need anymore, it was hard for him to write, no encouragement or feedback good or bad, he hadn’t sold one book. He felt his work was part of the tradition of hip writers, very different from the boring and unoriginal writing of the day, so he kept at it. 

He started writing late in life and he was born to write, he didn’t need to take any courses or classes, he simply wrote. Early in life he had read the Beats… all the cutting edge and hip stuff out there, starting with Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell and  so on,  he knew what he wanted and ultimately it made little difference what others thought about his work, it was as though it had to be done. 

More than anything he regretted not being a part of a scene of writers, most his pals were retired cons who had never read a book by a beatnik, who if they did read, read the cheesy spy novels and thrillers of the day. Henry feeling like Sylvia Plath must have felt, hip in a square world. 

Henry back at it again, after two weeks of mind fucking himself over and over, hard pressed to find a reason to write.  

The night before while watching Bukowski read poetry on You Tube, he wondered what this man had? Buk’s stuff simple and straightforward, resolute, irreverent, solitary and rare. 

If nothing else Buk kept at it because it was all he had, Buk way out there on the edge looking in at it all, spying on the Jackals and laying them to waste, a foray, spraying bullets at the predatory and thirsting dunderheads late at night, listening to Brahms and as always drinking more and more by the minute, this was his fuel alright.   

Henry needed some of that, what the Buk had, so now you see it, Henry back at it, writing in a vacuum God knows why? Henry a lazy writer, writing to himself out of habit,  it was sad and lamentable all right.