bukowski lycanthrope If I still drank I'd raise a well whiskey to Chuck of the rotten breath and gravelly thoughts. It's fashionable to shit on him if you're amongst the literary bores who make unironic land acknowledgements. We are standing on the unceded and ancestral lands of the sauropods and so on. As if they're going to give it back, as if the land gives a shit. And so maybe he wrote about women as if he only barely made out their shape as objects in dimly lit bars. He seemed to make his own shape out in similar fashion. Was he the poet laureate of incels when we just called them drunks and losers? Sure but it seems now there are worse things than the edgelords carrying dogeared copies of chapbooks and eventually finding Emily Dickinson in the hope of being set free. Maybe communing with the old gods of anger, despair, and honest loneliness in words - in the hope of finding some beauty in the rot of one's soul is preferable to looksmaxing and pickup artists and podcast bros. Maybe giving grace to hamfisted despair is a better approach than the delusion that the world owes you a god damned thing. Maybe you are actually ugly and unloved. It won't stop you from writing a poem. And if I'm being honest, poems and whiskey have their own sexual currency if you're into that sort of thing. If you're lonely, pick up a book of his poems. Chirp a bit at the bluebird in your soul. Give people the grace to lash out in the places it's allowed - bars and open mic poetry nights. And give yourself grace if you're odd and unloved and navigating the long open mic poetry night of the soul. After all, look around you at the utter hell the so-called sane and virtuous people have fashioned for us. Get angry, don't let them win, don't let the hucksters sell you on self improvement. Poetry is and always has been the only thing that's free in this country. You won't catch me hiding his books when polite company comes over. And when no one is around, and it's late at night and my wife and the memories of my ex-girlfriends are asleep I sometimes still read them. 260326 ... raze the poem of his i always come back to is "the laughing heart". i never knew it until someone i care about a great deal shared it with me. "your life is your life. don't let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. you can't beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelous. the gods wait to delight in you." as she said, it's a strangely tender poem coming from a man who often hid the soft parts of his heart where they were hard to find. but i think that makes it all the more precious and powerful. 260327 what's it to you? who go blather from