To face life stone cold sober and let truth, beauty and love breathe, or not, that is this poetic outlaw’s question

    I found one forum online where truth, beauty and love still breathe pretty good. This from it was in my email this morning.

Bluebird
By: Charles Bukowski

POETIC OUTLAWS
MAR 6, 2024

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do

you?

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter

Yeah, Charles, 

I have cried oceans and oceans of tears and rivers and rivers of snot, 
and perhaps you should try it, if you're man enough? 
Did you ever hear that the heart has its own reasons that reason cannot know? 
Did you ever hear that the lungs are the organs of feelings, 
and if you smoke cigarettes you cannot know how you really feel about anything? 
Did you ever hear that booze alters the mind, 
so that it does not work as designed?
Did you ever wonder if the bluebird is your soul, 
and you kept her caged in a dungeon your entire life, 
because you were terrified of what she might do,
if you simply got out of her way and let her fly and sing? 
Is this poem your version of the Merchant of Venice’s sad tale?
You never let your heart sing, or bleed? 
You never let your lungs cry? 
You never let your blood run?
Because you were trapped in your fear, mind, cigarettes and booze? 
I hope you let your blue bird out the next time around,

if there is a next time.

Poetic Outlaws

He let it out all the time, don't let him fool you. His poems still reverberate throughout the cosmos. He's achieved more than most "clean", sober minded people. As Churchill once said, which applies aptly to Bukowski: "All I can say is that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”

Sloan Bashinsky

Based on this poem, Bukowski did not let his blue bird fly and sing as it desperately wanted to do, and he wrote that acknowledgement to the blue bird, but was the blue bird comforted? 

Ethan Summers

It was, as he did let his soul fly through his poetry 

Sloan Bashinsky

Based on the poem, he did not let the blue bird fly, and I take him at his word.

Poetic Outlaws

"I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep..."

That's when the writing happened. That's when love happened.   

Sloan Bashinsky

Again I ask, was the blue bird comforted by this poem, or by only being let out at night sometimes? 
It’s a beautiful poem, but it also is a very sad poem.

My perspective is affected by having two parents defend themselves and dampen their souls with booze from rising in the morning to turning in at night. I respect Bukowski’s honesty, but if he did not cry, something was very, very wrong.

Poetic Outlaws

You've been a Bukowski hater since the beginning. I'm used to it from you by now. Just know though, his writings have pulled millions of people out of the muck of life. He gave hope to the hopeless. We need a few souls out there that can rise above the sentimental.  

Sloan Bashinsky

I don’t hate Bukowski, I read his poems, and I listen to his soul and to his ego, and sometimes I say here what I see and hear. I have told people they should subscribe to Poetic Outlaws, if they want to get dosed in reality, for a change :-)

Ethan Summers

I agree with you entirely yet I understand his point of view too. How sad this world would be if we would be all alike. Some need to hear from time to time the shards of broken glass that once formed their being, scattering on the floor to make sure they are still alive 😉

Sloan Bashinsky

And, how AWFUL this world would be if we would be all alike :-)! 

But uniqueness is not what humanity, in the main, seems to think is important, given the susceptibility of most people to social, religious, educational, political, etc. robotic programming and needing to belong to this or that herd, which Bukowski did not do, based on all I have read of his at Poetic Outlaws, but for whom, shamefully, I still might not know he had existed. I have to wonder what pain or whatever in him caused him to buffer, even squelch, the bluebird; caused him to buffer, even squelch his pain with cigarettes and booze and, yes, prostitutes? 

My mother told me that she started smoking 2 packs of Pall Malls a day at age 15 to rebel against her Puritan parents, and she got up drinking vodka and went to bed drinking vodka, and when she tried to divorce my father, her mother told her, if she went through with it, would kill her (mother). So, my mother buried herself in her church and called off the divorce and contracted lung cancer and it spread around in her and she got her divorce from my father and her mother and father.
My father didn’t smoke, but he got up drinking vodka and went to bed drinking it, and he came unglued when my mother died, and he wept every night for months, as his real feelings overpowered the vodka and everything else in him. But he did not stop drinking for a very long time, and by then he had a morphine to pump to relieve pain in his spine, which had suffered from weight beyond its power and medicine’s ken.

I probably should thank my parents for encouraging me not to drown myself in booze, and I never smoked a cigarette. I got to deal with my angry bowel pain head on, and what lies underneath it, for decades, and it still greets me when I wake up each morning, and it accompanies me throughout the day into the night and bedtime, and even in my sleep. Yet, I know where it comes from, or where most of it comes from, I have admitted what I did to cause it, but what others did I can only indulge, and I take nothing to reduce it, because nothing I ever tried worked, so I kmow it's not medical, but is of the soul.

We all get more chances, Bukowski may already have come back and is getting another chance. My hope is that that I live this life clear enough, painfully enough, lovingly, head on enough, so that I don’t have to come back and try again to be who I really am, for a change :-)  

 

This fell out of me as I was eating breakfast one 1995 morning, totally unaware that the world I then knew would soon cash and burn and I would start life all over, again, and that I would do it several more times :-)

“Sacred Prism” 

Earth,

The sacred prism

through which souls are refracted

into their elemental parts,

Purified in Holy Fire,

Then one-forged

and sent on their way

to not even God knows where,

Simply because they are all

Unique Emanations of God,

Evolving . . . 

 

Ethan Summers
Bukowski was broken in more than one way and I wouldn’t offer him as a life example to others, much less to my offsprings but the sensitivity that transpires from his writings is undeniable. I’m curious of one thing though. Have you found yourself in a situation in which you felt the urge to weep but refrained your tears long enough until they dried out? Did you try in such moments to write something instead (maybe poetry)? Sometimes strange things happen in moments like these. Tears that were supposed to be rolling on the outside, begin to roll inwardly and you get some bizarre awareness and steadiness you didn’t know you had…

Sloan Bashinsky

No, I have not tried to do it that way, but I can imagine it would be a very powerful spiritual practice, and it kinda reminds me of the movie "Shakespeare In Love", after his lady love was shipped off to America to marry some boring beast of a man at the Queen’s behest, and young Shakespeare wrote “The Tempest” and a storm came up and sunk the ship his lady love was on and she swam to the shore of some tropical island, perhaps Bermuda, and the film ended. 

All of my poetry has been alchemical, painting my own journey, some very personal, some also applicable to the collective. In late 1993 and early 1994, a lot of poetry came out of me and a lot of tears and snot, too. After that, poems came every now and then, even until now. Two poems came before 1993, one in 1991, one in 1992, which laid the foundation for the rest of my life, I think. Before that, I did not know I was a poet, and quite frankly, poetry had long kinda terrified me, because I didn’t understand it very well, if at all.  

 

Here are the first two poems. 

"Living Poets" 

Dead poets are poets who never write

Who obey shoulds and oughts

Who live to please others

Who value money over God

Who die without ever having lived

Death is their mark 

Dead poets are remembered by the living.

Living poets are remembered by time

Dead poets never sing their song

Living poets never stop singing it 

The difference between the two is this:

One worships fear, the other life 

To be a dead poet is hard

It requires being someone else

To be a living poet is easy

It only means being myself 

One choice is hell, the other heaven

That is what is meant by free will  

(1991) 

 

"The Mockingbird" 

I happened upon a mockingbird

singing its fool head off –

I asked it how and why it sang?

But all it did was look ahead,

all it did was sing.

It never turned to see if I was watching,

or listened for money jingling in my pockets,

or asked if I liked its music,

or expected a recording contract –

It was too busy singing

to pay any attention to me.

Thus did I learn

the greatest sin of all

is to kill a mockingbird. 

(1992) 

 

Poetic Outlaws

You do know that almost everyone I post on this page was a rascal, right? I don't do puritans. Everyone I post smoked, drank, and danced with the dark. Bukowski just wrote more poetically about it. Fearlessly. It was Paglia who once said: “Great art has often been made by bad people. So what? Expecting the artist to be a good person was a sentimental canard of Victorian moralism, rejected by the “art for art’s sake” movement led by Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.”

Sloan BashinskyLiked by Poetic Outlaws

It’s because of what you post here that I come here and tell others in what I write at my blog and Substack to come here :-), because this is the only place I have found online where truth, beauty and love still breathe pretty well :-). 

Sally LunnSally’s Substack

Obviously, you have no idea that Bukowski was viciously targeted by the Government. Save your judgement for when you can survive what Bukowski survived, please. 

Sloan Bashinsky

I survived the death of my infant son, and several heart breaking divorces, and a really angry bowel that hatched in 1969 and never let up, and being cast out of my family, and being homeless a long time, and homeless again for another spell, and several dark nights of the soul, and a black night of the soul that had me planning to off myself every day for 16 months until it lifted, and I did not turn to booze or other drugs to dampen it. The government did not come after me, yet, but I keep provoking the government on the left and on the right, so perhaps it will come after me, and I will face it stone cold sober, as well, which neither of my parents were able to do. So, I do have some experience with alcoholics and their pain and how they drugged it, instead of facing it stone cold sober. 

 

Douglas Prouty
FootieJazz
wow, nice
I was tempted to chime in something about the blackbird in me,
pecks at my cage always when i'm mid-song
you know the one up with the sun and preaching positive wondrous mindset
like i'm grateful for the toothache
and forgiving the jeep that 360ed in my driveway at 3am
the black bird that knows where the knife is
that says homo when i do one of my jete's into the pool
the whole worlds going to shit he caws
and maybe I smile back 
tell him on saturday
i'll smoke a cigarette and howl at the moon through the pines
if that will make him happy 

Sloan Bashinsky
Whatever you are smoking, keep smoking it :-). In some traditions, crows are messengers from the gods, The Great Spirit, etc.
I went through the New Age in the latter 1980s, and some of it was interesting, but it didn’t seem to be what I needed. I think trying to be positive no matter what might cause adverse chain reaction in the part of the psyche that feels it really does need to yell and scream, and cry and shriek and rage. I can imagine lots of medical and mental diseases have roots in the blocked psyche.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com