“Let It Enfold You” a Beautiful Poem by Charles Bukowski

Either peace or happiness, let it enfold you

When I was a young man, I felt that these things were dumb, unsophisticated. I had bad blood, a twisted mind, a precarious upbringing. I was hard as granite, I leered at the sun.  I trusted no man and especially no woman. I was living a hell in small rooms, I broke things, smashed things, walked through the glass, cursed. I challenged everything, was continually being evicted, jailed. In and out fights, in and out my mind.

Women were something to screw and rail at. I had no male friends. I changed jobs and cities, I hated holidays, babies, history, newspapers, museums, grandmothers, marriage, movies, spiders, garbagemen, English accents, Spain, France, Italy, walnuts, and the color orange. Algebra angered me, opera sickened me, Charlie Chaplin was a fake and flowers were for pansies. Peace and happiness were to me sign of inferiority. Tenants of the weak and addled mind.

But as I went on with  my alley fights, my suicidal years,  my passage through any number of women, it gradually begun to occur to me that I wasn’t different from the others, I was the same. They were all fullsome with hatred, glossed over with petty grievances . the man I fought in alleys had hearts of stone. Everybody was nudging, inching, cheating from some insignificant advantage. The lie was the weapon and the plot was empty, darkness was the dictator.

Cautiously, I allowed myself to feel good at times, I found moments of peace in cheap rooms just staring at the knobs of some dresser or listening to the rain in the dark. The less I needed, the better I felt. Maybe the other life had worn me down, I no longer found glamour in topping somebody in conversation or in mounting the body of some poor, drunken female whose life had slipped away into sorrow. I could never accept life as it was. I could never gobble down all its poisons.

But there were parts, tenuous magic parts open for the asking. I reformulated. I don’t know when, date, time, all that. But the change occured, something in me relaxed, smoothed out, I no longer had to prove that I was a man. I didn’t have to prove anything, I begun to see things. Coffee cups lined up behind a counter in a café or a dog walking along a sidewalk or the way the mouse on my dresser top stopped there, really stopped there with its body, its ears, its nose, it was fixed, a bit of life caught within itself, and its eyes were looked at me and they were beautiful.

Then it was gone. I began to feel good, I began to feel good in worst situations and there were plenty of those, like say, the boss behind his desk, he is going to have to fire me, I’ve missed too many days, he’s dressed in a suit, necktie, glasses, he says “I’m going to have to let you go”, “it’s alright” I tell him. He must do what he must do, he has a wife, a house, children, expenses, most probably a girlfriend. I’m sorry for him. He’s caught.

I walked out into the blazing sushine, the whole day is mine, temporarily anyhow. The whole world is at the throat of the world, everybody feels angry ,short-changed, cheated. Everybody is despondent, disillusioned. I welcomed shots of piece, tattered shards of happines, I embraced that stuff like the hottest number, like high heels, breasts, singing, the works.

Don’t get me wrong, there is such a thing as cockeyed optimism that overlook all basic problems just for the sake itself. This is a shield, a sickness.

The knife got near my throat again, I almost turned on the gas again, but when the good moments arrived again, I didn’t fight them off like an alley adversary, I let them take me, I luxuriated them, I bade them welcome home, I even looked into the mirror once having thought myself to be ugly, I now liked what I saw. almost handsome, yet a bit ripped and ragged, scars, lumps, odd turns, but all in all, not too bad, almost handsome. Better at least than some of those movie star faces like the cheeks of a baby’s butt.

And finally I discovered real feelings for others, unheralded, like lately like this morning, as I was leaving for the track, I saw my wife in bed, just the shape of her head there covers pulled high, just the shape of her head there, not forgetting centuries of the living and the dead and the dying, and pyramids, mozart dead but his music still there in the room, weeds growing, the earth turning, the tote board waiting for me. I saw the shape of my wife’s head, she so still, I ached for her life just being there under covers, I kissed her on the forehead, got down the stairway, got outside, got into my marvelous car, fixed the seat belt, backed out the drive, feeling warm to the finger tips, down to my foot on the gas pedal, I entered the world once more, drove down the hill pass the houses full and empty of people. I saw the mailman, honked, he waved back at me.

The first time I heard this poem was in Beautiful Boy movie narrated by the lead actor Timothee Chalamet himself. I can just copy and paste this poem from a website somewhere on the internet to my wordpress page but I decided to dedicate my time wrote it words by words, play and pause, rewind and fast forward the movie to inhale and absorb every beautiful word and sentence in this poem. Can you feel it?  Like every part and every paragraph of this poem has its own scene, dark scene, angry scene, enlightenment scene, sunshine scene, which is playing inside our head when we read this poem. I think that’s the most magical part of this Charles Bukowski’s masterpiece. One of a kind.

For me this poem is a story telling about growing up, how we, us, in our young days, confused, asked for validation but angry and sick of everything. But there is a part inside us that soft and waits to open itself,  patiently. and then we grow up, we don’t know the exact time but that part already dominates us, we are no longer full of anger, we enjoy the sunshine, we find beautiful in every little thing, we embrace the peace and happiness inside us, we even embrace the worst days of our life. we begin to find beauty in ourselves, it still kinda messy and we love it as it is. Then we find love in other human- being, we finally feel content with our life and that’s it.

Maybe our life is not the exact same like how Charles Bukowski narrated the lowest and the highest point of a man’s life, maybe our life is just an average day for years and it’s okay, totally okay, my point is I hope we embrace every moment in our life as it is the part of our journey, cry it, laugh at it, curse it, but never deny it.

I love how Beautiful Boy Movie gave a closure for its credit scene with a poem instead of a soundtrack like most movies did. Please recommend me another beautiful poem from a movie like this one!

Medan, 3 Februari 2020 1:05 WIB

 

Nadya

image credit: Imdb.com