Mockingbird Wish Me Luck - Charles Bukowski

 

Yeah, I'm on a Bukowski re-reading kick while I'm waiting for book orders to arrive in the mail. This 1972 poetry release must have come out about the time of the first record I heard from him, so these resonate pretty strongly with me and I hear his voice and his cadence every time I read them. 

Here he was still living in small rooms in Hollywood, with wild women, hippies, and drunks'n'druggies for company, whether he wanted it or not. Here he's still hungry, more than a little mad, drunk on cheap crap but laying down the strong lines about his view on life, his women, the racetrack, jail, other poets, cheap rooms, death and whatever fantasies pop into his demented mind. At times he becomes uncharacteristically sentimental when talking about his daughter and, when things were good, his love at the time, the sculptress Linda King.

While our personalities are nothing alike and my life has been nowhere near as extreme as his, I did live in the same neighborhoods, although not at the same time, and I have felt the sting of madness now'n'again, and certainly plenty of dark depressions, so there are bits'n'pieces I can relate to, and his words always ring true'n'powerful.

I dunno if I've read anything of his that I thought was bad, but this is a damn good one. Man, I miss the days of walking over to Red's bookstore and picking up the latest Buk release!