Taylor Swift & Charles Bukowski

I had the delightful experience last night of dropping off some Swifties for her Saturday night Tampa concert.

With hours to fill before picking them up, I chose to attend a nearby cinema, partaking of its finest offering, The Super Mario Brothers Movie. Explosive romantic action film is how I can best describe it. Plus mushroom power ups. I cannot give it enough stars to do it justice.

After the dénouement, I wandered off to a nearby bookstore - yes, they still have those! - to further extend the night’s artistic amusements. Gravitating towards the poetry section in hopes of fooling browsers I don’t know into thinking I’m smart, I grabbed a copy of Charles Bukowski’s The Pleasures of the Damned, Poems, 1951-1993. Opening to a page at random, I was hit by Charles who reminded me at once that he was certainly very smart, searingly so.

something’s knocking at the door

a great white light dawns across the
continent
as we fawn over our failed traditions,
often kill to preserve them
or sometimes kill just to kill.
it doesn't seem to matter: the answers dangle just
out of reach,
out of hand, out of mind.

the leaders of the past were insufficient,
the leaders of the present are unprepared.  
we curl up tightly in our beds at night and wait.  
it is a waiting without hope, more like
a prayer for unmerited grace.

it all looks more and more like the same old
movie.
the actors are different but the plot's the same:
senseless.

we should have known, watching our fathers.
we should have known, watching our mothers.
they did not know, they too were not prepared to 
teach.
we were too naive to ignore their 
counsel
and now we have embraced their 
ignorance as our
own.
we are them, multiplied.
we are their unpaid debs.
we are bankrupt
in money and 
in spirit.

there are a few exceptions, of course, 
but these teeter on the 
edge
and will
at any moment
tumble down to join the rest
of us, 
the raving, the battered, the blind and the sadly 
corrupt. 

a great white light dawns across the
continent,
the flowers open blindly in the stinking wind,
as grotesque and ultimately 
unlivable
our 21st century 
struggles to be 
born.

You’d have thought Bukowski was a time traveler to Biden’s America.

Fortunately, as I was waiting outside the stadium for my Swifties to emerge among tens of thousands of their kind, I received in loud, amphitheater-scale live musical echoes, the modern Swifterian rebuttal to Bukoswki’s grim diagnosis: Shake it off! Uh uh - Shake it off!

I hear you, Taylor, I hear you, as I slouch my way down the crumbling slopes of Golgotha, beset on all sides by deliberate ignorance and blatant censorship, propped up by the same tiny minority who have throughout human history buoyed the spirits of the rational against the desires of despots everywhere.