It’s a death match and no one wins…

If was about about how to be a man. It lays out clearly in two line increments the most important rules for life if you are concerned on being a standfast, honor laden, forthright individual. The language is brutally honest, and poetic at the same turn. You can Hemingway ripping it out of a borrowed library copy as a boy and nailing it to his wall. It’s a fine poem, even finer that my mother gave it to me, and I find myself repeating lines of it throughout my life in lieu of any religious sentiments. It was by far my favorite poem.

The first poem I ever had an attachment to was given to me by my mother. It was “If” by Rudyard Kipling. She gave me this old, thin book of Kipling poems with impossibly small typewriter print. It had an oil slick, hardback cover, and a spine that mimicked a piece of bamboo. The book physically was a piece of magic, almost a spell book of sorts, travelling through time from the turn of the century to my Nintendo grubbing hands. The poem was no less magical. 

Until University.

College was an extremely formative time for me, as it is for many kids, but I feel like I went out of my way to make it more formative than most. I botched my entrance to NYU so I settled for the vacation paradise of UC Santa Barbara. In retrospect this was the right choice. I lived on a cliff that overlooked the Pacific, the girls all had large, natural breasts that even my mother couldn’t fully believe, and one year I took mime, massage, and a film class on pornography, which were all somehow required in order to graduate. It was a swell time. 

It was also a time of pushing boundaries. I disliked most of the student body; white surfer dudes and duds that were interested in Basketball and Frat life. I wanted intellectual stimulation, advanced sexual experiences, and poetry most of all. I ended up living with three French guys who didn’t even go to the school, Jaques, Jocelyn, and Guillaume, who were programmers in Goleta. My best friend was a theoretical physisist, and I started the Italian Club with a friend with a grant from the school to further the appreciation of Italian culture on campus. This really was just 200 bucks a month to throw a wine party where we would play Italian club music and hook up with girls that liked two guys that kinda spoke Italian. It was a glorious time, until Bukowski came into my life. 

I don’t remember the class, but someone gave me Bukowski to read and what I remember reading was “Dinosauria, We”. Fuck me. 

I was drinking rusty nails all the time, the drink of my father, and was trying to be Hemingway as much as possible, writing all the time, reading all the time, wearing an old leather jacket and Doc Martens like I knew something. When Dinosauria, We hit my membrane shit changed. I saw a truth, a sad, bleak truth in those words that I never saw in any other. 

“Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty” 

Fuck me. This was the late 90’s, the end of the nouveau gilded age. No one knew we were all about to get fucked, but Bukowski did, and now I did too.

Time rolled on. I travelled manically, in the before times when there were no cell phones, no internet. There were maps, and writing down addresses in a notebook and dear God you had to buy a coin to use the phone. It was like nothing I ever experiences and made me fall in love with perspective, desperately trying to put myself in places to get new perspective like a junky trying to score better drugs each time. As tech advanced and the world got smaller the drug got less and less effective. I’d have to go deeper and father to get the same or close to the same high. The world was homogenizing; language was becoming English, culture was shared instantaneously, and you could now travel anywhere, even on your couch through a little window in your hand. 

We used to take pictures of people we love. Now we take pictures of future shits. 

Ok, sure, grumpy old man. The reality is if you are born into this than you will never know how good it was, or, perhaps, it never was that good since you will never know it. The sad part is eventually everyone looks back and the rear view is always filled with nostalgia, regardless of what version of iPhone you recorded it in. In other worlds, we all get there. 

What struck me today is how Bukowski replaced Kipling for me. Now I don’t mutter “If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss” I mutter “Born into this, Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes” much more often. 

It makes me wonder if this generation, if they read poetry, if they would attach themselves to Kipling like I did as a young man, or see Bukowski as their mouthpiece. Maybe it’s a new generation that hear Kaur, Diaz, or Smith ringing in their head, or maybe they just asked ChatGPT like I did who are famous modern poets so they can repeat it to whoever may be listening. I don’t know the answer but the question has been splashing in my mind for days now and I’m slowly forming an understanding of something. 

Kipling v. Bukowski is an interesting case. Kipling lived when empires ruled. Things were manufactured, built by hand. He saw industrialization take home. Born in 1865 and dying in 1936 in his 70 odd years he saw the end of slavery, the sinking of the Titanic, a World War, and the crash of the Global Economy. “If” was the last rites of dying mentality.

Bukowski, born in 1920 in Germany immigrated to Ohio with his parents. He drank himself to death in 1994, a 74 year task he was hell bent on. Somehow living longer than Kipling, he is a product of the modern age. He survived an economic crash, a second world war, a space race, and died at the cusp of the digital revolution and birth of the internet. 

If you read these two men’s words something clear starts to form. Something very telling about the ages, and the age we are in, and the age yet to come. There is a technological direction that is overwhelmingly putting pressure on life in a very unnatural way. It isn’t something that is affixed to the Sun, or the seasons, or the unknowing of science — it is created by human existence itself, by humankind’s desire to emote, for our lust for power. Of course there are bright moments in these dark tones, but Bukowski lays it out quite clear, 

“The natural effect of general decay
And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
Born out of that.
The sun still hidden there
Awaiting the next chapter.”

It doesn’t end well for us.

So here I am, built on Kipling, full of hope, honor, and fortitude, but defined by Bukowski full of dread, despair, and horror. I know it’s Monday morning but let’s get real — shit is pretty brutal out there right now. I’m typing on a computer and you’re reading this on the internet. There is nothing here that is real. We have built a virtual existence for better or worse. 

I still travel like a madman (I am an Editor at Get Lost Magazine if you care to see what kind of trouble I like to get myself into). I have more than my share of perspective. One thing that can happen after a lifetime of going places is that you realize there is no end to perspective; there is always a new way to look at something. In that both everything is real, and nothing is real. A bit of hope in the hopelessness I suppose. I’ve been accused of being a Stoic. I’m not. I just know that tomorrow the sun will rise, regardless if anyone is around to see it or not, and that’s just fine with me.