Another Day - Analysis

A day made of contempt, and the decision to keep moving

In Another Day, Bukowski turns a simple lunch into a gritty proof of endurance: the speaker feels the low-down blues, walks into a restaurant anyway, and survives the day by clinging to small, almost meaningless procedures. The poem’s central claim isn’t that life is beautiful despite misery, but that living often looks like going through motions you don’t believe in—tipping, paying, chewing, starting the car—while disgust and loneliness keep talking in your ear.

The voice is blunt, observational, and cruelly funny. It treats people as bodies first—an ass that is too big, watery blue eyes, a head like an elephant, tiny heads on long necks. That inventory of deformities isn’t just insult; it’s the speaker’s way of defending himself from feeling anything too tender. If he can reduce everyone to shapes, he doesn’t have to admit he came in here wanting relief.

The waitress: kindness offered, then instantly poisoned

The sharpest contradiction arrives early: the waitress radiates kindness and sympathy, and the speaker seems to register it as real. But he immediately sabotages that recognition with a fantasy of domestic horror: Live with her 3 months and you’d know real agony. The poem keeps doing this—allowing a human connection to appear, then contaminating it with contempt before it can become need.

Even the tip is a moral compromise that feels both decent and mechanical: O.k., you'll tip her 15 percent. He will perform basic fairness, but he won’t let it count as tenderness. The restaurant becomes a place where empathy is visible and available, yet the speaker can only accept it in the form of etiquette.

Grotesque customers and the fear of being ordinary

The other diners are drawn like a nightmare caricature: the elephant-headed man, then the trio with long necks like ostriches discussing land development. That subject matters: it’s the language of profit and expansion, the polite plan to reshape the world. In the speaker’s depressed state, their loud talk reads like an insult—proof that some men can chatter confidently while he can barely hold himself together.

Later, those same ostrich-men reappear outside, now holding toothpicks and talking about women. They can switch from real estate to sex without any apparent change in mood, and that smoothness seems to enrage him. His disgust is partly jealousy: their ease makes his suffering feel like a private weakness.

The sandwich as a tiny, difficult act of survival

The poem’s hinge is quiet: You begin eating the sandwich. Nothing is solved, but something happens. The speaker calls it a minor, difficult, sensible action, which is a striking description of eating—like swallowing is a kind of ethics. Bukowski then offers a strange comparison: it’s like composing a popular song to make a 14-year old weep. The analogy is cynical about art (manufactured emotion), but it also admits that even cheap comforts can be real if they get you through a day.

Notice how quickly the world pushes back: the laugh behind him is filled with sand and broken glass. Even sound becomes abrasive. The poem refuses any clean refuge; relief arrives only as temporary numbness—another beer, a toothpick, the exit.

A harsh question the poem won’t let go of

If the speaker can only tolerate people by turning them into grotesques, what does that say about his own hunger for contact? The waitress’s kindness is real enough to register, which means his cruelty is not ignorance—it’s a chosen shield. The poem dares us to see that the low-down blues isn’t just sadness; it’s a style of looking that keeps him isolated.

Smog alert and the engine that still starts

The ending expands the restaurant’s ugliness into an environmental apocalypse: unbearably hot, first-stage smog alert, birds and plants dead or dying. The day itself is sick, not just the speaker. Against that backdrop, the final sentence—You start the engine.—lands as a bleak form of persistence. There’s no revelation, no uplift, just the continuation of motion. In Bukowski’s logic, that’s what makes it another day: not hope, but the stubborn ability to leave the restaurant, find the car still there, and do the next small, sensible thing.