Beasts Bounding Through Time
Beasts Bounding Through Time - meaning Summary
Violence and Creative Suffering
Bukowski assembles a roll call of artists and writers alongside brief mentions of their self-destructive acts or persecutions, repeating the line that frames these episodes as "the impossibility of being human." The poem compresses biography and ruin into a litany that moves from violence and madness to a final, ambivalent affirmation of breath and motion. It presents creative life as doomed, stubborn, and nonetheless driving a small, persistent light forward.
Read Complete AnalysesVan Gogh writing his brother for paints Hemingway testing his shotgun Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine the impossibility of being human Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town the impossibility of being human Burroughs killing his wife with a gun Mailer stabbing his the impossibility of being human Maupassant going mad in a rowboat Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller the impossibility Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops the impossibility Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench Chatterton drinking rat poison Shakespeare a plagiarist Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness the impossibility the impossibility Nietzsche gone totally mad the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing in and out out and in these punks these cowards these champions these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light toward us impossibly.
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