How Is Your Heart
How Is Your Heart - fact Summary
Published in 1992
Published in 1992 in the collection The Last Night of the Earth Poems, Bukowski's how is your heart condenses his lived experience—poverty, jail, fraught relationships, and addiction—into a pragmatic ethic of acceptance. The speaker describes an inward balance that endures amid back alleys, cheap rooms, factories, and hangovers, a contentment distinct from happiness. Everyday, harsh images—waking in strange rooms and facing a cracked mirror—underscore steady endurance. The closing claim that what matters is how you walk through the fire frames resilience as the poem's moral center.
Read Complete AnalysesDuring my worst times on the park benches in the jails, or living with whores, I always had this certain contentment - I wouldn't call it happiness - it was more of an inner balance that settled for whatever was occurring and it helped in the factories and when relationships went wrong with the girls. It helped through the wars, and the hangovers, the back alley fights, the hospitals. To awaken in a cheap room in a strange city and pull up the shade - this was the craziest kind of contentment. And to walk across the floor to an old dresser with a cracked mirror - see myself, ugly, grinning at it all. What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.
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