Charles Bukowski

Love & Fame & Death

Love & Fame & Death - meaning Summary

Ordinary Menace, Sudden Silence

The speaker describes a persistent, watchful presence outside the window that is at once mundane and menacing. Tension builds through observation until a sudden, almost dismissive action—slamming the screen with a newspaper—produces a distant scream and the intruder92s departure. The poem closes with a reflexive line about how to finish: by becoming quiet. It compresses anxiety and an abrupt resolution into a short, direct moment.

Read Complete Analyses

It sits outside my window now like and old woman going to market; It sits and watches me, it sweats nevously through wire and fog and dog-bark until suddenly I slam the screen with a newspaper like slapping at a fly and you could hear the scream over this plain city, and then it left. The way to end a poem like this is to become suddenly quiet.

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