Charles Bukowski

Pull a String, a Puppet Moves

Pull a String, a Puppet Moves - meaning Summary

Fragility of Everyday Life

Bukowski warns that daily life’s comforts are precarious and can vanish suddenly. Ordinary objects and relationships rest on unstable foundations, so remote or trivial events — exemplified by the death of a boy far away or a storm elsewhere — can precipitate personal collapse. The poem tracks a moment of domestic chaos and incapacitation, showing a speaker rendered bewildered and incapable of explanation, exposed to the randomness of loss.

Read Complete Analyses

Each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly: the cat, the woman, the job, the front tire, the bed, the walls, the room; all our necessities including love, rest on foundations of sand; and any given cause, no matter how unrelated: the death of a boy in Hong Kong or a blizzard in Omaha... can serve as your undoing. All your chinaware crashing to the kitchen floor, your girl will enter and you'll be standing, drunk, in the center of it and she'll ask: My God, what's the matter? And you'll answer: I don't know, I don't know...

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