Charles Bukowski

The Shower

The Shower - meaning Summary

Intimate Domestic Ritual

The poem describes a post-coital shower shared by a couple, narrated in frank, physical detail. Bukowski focuses on tactile care and mutual tending—washing each other with slow, deliberate attention—which transforms a casual act into intimacy. The routine offers a refuge from the narrator's past pain and failures and becomes a small, stabilizing miracle. It closes with a plea for a gentle, peaceful removal from life's harshness rather than violence or abrupt endings.

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we like to shower afterwards (I like the water hotter than she) and her face is always soft and peaceful and she'll watch me first spread the soap over my balls lift the balls squeeze them, then wash the cock: "hey, this thing is still hard!" then get all the hair down there,- the belly, the back, the neck, the legs, I grin grin grin, and then I wash her. . . first the cunt, I stand behind her, my cock in the cheeks of her ass I gently soap up the cunt hairs, wash there with a soothing motion, I linger perhaps longer than necessary, then I get the backs of the legs, the ass, the back, the neck, I turn her, kiss her, soap up the breasts, get them and the belly, the neck, the fronts of the legs, the ankles, the feet, and then the cunt, once more, for luck. . . another kiss, and she gets out first, toweling, sometimes singing while I stay in turn the water on hotter feeling the good times of love's miracle I then get out. . . it is usually mid-afternoon and quiet, and getting dressed we talk about what else there might be to do, but being together solves most of it for as long as those things stay solved in the history of women and man, it's different for each- for me, it's splendid enough to remember past the memories of pain and defeat and unhappiness: when you take it away do it slowly and easily make it as if I were dying in my sleep instead of in my life, amen.

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