Sleep
Sleep - meaning Summary
Sleep as Escape and Relief
Bukowski's "Sleep" presents a blunt narrative of a fraught domestic encounter, a drunk, once-beautiful woman and the exhausted speaker who pleads for rest. After a violent-sounding burial on the Hollywood Hills, the speaker returns home and collapses into an extended, almost oblivious sleep lasting five days and four nights. The poem examines fatigue as both literal need and emotional escape, collapsing anger, death, and relief into a single exhausted moment.
Read Complete AnalysesShe was a short one, getting fat and she had once been beautiful and she drank the wine, she drank the wine in bed and talked and screamed and cursed at me. And I told her, "Please, I need some sleep." "Sleep? Sleep? Ya son of a bitch, ya never sleep, ya don't need any sleep!" I buried her one morning early. I carried her down the sides of the Hollywood Hills, brambles and rabbits and rocks running in front of me. And by the time I'd dug the ditch and stuck her in, belly down, and put the dirt back on, the sun was up and it was warm, and the flies were lazy and I could hardly see anything out of my eyes, everything was so warm and yellow. I managed to drive home and I got into bed and I slept for 5 days and 4 nights.
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