Something For The Touts The Nuns The Grocery Clerks And You - Analysis

The poem’s blunt thesis: abundance that doesn’t add up

Bukowski keeps returning to a single, unsettling claim: We have everything and we have nothing. The line isn’t a slogan so much as a verdict on modern living, where experiences pile up—sex, work, money, religion, violence, small pleasures—without producing anything like stable meaning. The poem’s method is to show that the same emptiness can wear many costumes: it can look like a man in churches, or like cruelty tearing butterflies / in half, or like wealth in Palm Springs with Cadillac souls. These aren’t separate moral categories so much as different ways of acting out the same hunger. The repeated pairing of opposites—Cadillacs and butterflies, nothing and everything—suggests a world where the expensive and the delicate, the brutal and the beautiful, are all equally unable to solve the basic problem of being alive.

Cadillacs, butterflies, and the melting face

The poem’s imagery insists that both glamour and innocence are fragile, and that fragility is part of their point. A butterfly torn in half is a small, gratuitous violence; a Cadillac is a heavy, purchased power. Putting them side by side makes both feel like props in the same drama: domination, boredom, appetite. Even the self seems unstable: the face melting down to the last puff / in a cellar in Corpus Christi turns identity into smoke and residue. That line doesn’t just describe addiction or exhaustion; it makes the person seem like something that evaporates under pressure, until all that’s left is a final breath in some anonymous basement. In that context, the poem’s “everything” starts to sound like clutter—objects, bodies, locations—while the “nothing” is what remains when the clutter fails to convince.

The first big turn: “something” appears everywhere—and doesn’t save anyone

Early on, Bukowski offers a near-consolation: There’s something for the touts, the nuns, / the grocery clerks and you. The list matters. It levels the spiritual professional (nuns), the street hustler (touts), and the ordinary worker (grocery clerks), then pulls the reader in with and you. The poem briefly makes meaning feel democratic, as if a hidden “something” is available at 8 a.m., in the library, in the river. But that “something” is immediately welded back to the poem’s central contradiction: everything and nothing. In other words, the world is full of potential significance—time, books, water, routine—yet the poem refuses to pretend that potential automatically becomes comfort.

The slaughterhouse lesson: value, weight, and the body’s accounting

The slaughterhouse scene is one of the poem’s harshest demonstrations of how “something” becomes “nothing.” A carcass running along / the ceiling on a hook turns life into inventory. The speaker describes the worker swinging it—one, two, three—until it becomes $200 worth of dead / meat. The line its bones against your bones forces identification: the worker’s body and the animal’s body share the same physical grammar. This is not abstract social critique; it’s a tactile equation. Money gives the dead weight a price, but the price doesn’t make it meaningful, and the closeness of bones doesn’t grant dignity. The poem lands again on something and nothing: labor produces “something” measurable, but the measurement is part of the emptiness.

5 a.m. coffee: death’s timing and the world’s refusal to explain

After the slaughterhouse, the poem narrows into a more existential dread: It’s always early enough to die and / it’s always too late. The contradiction is temporal and emotional at once—death can come anytime, but life still feels perpetually behind schedule. The grotesque detail the drill of blood in the basin white strips away any romantic language about endings. Then come the gravediggers, not solemn but ordinary—playing poker over 5 a.m. coffee—waiting for the grass / to dismiss the frost. Nature will thaw; the men will keep working; the dead won’t return. The blunt refrain They tell you nothing at all is the poem’s anti-sermon: not even death delivers a clear message, only procedures and weather.

Days with “glass edges”: the long catalog as a lived philosophy

Mid-poem, Bukowski expands into a sweeping inventory of days, as if trying to prove the claim by sheer accumulation. Some days are sharp—glass edges—and some are foul with the impossible stink / of river moss, worse than shit. The chess metaphor—checkerboard days of moves and countermoves—makes life sound strategic and exhausting, with as much sense in defeat as in victory. Other days are animal-stubborn: Slow days like mules going slagged and sullen up a hill where a madman waits, and birds are netted in and sucked into a flakey / grey emptiness. Yet the poem refuses to be only bleak: there are also Good days of wine and shouting, fights / in alleys, and the erotic grotesque of fat legs of women around your bowels buried in moans. Pleasure exists vividly—but it still doesn’t settle the account.

Bosses with frog-faces: a social anger that feeds the “nothing”

The poem’s emptiness isn’t just cosmic; it’s manufactured by power. The long, furious sentence about the bosses turns them into a bestiary: frogs, hyenas, snails, eels, slugs, and not as good. What damns them isn’t only their wealth—windows 30 feet wide, luxury yachts—but their inability to perceive: they see nothing even with everything in reach. Their cruelty hides behind legitimacy: they’d kill you and justify it because it’s the law. Against this, the worker’s life narrows to your last paycheck from a list of places—harbor, factory, hospital, penny arcade—each a different corridor leading to the same drained ending. The “nothing” here is not mystical; it’s what systems produce when they convert people into replaceable labor.

A hard question the poem won’t let go of

If something can be found in the library and in the river, why do the bosses with vest pockets still see nothing? The poem implies an answer that is almost unbearable: the “nothing” isn’t a lack of opportunities for meaning, but a learned incapacity to receive it—a self-protective numbness that can come from power, from exhaustion, or from the daily humiliations of work.

Late direct address: your day, your window, your last small hope

Near the end, the poem pivots into intimacy: Days like this. Like your day today. The speaker stops cataloging and starts asking: What do you see today? / What is it? Where are you? The tone becomes strangely tender without losing its roughness, as if the poem’s rage has been a way of clearing space for a more personal fear. Even the “best days” are described in compromised terms: vacant lots are not bad, churches on postcards are not bad, wax museums are horrible but not bad. The faint praise matters: the poem is learning how to accept partial goods without pretending they redeem everything. The final images are small and bodily—toast for breakfast, coffee hot enough to prove your tongue is still / there, and three / geraniums trying to be red, pink, themselves. The ending doesn’t arrive at wisdom; it arrives at persistence: One more / good day. A little bit of it. The speaker’s searching becomes almost animal—sucking your tongue in a little—and the last line refuses closure: Some do it naturally, / some obscenely, / everywhere. The poem’s central contradiction remains, but it turns into a lived stance: keep looking for the “something,” knowing it will never fully cancel the “nothing.”