The Trash Men
The Trash Men - meaning Summary
Ordinary Lives, Unnoticed Work
The poem presents a brisk, unsentimental portrait of garbage collectors in Los Angeles, emphasizing their physicality, routines, and noisy labor. Bukowski notes their ordinary ambitions—jobs, homes, cars, weekend drinking—while highlighting the spectacle and clatter of their work. The narrator watches them with quiet isolation; their camaraderie and movement toward the sea contrast with his anonymity. The final line underscores a lonely separation: the workers live vivid lives unaware of the observer.
Read Complete Analyseshere they come these guys grey truck radio playing they are in a hurry it's quite exciting: shirt open bellies hanging out they run out the trash bins roll them out to the fork lift and then the truck grinds it upward with far too much sound . . . they had to fill out application forms to get these jobs they are paying for homes and drive late model cars they get drunk on Saturday night now in the Los Angeles sunshine they run back and forth with their trash bins all that trash goes somewhere and they shout to each other then they are all up in the truck driving west toward the sea none of them know that I am alive REX DISPOSAL CO.
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