Two Flies - Analysis

Annoyance as a Metaphysical Problem

In Two Flies, Bukowski turns a petty irritation into a confrontation with existence itself: the speaker can’t simply swat two flies; he has to account for their fury, their persistence, and what their small lives do to his own. The opening claim that The flies are angry bits of life immediately enlarges the scene. They are not just insects in a room but concentrated, mobile proof that being alive can feel like being trapped in the wrong form. The speaker’s question—why are they so angry?—is less scientific than moral. He senses grievance in them, and that grievance starts to implicate him.

The poem’s central tension is that the flies seem both insignificant and unbearable. The speaker almost mocks himself for suffering insects… while other men suffer dictates of / empire, tragic love… Yet the poem refuses that hierarchy. It insists that tiny suffering can still be real suffering, and tiny aggression can still summon something dark in a person.

Two Flies, Two Faces of Need

Bukowski makes the flies distinct characters, as if the speaker is forced to read meanings into their motion. One go[es] in half-circles / high along the wall, dropping a miserable sound onto the speaker’s head—an airborne reminder that you can’t escape irritation even by ignoring it. The other, the smaller one, becomes intimate: it teases my hand, rising, dropping / crawling near. The larger fly feels like a general atmosphere of misery; the smaller one feels like a personal challenge.

This doubling matters because it mirrors the speaker’s own divided response. Part of him wants distance—he tries to read a paper, to stay in a civilized, buffered world. Another part of him is provoked by the fly’s closeness, as if the insect is testing whether he has the right to comfort. That’s why the speaker can describe them as loose chunks of soul: he’s half-imagining them as spiritual leftovers, life that didn’t get fully placed or blessed.

From Irritation to Possession

The poem’s hinge comes when the flies stop being background noise and become a coordinated assault: they start circling my hand, strumming the base / of the lampshade. The room turns into a kind of cheap percussion chamber, and the speaker’s mind tips into religious language—unholiness, what god puts these / lost things upon me? The question is revealing: he doesn’t ask what bad luck did this, but what god did. The flies become a test sent by something higher, or else evidence that no higher order is minding the place.

What snaps is not only patience but identity. The speaker says until some man-thing / in me / will take no more, implying a brute, shameful mechanism inside him that he both recognizes and disowns. He is not proud of the thing that rises. It’s a possession scene in miniature: the human becomes the violent animal while insisting it’s merely responding to an impulse to challenge.

The Swat, the Miss, and the Moment of Shame

The attack is messy and humiliating—missing!—and the repetition (striking, / striking) makes it feel compulsive rather than controlled. When he finally kills the big one, Bukowski refuses to let the act look clean or heroic. The fly kicks on his back, and the speaker’s mind reaches for an ugly comparison: like an angry whore. It’s a cruel simile, and that cruelty matters; it shows how quickly the speaker’s disgust spills over from insect to life in general, how readily he turns suffering into something contemptible so he can justify crushing it.

The result—a smear / of fly-ugliness—is deliberately anti-triumphal. The victory produces only stain. And the cost isn’t just moral; it’s mundane: the paper, of course, / is ruined. The instrument of culture (the newspaper he tried to read) becomes a club. The speaker can’t preserve both civility and dominance; one of them gets wrecked in the attempt to feel at peace.

The Survivor Fly and the Uneasy Truce

After the killing, the tone cools into something like aftermath: the small fly becomes quiet and swift, / almost invisible. The speaker reads this as learning—tamed and / inaccessible—but it’s also possible that the fly was never tame at all, only newly cautious. Either way, their relationship shifts into a tense mutual boundary: I leave / him be, he leaves me / be. The speaker, who demanded order through violence, ends with a fragile diplomacy.

That diplomacy deepens into a startling final image: we are woven together / in the air / and the living. The line doesn’t sentimentalize the fly; it binds them in a shared medium. Air is what the fly rides and what the man breathes. The room is not the man’s property after all; it’s a small ecosystem where both parties are exposed, timed, and mortal.

What If the Fly’s Anger Is the Speaker’s?

The poem keeps hinting that the flies’ rage may be the speaker’s displaced feeling. He begins by insisting it is not my fault, a defensive line that doesn’t fit the situation unless he already feels accused. By the end, he admits something has happened, / something has soiled my / day, as if the real damage is internal—his day has been dirtied by what he’s capable of over almost nothing.

If it is late / for both of us, late for what, exactly—late for change, late for innocence, late for gentleness? The fly’s lifespan makes lateness literal, but the speaker’s makes it existential. The poem leaves you with the uncomfortable sense that the small irritations aren’t distractions from life’s main tragedies; they are where a person’s humanity gets tested, and sometimes fails.