O We Are The Outcasts - Analysis

A sermon against poetry that still wants an altar

The poem’s central move is a deliberately filthy paradox: Bukowski tears into poets as a species while showing how hard it is to stop wanting what poets want—attention, exemption, a sense of being special. The opening sneer at P O E T R Y as something you can coax out with a laxative attacks the culture of constant production and public display—Get your name in LIGHTS, even if it’s only on 8 1/2 x 11 mimeo. The joke is that the “miracle” has been reduced to paperwork and formatting. Yet the speaker’s fury is intimate, not distant: he talks like someone who knows the hunger from the inside.

The first target: the martyr-clown in the basement bar

In the first long section, the poem ridicules the common writerly pose: the author as truth-teller and wounded saint. These writers sit in tinker-toy rooms with flabby hearts and announce what’s wrong with the world—as if the brutal facts weren’t already obvious: a cop’s club cracks heads; war is a dirty game. Bukowski’s tone is scabrous and comic, but it’s also weary, as if he’s heard the same confessional speech too many times: the man in the basement bar hiding from a wife and kids he doesn’t want, proclaiming his heart is drowning in vomit. The speaker’s refusal to grant the writer uniqueness is the moral point: Hell, all our hearts are drowning—in pork salt, bad verse, soggy love. Suffering isn’t a credential; it’s the baseline.

The second target (and the poem’s hinge): the rich poet as hobbyist

The poem turns sharply at Poets. / And there’s another / Type. Now the writer isn’t a barfly-martyr but a property owner with country / Places, holding a cocktail glass about heart high and sipping rather than drinking. This figure has the time to “understand life” precisely because he doesn’t have to: no slaughterhouses, no washing / Dishes, no cab-driving. Bukowski exposes how privilege disguises itself as sensitivity. The rich poet’s world is built of small meannesses and guarded borders: he’s tight with money (the 5 cent stamps), he performs generosity that never materializes (promised whiskey and cigars that are never / there), and he HIDE[s] their women like valuables. Even his “poetry” is bureaucratic anxiety: the obsessive trip to the post office box 3 or 4 times a day, hoping for acceptance, fearing rejection. The poem insists that the hunger for literary validation survives every class position; it just wears different clothes.

Outcast pride vs. outcast envy

One of the poem’s sharpest tensions is that the speaker mocks poets for believing they’re chosen—he thinks he’s Rimbaud, he thinks he’s Pound—while he also can’t fully stop measuring himself against those myths. The Dylan Thomas passage is pure corrosive satire: THEY KILLED HIM, the speaker jokes, by FORCED free drinks and sex on him, when he should have been left alone to Write write WRITE! It’s a parody of how literary culture romanticizes self-destruction as if it were artistic fuel. But it also reveals a trapped admiration: the speaker knows the legend well enough to weaponize it. His contempt reads like self-defense against a world that keeps ranking poets, handing out halos, and calling someone the great / Poet!

The Indians, the beerstain, and the limits of the speaker’s moral high ground

The poem’s class critique expands, briefly, into something uglier: the starving Indians selling beads and baskets outside the small desert town, kept out of the rich man’s houses for being dirty and ignorant. The speaker answers with a grim, self-incriminating mirror: his own shirt has a beerstain; he lights a 6 cent cigar and Forget[s] about / it. That last move matters. The poem knows that righteous perception doesn’t automatically become righteous action. Even the “outcast” can slide into numbness, choosing the cheap consolation of drink and smoke over sustained witness.

Cold ending: no welcoming committee, no bars, no transcendence

The final scene deflates the fantasy of poetic importance with almost slapstick bleakness. Somebody was supposed to meet him at the station—Of course, they weren’t. The promised ceremony (We’ll be there to meet the great / Poet!) collapses into a practical problem: it’s 7 a.m., 40 degrees, and there were no / bars open. That ending doesn’t just puncture other people’s pretensions; it punctures the speaker’s, too. The poem leaves its “outcast” not heroic but stranded—alive to hypocrisy, allergic to comfort, and still wanting the simplest kind of mercy: warmth, a drink, a door that opens.