I had an hour to kill in Boston’s Back Bay/Fenway neighborhood, so I headed to the original Bukowski’s Tavern, the only nearby bar where aging hipster bartenders sling beers brewed by Trappist monks to people who weren’t in the area shopping at Copley Place or Newbury Street.
I sat at the bar and ordered some kind of Weizen. I pulled out an Atlantic Monthly magazine. I hated to be that person sitting in Bukowski’s and reading at the bar, so I tried to look nonchalant and unabsorbed. Occasionally, I would look up and smile at nothing, or stare meaningful at my beer.
Before I left, I went to the restroom. Someone had meticulously penned on the wall in black marker “i wanted to overthrow the government but all i brought down was somebody’s wife” and attributed it to Bukowski. It made me giggle.
Today I sought the source of the Bukowski restroom quote, imagining it to come from a story but it’s actually the title of poem. The poem touches on politics (“We plotted to overthrow a tottering dynasty”), but overall it’s a fine example of Bukowski’s iconic uninhibited maleness (“[I was] always drunk as possible, well-read, starving, depressed, but actually / a good young piece of ass would have solved all my rancor.”)
The part of the poem that I get stuck on, though, is this: “I guess she felt as I: that the weakness was not Government / but Man, one at a time, that men were never as strong as / their ideas / and that ideas were governments turned into men.” Hmm. Okay, I think he’s saying that governments are good ideas that are poorly executed by men. I must have read it about fifty times and I still can’t fully wrap my brain around it.
But, why the heck am I trying to decipher Bukowski’s freaking political philosophy? If the title of the poem didn’t clue me in, certainly the last line should: “I would have to get / very drunk again.”
