"The Laughing Heart" by Charles Bukowski

In honor of National Poetry Month, I am featuring special poems by special poets each Wednesday. Here is a buoyant, defiant piece, "The Laughing Heart" by the inimitable Charles Bukowski.

The Laughing Heart
by Charles Bukowski

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

https://bukowski.net/

Try To Be Tender

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
--Charles Bukowski