Poems of disarming sincerity and sharp humor, written with raw passion and poignant honesty. Charles Bukowski writes about love, lust, and desire in the first person, sometimes with harshness and cynicism, other times with sensitivity and tenderness, thus depicting the multiple facets of the enamored individual.

His poems, whether playful or not, often whimsical, speak of the allure of the mysterious and sex, the rejection or acceptance by the object of desire, the egoism and narcissism of the infatuated subject, and ultimately, the redemptive power of love. Revelatory poems about the man and the writer Bukowski - referring to them in regards to lovers and friends, but also to his daughter and his work - who, with his heartbreakingly familiar and contemplative manner, elevates love to a prism through which he sees the world in its full beauty and savagery, as well as his own vulnerable position within it.

I pass by the hotel at 8
and at 5 in the alleys there are cats
and bottles and vagabonds,
and I look up at the window and I think,
I don't know where you are anymore,
and I continue my path and wonder where
life goes
when it stops.