Decomp book Review

My salted slug eyes struggle I got backwards x-ray vision where the sidewalk ends you’ll find decomposition. Help a brother rub one out join him under the over pass sniffing aimlessly orange pills. These are the days, before I knew my number. I have a dead see scroll version of “Maybe Will See”. Letters worn stickers on a kabbalah rubik's cube. He was an older man when he wrote it. He was leaving his mindset of a drunken blue-collar worker teetering between nihilism and nirvana. Instead, he was entering a state of reflection and cautious optimism. He no longer wanted to point out the pointless; he wanted to impart wisdom into the world. He opens with humankind’s greatest endeavor, (no not fucking) the exploration of space (cheating on Gaia) . He was born in 1920 and saw many of the innovations of the 20th century unfold; such as television, computers and humankind going to the moon. He has some insight into what these events represent. He does not care about the details of the endeavors; he only glosses over them. What was important for him, were the effects these events had on humankind. They distract us, they make us believe in a lofty ideology that we are not genetically predisposed to believe in, and it keeps us “from doing things to ourselves” (Stanford 1080). This poem is about humanity’s need to escape from itself so it does not do self-inflicted damage. When speaking of man’s exploration of the final frontier He states, “I am for this.” He sounds like a hopeful parent of a juvenile delinquent who approves of the positive effects that high school wrestling may have on their child. Man needs to channel his violent energies into something mysterious and infinite like the universe.
By innovating, our hunting instinct is eclipsed by our gathering instinct. “Our poking around” which “is pleasurable” stops us from attacking ourselves and others (Stanford 1080). Bukowski falls from the heavens into the mundane by making an enigmatic connection between space exploration and better peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Bukowski’s better sandwich could be like the creation of Tang, a side effect of advancement in technology. With this perspective, technology and exploration would be our salvation. The sloth, caused by the convenience of technology, coupled with the religion of science, would mesmerize us. The sandwich could also represent the fact that everything is more vivid to those that participate in a life explored. The exploration of space gives everyone hope, a reason to wake up. The next day could bring untold mysteries that could take a lifetime to digest.
Bukowski sees two sides of humanity in this poem; he sees a curious inventive side and a war-like, suicidal, and destructive side. Charles Bukowski, like all men his age, had lived to see many wars and many innovations, and he prefers our preoccupation with innovation to war. Seeing new things replaces man’s ever-acute nihilism with curiosity.
The title “Maybe Will See” has a desperate optimism to it. He believes our growing understanding of the universe is a distraction from doing bad, but what if humanity finds something? He creates a glimmer of hope and maybe his distraction turns out to be the Holy Grail. Maybe we will see. I pissed on the track.