CHARLES BUKOWSKI AND TRASHCAN LIVES Today Im going to talk about a Bukowskis poem called trashcan lives.

First, in order to create a context for a better understanding of this poem, Im going to tell Bukowskis life. Charles Bukowski was born in 1920 in Germany, but in 1923 he emigrated with his family to United States due to an economic crisis in Germany caused by the 1rst world war. They lived some time in Baltimore, and later they stayed definitely in Los Angeles. During his childhood, his father was an unemployed and he ill treated bukowski and his mother as well. This family problem and his shyness made Bukowski a lonely person who took refuge in Hemingway and Millers literature and in alcohol. After he finished school, he studied for two years art, journalism and literature in L. A.s college. His journey as a writer began when he was 24 years old, with some publications in a story magazine, however as he couldnt continue publishing he was disappointed, so he stopped writing and came back to alcohol, his eternal friend. In the 50s, after being wandering for the country knowing motels and having affairs with many women, he gave literature one more chance; he wrote poetry, novel and short story. Also he worked as a postman, as the title of one of his novels. But in 1969, influenced by Jon Webb y Gypsy Lou, he decided to quit his job and took the risk of living out of writings. In spite of the fact that he had many women, some of them marked his life and literature, Barbara Frye, Frances Smith, Janet Cooney Baker, Linda King, Linda Lee and his daughter Marina Louise Bukowski, these women appear in his books with pseudonyms, even if the stories are not tender and sensible talking about women, he is able to describe feelings like love. Bukowski died of leukemia on 1994, in San Pedro, California. His life and literature was marked by sadness, his hopelessness, despair and the routine of people lives, he made of literature, alcohol and sex affairs a way of getting out of boredom. In his Poem Trashcan Lives, he presents a nihilistic outlook of the way a society works; in nihilism life does not have meaning, all outside values became into a crisis, in that order of ideas human beings must create their own values. Therefore he shows that politic regimes and all values that others propose dont work, because they are imposed vertically by using fear, in that way people do not criticize them. A politic regime is democracy, in which people govern in order to improve their condition, by means of leaders elected by vote, other is dictatorship, it means that power is focus on one person who does not take into account people necessities, and benefit a minority. For Bukowski both are the same and are wrong, in his verses: this is the way a democracy / works: / you get what you can / try to keep that /and add to it / if possible /this is the way a dictatorship / works too / only they either enslave or / destroy their / derelicts, he states that people has to do the same in a kind of blooding competence in order to survive. At the beginning and the end of the poem, Bukowski repeats Its a hard cold wind, nihilism says that life doesnt have a truth, so it doesnt deserve an action for changing the things, the poem doesnt have a change in terms of arriving in different point, but a way to have freedom of this imposed values is following his own values, as he did it provide with a bottle of red. .