Poems of disarming honesty and sharp humor, written with innate passion and touching straightforwardness. Charles Bukowski writes about love, lust, and desire in the first person, sometimes with harshness and cynicism, other times with sensitivity and tenderness, thus sketching the multiple facets of a person in love.

His poems, entertaining or not, often playful, speak of the allure of mystery and sex, the rejection or acceptance by the object of desire, the egoism and narcissism of the enamored subject, and ultimately, the redemptive power of love. These are revealing poems about the man and the writer Bukowski - he refers to his lovers and friends, but also to his daughter and his work - who, with his heartbreakingly intimate, contemplative manner, elevates love to a prism through which he views the world full of beauty and savagery, as well as his own vulnerable position within it.

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