Charles Bukowski Road Not Chosen

Charles Bukowski Road Not Chosen While reading Charles Bukowski poetry On the metro ride home Listening to Buddha bar music On my oh too hip IPod I begin to see myself as I was Over 30 years ago when I was merely a bit player A minor character in a Charles Bukowski poem A wild young underemployed intellectual Hanging out in dismal bars and dives all over Asia and California Hanging with disreputable women and drunks and drinkers And characters out of his kinds of haunts A mad poet bard of the underground A drunken poet in a drunken bum show That nightly played in his head Then one day I met the women of my dreams And went down a different path A long slow path to respectability And now 30 years later I am no longer a wild man I am still a poet at heart But I am now also a bureaucrat In a button down suite Doing the people's business Working for the Government I've become the Man Sometimes I wonder Would I have been better off Going down that another path Would I have ended up Somewhere else Doing something else Would I have been as happy Would I have been as successful? There is no answer that satisfies The longing in my heart For that wild thing That still lurks beneath It's civilized cover And I know that I am still A mad poet at heart Railing against the injustice of the world As I work day by day in the belly of the great beast of State I recall the ancient Chinese saying, "Confucian during the day while Taoist rebel at night" Playing out in my head and nightly dreams In the true American Upper class patrician tradition I close the book and look out the window Get off the train, and walk slowly home And realize I had no choice But to take the path that I’ve trodden on And so I put aside my misgivings And say goodbye to my "Bukowskian"desires For another night of domestic contentment Was it worth it all to take the conventional path And not take the bohemian road to hell and back I look at my wife and realize I had no choice, had no choice But to follow her to the ends of the earth And beyond by her side as we walked our path Of shared destiny Goodbye Charles Bukowski wherever you are May I meet you in a bar in the next life And figure out where we should have gone Until then the drinks are on me.