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Filmmaker Kayhan Lannes Ozmen has taken Charles Bukowski’s poem “Girl on the Escalator” and created a stunning short film. Watch it below.
The poem finds a lonely, lascivious man lusting after a woman who is unattainable to him. For one thing, she’s already taken, and he deconstructs not only the young woman for whom his gaze has fallen upon, but also her man’s reaction.
It is one of a number of poems that see the poet writing on obsession with the fairer sex, with a mix of both worship and objectification.
It also seems him imagining the woman’s characteristics, and what her life must be like, despite having little to go on.
The work is often read as misogynistic, or as an honest appraisal of what goes on in the mind of a man who longs to connect, fails time and again, and then becomes bitter but still filled with desire and a type of cracked hope.
The text of the poem follows.
“Girl on the Escalator,” by Charles Bukowski
as I go to the escalator
a young fellow and a lovely young girl
are ahead of me.
her pants, her blouse are skin-tight.
as we ascend, she rests one foot
on the step above and her behind
assumes a fascinatin shape.
the young man looks all around he appears worried,
he looks at me.
I look away.
no, young man, I am not looking,
I am not looking at your girl’s behind.
dont worry, I respect her and I respect you.
in fact, I respect everything; the flowers that grow, young women,
children, all the animals, our precious complicated universe, everyone and everything.
I sense that the young man now feels better and I am glad for him.
I know his problem: the girl has a mother, a father, maybe a sister or a brother,
and undoubtedly a bunch of unfriendly relatives
and she like to dance and flirt and she likes to go to the movies and sometimes
she talks and chews at the same time and
she enjoys really dumb TV shows and she thinks she’s a budding actress and she
doesn’t always look so good and has a
terrible temper and sometimes she almost goes crazy
and she can talk for hours on the telephone and she wants to go to Europe some summer soon
and she wants you to buy her a near-new Mercedes and she’s in love with
Mel Gibson and her mother is a
drunk and her father is a racist
and sometimes when she drinks too much she
snores and she’s often cold in bed and
she has a guru, a guy who met Christ
in the desert in 1978, and she wants to be a dancer and she’s unemployed and she
gets migraine headaches every time she
eats sugar or cheese.
I watch him take her up
the escalator, his arm
protectively about her waist, thinking he’s
lucky,
thinking he’s a real special guy,
thinking that nobody in the world has
what he has.
and he’s right, terribly
terribly right, his arm around
that warm bucket of
intestine,
bladder,
kidneys,
lungs,
salt,
sulphur,
carbon dioxide
and
phlegm.
lotsa
luck
