Life's Pleasures Quote by Charles Bukowski

"I will remember the kisses our lips raw with love and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me, and I will remember your small room the feel of you the light in the window your records your books our morning coffee our noons our nights our bodies spilled together sleeping the tiny flowing currents immediate and forever your leg my leg your arm my arm your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again"

Charles Bukowski, Poet

About this Quote

Bukowski isn’t trying to be elegant here; he’s trying to be accurate to the way memory actually hits: in a rush, without punctuation, without permission. The line barrels forward on “and… and… and”, piling sensation on sensation until it feels less like a poem than a breathless confession. That momentum is the point. Love, for Bukowski, is rarely a polished monument. It’s a lived-in room, a stack of records, coffee that tastes like routine and rescue at once.

The specific intent is to preserve a relationship at its most physical and domestic, to argue that the “small” details are the evidence. “Kisses our lips raw” refuses romance-movie softness; it’s desire abrasive enough to leave marks. “You gave me everything you had” and “I offered you what was left of me” slips in the bruised Bukowski worldview: two people not at their best, not newly minted, trading what remains. The intimacy is real, but so is the damage. He frames love less as abundance than as mutual depletion that somehow still feels like grace.

The subtext is gratitude threaded with fear: the speaker is cataloging because he knows the inventory can vanish. The room becomes a reliquary, the shared objects proof that it happened, that he was briefly remade. “You who made me laugh again” lands like the hidden thesis. Under the erotic sprawl is a recovery narrative: not salvation in the religious sense, but the startling return of a human reflex he thought he’d lost.

Context matters: Bukowski’s work circles loneliness, alcoholism, classed-down American life. So when he finds tenderness, he doesn’t dress it up. He hoards it, sentence by sentence, like someone who doesn’t trust it will come back.