Time & Perspective Quote by Charles Bukowski

Bukowski opens with a command that’s also a plea: “Understand me”. It’s the posture of someone who knows he’s difficult and would rather turn that into a brand than an apology. The next line deliberately scrambles itself - “I’m not like an ordinary world” - and that grammatical slip matters. He’s not merely saying he’s not like ordinary people; he’s casting himself as a separate climate, a whole environment with its own rules. The self-mythology is the point.

“I have my madness” works like a preemptive strike. Call it madness and you control the narrative: what might look like self-destruction, rudeness, addiction, or refusal to play nice becomes artistic temperament. Then he pushes it into metaphysics: “another dimension”. That’s classic Bukowski swagger - a barfly’s transcendence, a poet’s alibi. He claims distance from the social world while still demanding attention from it.

The cleanest blade is the last clause: “I do not have time for things that have no soul”. “Soul” here isn’t theology; it’s a sorting mechanism. It dismisses bureaucracy, small talk, status games, polite culture - all the deadening surfaces Bukowski made a career of spitting on. Subtext: if you don’t move me, you’re not just boring; you’re spiritually empty.

Contextually, this is Bukowski’s long-running argument with postwar American normalcy: the 9-to-5, the tidy self, the respectable lie. He sells the outsider stance as both wound and weapon, turning alienation into an aesthetic and impatience into a moral position.