post-academic required reading.

So I've finally read "The Old Man and the Sea"
twelve years too late, but in a mere two sittings
and I now have a better understanding
of several different reactions to the book.

To the millions of students forced to read it:
I comprehend why it makes you want to kill
Mr. Hemingway, though he already beat you to it:
it's over a hundred pages of a man hunting a fish
for three days, and he doesn't even get to
reap the benefits at the end; I'm sure
you've learned by now that there are no happy endings
and that even graduation is more of a painful beginning
than a triumphant conclusion.
Read it again after you've lived a little--
no, after you feel like you've lived too much for your years.
You'll thank me.

My literary idol, Charles Bukowski--
you had a love-hate relationship with Hem
for most of your life, and this final work was the one
you used most in your arguments against the man
or at least the writer.
Well now, ten years after your death, a kid
who will never aspire to be half the writer
half the lush, half the tail-chasing tale-chaser that you were
is sitting here telling you that you only hated Ernie's
final masterpiece because you were envious;
your life-long hero taught you that it didn't take
a story laden with liquor bottles, or dead-end jobs
or bad parenting, or a woman (other than the Sea)
to pin down what every writer has always been trying to say:
life's a hell of a fight-- glorious even, if you can pull that off--
and in the end we can only hope to pick up what's left
and start over.

And you, Ernest: you're the real Christ in coward's clothing.
Was it you searching for that majestic marlin too far out?
Was it you holding fast to that rope for three days?
You who landed the harpoon, fought off the sharks
and ultimately lost to them
and your own human nature
by taking on more than you could handle?
You were right to refrain from calling it sin.
I'd like to think that it wasn't a gambling debt
an old flame that you couldn't blow out
or a drunken night of lonesome introspection
that made you decide that your glass of orange juice
was a better place to keep your brains.
I'd like to think that you knew
that in order to live you had to write
and that you'd never be able to top that last little number
your typer and the gods slid your way.
Your shotgun didn't admit defeat, it announced victory.
Don't worry;
I get it, if no one else does.