The writings of Charles Bukowski were influenced by the social, cultural and economic atmosphere of the city of Los Angeles. Through his tough social and physical upbringing, Bukowski is able to capture the reality of life drawing on his personal experience and uses themes of sex, alcohol and violence in his raw writing style. His work says a lot about the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing itself, alcohol, relationships with women and daily work. Although Bukowski eventually had an FBI file on him following his column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, in the Los Angeles underground newspaper Open City, and his possible escape, he also wrote countless poems, short stories, six novels and would eventually publish more than sixty books, I decided to concentrate on a single piece of his work, Love is a Dog From Hell, and three poems entitled The 6 Foot Goddess, Sandra, You and Pacific Telephone. In these poems we can see the sexual tendencies that Bukowski is known for, while revealing his inner machismo. It is using this poem that I will show that Charles Bukowski may have been an extremely talented writer, but he was also a very sexually oriented person who had a constant obsession with women that could never be satisfied, only alleviated by his writing.Charles Bukowski was born as Heinrich Karl Bukowski in Andernach, Germany to his father Henry, a sergeant in the United States Army, and his mother Katharina. When he was two years old, Bukowski's parents immigrated to the United States from Germany where they settled in Los Angeles. His father believed in firm discipline, both mental and physical, and often beat Bukowski for the slightest infractions. Bukowski would later describe his childhood as saying ... middle of paper ... more attractive and he cannot escape the life of drugs or alcohol in his writing any more than he could there escape into reality. Even more of this narcissistic writing comes into play in the poem entitled “You”. In this selection he describes a woman speaking to her lover in which she continually feeds his ego and physical vanity. She also continues to reinforce his machismo by comparing him to a beast. This mentality is something Bukowski seems to feed off of during his writing. She constantly compares her lover to an animal or a beast. She refers to his hands as his paws and the woman tells her lover that his balls are the biggest she has ever seen and that he "shoots sperm like a whale shoots water from the hole in his back” (You). Once again, this feeds into the methods of self-promotion we find prevalent in many of Bukowski's works..