Weekday Literary Inspirations:

The Con Job
By C. Bukowski

the ground war began today
at dawn
in a desert land
far from here.
the U.S. ground troops were
largely
made up of
Blacks, Mexicans and poor
whites
most of whom had joined
the military
because it was the only job
they could find.

the ground war began today
at dawn
in a desert land
far from here
and the Blacks, Mexicans
and poor whites
were sent there
to fight and win
as on tv
and on the radio
the fat white rich newscasters
first told us all about
it
and then the fat rich white
analysts
told us
why
again
and again
and again
on almost every
tv and radio station
almost every minute
day and night
because
the Blacks, Mexicans
and poor whites
were sent there
to fight and win
at dawn
in a desert land
far enough away from
here.

-----
Thought that this would be a good representation on what the current fighting situation overseas is all about. And what Bush and Dick got us into.

Charles Bukowski Mondays

From the book:
Drinking With Bukowski

Charles Bukowski interviewed by Sean Penn

On Shakespeare:
He's unreadable and overrated. But people don't want to hear that. You see, you cannot attack shrines. Shakespeare is embedded through the centuries. You can say "So-and-so is lousy actor!" But you can't say Shakespeare is shit. The longer something is around, snobs begin to attach themselves to it, like suckerfish. When snobs feel something is safe...they attach. The moment you tell them the truth, they go wild. They can't handle it. It's attacking their own thought process. They disgust me.

On Writing:
I never write in the daytime. It's like running through the shopping mall with your clothes off. Everybody can see you. At night... that's when you pull the tricks... magic.

M.I.A & Jack Kerouac

It has been a crazy last few weeks so I apologize that I havent updated. My new seattlepi.com gig has kept me busy which has been a great blessing. So while I finally post a new piece I wanted to share some wisdom from the late great...



Jack Kerouac

Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of thirty "essentials."


1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Charles Bukowski Mondays

the Interview

By Charles Bukowski

I read it all.
the poet went on and on
talking about the value of
workshops.
this poet taught at a
university.
believed in teaching poets in
prison,
and teaching poets in the schools,
high schools,
reading his poems there,
bringing the word.
this poet had studied under
C. and R. and O.
yes, this poet always carried
a notebook
to capture impressions
at odd moments
else they would be forgotten.
yes, this poet revised his stuff
many times.
as much as six revisions per
poem.
this poet had been awarded
grants and
prizes.
during dry periods this poet hiked
or rode his bicycle.
the masses, said this poet,
were hungry for poetry.
the reason the books didn't
sell was not that poetry itself
was insufficient but that the
masses were sadly unaware of
it.
it was our duty to awaken the
people he said, it was our responsi
bility, etc.

I dropped the magazine to the
floor, got up, walked to the
bathroom
and had one of my best
bowel movements in
several years.

Weekend Literary Inspirations:

Regarding the Writer's Life
By-Line: E. Hemingway, p. 185

"You must be prepared to work always without applause. When you are excited about something is when your first draft is done. But no one can see it until you have gone over it again and again until you have communicated the emotion, the sights and the sounds to the reader, and by the time you have completed this the words, sometimes, will not make sense to you as you read them, so many times you re-read them. By the time the book comes out you will have started something and it is all behind you and you do not want to hear about it. But you do, you read it in covers and you see all the places that now you can do nothing about. All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general dying of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you to Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens. You are just as well off without these reviews. Finally, in some other place, some other time, when you can't work an feel like hell you will pick up the book and look in it and start to read and go on and in a little while say to your wife, "Why this stuff is bloody marvelous."
And she will say, "Darling, I always told you it was." Or maybe she doesn't hear you and says, 'What did you say?" and you do not repreat the remark.
But if the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written and reading it over you see that this is so you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work."

Charles Bukowski Mondays

found poems

By Charles Bukowski

I know I shouldn't write so many poems
but
it's a form of self-entertainment which
AMAZINGLY
I am paid for.
I live alone in this large house with 2
cats (there were 3, one died)
and at a my age it's realistic to assume that
I might also die
one of these a.m. nights
after writing 10 or 12 poems
and that's where the laugh
comes in:
before I bed down I place the new
poems
neatly in the center of my desk so that
when the stink gets bad
and the neighbors complain or
when my girlfriend phones and the phone goes
unanswered

the poems will be found.
not that my death will be tragic or
important

(I will be out of
here)

but the poems themselves will
let them know

(those carping little
critics)

that I was good until the end
or maybe even
better.

Charles Bukowski Mondays

Contribution to Voyagers "Poetry in Motion" Series from the 1990's

By Charles Bukowki



Transcript:
"Reading the poets has been the dullest of things. Even reading the great novelists of the past, I said, "Tolstoy is supposed to be special?" I go to bed, I read War and Peace. I read it, I read it, I say, "Where is the specialist in War and Peace?" I really tried to understand. I mean, and then many of the great poets of the past, I've read their stuff. I've read it. All I get is a goddamn headache and boredom. I really feel sickness in the pit of my stomach, I say "There's some trick going on here, this is not true. This is not real, its not good."
You see poetry itself contains as much energy as a Hollywood industry. As much energy as a stage play on Broadway. All it needs is practitioners who are alive to bring it alive. Poetry has always been said to be a private, hidden art. Not to be appreciated. The reason it's not appreciated is because it hasn't shown any guts, hasn't shown any dance. Hasn't shown any moxie. Poetry is generally very dull, very pretensive. Uh, those who say the poet is very private and precious person, I don't agree with. Generally, he is just a dumb, fiddling asshole writing insecure lines that don't come through, believing he's immortal, waiting for his immortality which never arrives. Because the poor fucker just can't write. Most poets, coets, whoets, carrots, can't even write a simple line. Like, "The dog walked down the street."Nothing should ever be done that should be done. It has to come out like a good hot beer shit. A good hot beer shit is glorious man. You get up, turn around, look at it and your proud. The fumes, the stink of the turd, you look, you say, "God, I did it. I'm good." Then you flush it away and there is a sense of sadness when just the water is there. It's like writing a good poem, you just do it. You, its a beer shit. There's nothing to analyze, nothing to say it's just done. Got it?
I really hate reading verse because you're really getting up there. You've written poems that you really meant alone, you know, by you're typewriter, then there's crowd out there drinking beer and all that. And you're reading it to them. The writer has no responsibility. Except to jack off and bed (vet?) alone and type a good page. I continued writing even though it came back and got drunk for 10 years. I felt there was nothing out there. So I had to continue because they were so bad, not because I was so good. And I'm still not so good, but they're still very bad. There is still room for somebody to step in here you see, and I hope he arrives or she.
That should be enough right there, with that bottle of 55 poets, that should cure them. With their melody but it wont. Goodnight, goodbye, and happy reading.

Weekend Literary Inspirations:

The Origins of Joy in Poetry

By Jack Kerouac
Chicago Review, 1958

The new American poetry as typified by the SF Renaissance (which means Ginsburg, me, Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, McClure, Corso, Gary Snyder, Phil Lamantia, Phil Whalen, I guess) is a kind of new-old Zen Lunacy poetry, writing whatever comes into your head as it comes, poetry returned to its origin, in the bardic child, truly ORAL as Ferling said, instead of gray faced Academic quibbling. Poetry & Prose had for a long-time fallen into the false hands of the false. These new pure poets confess forth for sheer joy of confession. They are the CHILDREN. They are also childlike graybeard Homers singing in the street. They SING, they SWING. It is diametrically opposed to the Eliot shot, who so dismally advises his dreary negative rules like the objective correlative, etc, which is just a lot of constipation and ultimately emasculation of the pure masculine urge to freely sing. In spite of the dry rules he set down his poetry itself is sublime. I could say a lot more but ain't got time or sense. But SF is the poetry of a new Holy Lunacy like that of ancient times (Li Po, Han Shan, Tom O Bedlam, Kit Smart, Blake) yet it also has the mental discipline of pointing out things directly, purely concretely, no abstractions or explanations, wham wham the true blue song of man.

(His complete view of himself as a poet)

Drinking and Waiting...With a Smile

I went to a wedding this past weekend back home in Alaska. I watched as my best friend since grade school tied the knot. Went the distance. Took the plunge. Whatever analogy you would like to use, he is now grown up, the husband to a wonderful woman and I could not be happier. Being surrounded by the many friends and families that he and I both grew up with from the days of our youth and today, it felt like, not only a wedding of two friends, but of a family reunion of sorts. Growing up together all these years, I knew I would see the many different faces of my past; from grade school to high school. And like high school, I ended up traversing, mingling from person to person as I did a decade ago.
It was refreshing, cathartic. To be able to go up to nearly everyone there and begin again where we had left off. Not having the anxiety, constant and perpetual tiresome feeling of starting from scratch. Boring out nearly entire life stories. No, this time, we all knew each other's lives and watched as two of our own continued theirs together; it was something to witness.
The groom and I have had our ups and we have had our downs, we've had our share of bickering, laughter and tears. Yet, as with true friends both past and present, the good times always outlast the bad. Being a year older than I, he was like the big brother I never had. I could confide in him, lay down my guard with him, be myself with him. At a time where I questioned my place in society, his friendship made life easy. As I contemplate, I am reminded of a quote I have seen before from Henri Nouwen:

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."

and Charles Bukowski:

"That is what friendship means. Sharing the prejudice of experience."

Knowing that I can physically, or rather vicariously, go back home to my birthplace and see my friend(s) makes being alone tolerable. He let me be who I was and there was never a need to apologize for that. Like Bukowski, who in my view was the writer most comfortable in his own skin, demonstrated in simplicity the darker side of life, while shining through with style and unapologetic fervor. Even his friends and lovers knew who he was and accepted, or rather tolerated him. As, A.D Winans, a long time friend, wrote of Bukowski:

He would be the first
To tell you that
He was an asshole and
He was
And so are you and
Sometimes more and
Sometimes less
Depending on
The
Circumstances
He would be the first
To admit that
He was a hustler and
A con man and
He was both
But he did it with style
Which is more
Than you can say
For most of us

Amen
Rest in Peace

As I sit here scribbling once again all alone, reminiscing the past and my friend as silence mushrooms the air, I crack a grin. Things have changed. Time has changed. Therefore, I leave you with a poem called "drink and wait" by Charles Bukowski:

well, first Mae West died
and then George Raft,
and Eddie G. Robinson's
been gone
a long time,
and Bogart and Gable
and Grable,
and Laurel and
Hardy
and the Marx Brothers,
all those Saturday
afternoons
at the movies
as a boy
are gone now
and I look
around this room
and it looks back at me
and out through
the window pane,
time hangs helpless
from the doorknob
as a gold
paperweight
of an owl
looks up at me
(an old man now)
who must endure
these many empty
Saturday
afternoons.


I can now drink and wait alone with a smile.
Thank you Bukowski
Thank you dear friend

Charles Bukowski Mondays

Observations on music

By Charles Bukowski

I have sat for thousands of nights
listening to symphony music on the radio;
I doubt that there are many men my age
who have listened to as much classical music
as I have-
even those in the profession

I am not a musicologist
but
I have some observations:
1) the same 50 or 60 classical compostions
are played over and over
and over again.
2) there has been other great music written that we
ignore at our peril.
3) the second movement of most symphonies
is only kind to insomniacs
4) chamber music has every right to be energetic
and entertaining
5)very few composers know how to END their
symphonies
but
most opening movements, like romance, have
early charm.
6) I prefer a conductor who inserts his own
interpretation rather than the purist who blindly follows
the commands of the master.
7) of course, there are always some conductors with so much ego and
"interpretation" that the composer
vanishes.
8) music is much like fucking, but some composers can't
climax and others climax too often, leaving themselves and the listener
jaded and spent.
9) humor is lacking in most so-called great musical
compositions.
10) Bach is the hardest to play badly because he made so few spiritual mistakes.
11) almost all symphonies and operas could be
shorter.
12) too much contemporary music is written from the safe
haven of a university. a composer must still experience life in its raw form in order
write well.
13) music is the most passionate of the art forms;
I wish I had been a musician or a composer.
14) very few writers know how to END a poem like this one
15) but I do.

Charles Bukowski Mondays

Beasts Bounding Through Time
By Charles Bukowski

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory
moving this little bit of light toward us
impossibly.

Weekend Literary Inspirations:

The Loser
By Charles Bukowski

and the next I remembered I'm on a table,
everybody's gone; the head of bravery
under light, scowling, flailing me down...
and then some toad stood there, smoking a cigar;
"Kid you're no fighter," he told me,
and I got up and knocked him over a chair;
it was like a scene in a movie, and
he stayed there on his big rump and said
over and over: "Jesus, Jesus, whatsamatta wit
you?" and I got up and dressed,
the tape still on my hands, and when I got home
I tore the tape off my hands and
wrote my first poem,
and I've been fighting
ever since.

Charles Bukowski Mondays

Excepts from
"The L.A Scene: The Poets, The Madmen; The Impoverished and the Rich of Soul; The Bland, The Bastards, The Drunks and the Damned..."

By Charles Bukowski

"After a bad marriage I decided, well, hell, I might as well be a writer, that seems easiest, you say anything you want to and they say, hey, that's good, you're a genius. Why not be a genius? There are so many half-assed geniuses. So I became another half-assed genius.
My first thought was to stay away from writers, artists, creators, feeling that they could take one off the path with the misdirection of their ambitions. After all, a good writer need only do two things well: Live and write, and the job is done. In Los Angeles it is possible to live in total isolation until they find you, and they will find you. And drink with you for days and nights, and talk for days and nights. And when they are gone, others will come along. One doesn't mind the women, of course, but the others are definitely consumers of the soul...."

"Los Angeles is full of very odd people, believe me. There are many out there who have never been on a 7:30 a.m. freeway or punched a timeclock or even had a job and don't intend to, can't, won't, will die first rather than live the common way. In a sense, each of them is a genius in his or her way, fighting against the obvious, swimming upstream, going mad, getting on pot, wine, whiskey, art, suicide, anything but the common equation. It will be sometime before they even us out and make us say quits.
When you see that city hall downtown and all of the proper precious people, don't get melancholy. There is a whole tide, a whole race of mad people, starving, drunk, goofy, and miraculous. I have seem many of them. I am one of them. There will be more. This city has not yet been taken. Death before death is sickening.
The strange ones will hold, the war will continue. Thank you. "



(Trailer for the film "Factotum")

To Understand Life and The Sexes I Turn to Bukowski

“Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually dirty kitchen, and 5 out of 9 I’ll show you an exceptional man.” - Charles Bukowski, 6-27-67, over his 19th bottle of beer.

“show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 out of 9 I’ll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.” - Charles Bukowski, 6-27-67, over 20th bottle of beer.


Forget E! Entertainment’s experts. I dump on the Queer Eye Men. I scream turrets at morning talk show relationship gurus. I discredit the so-called how-to “experts” on the world wide web. On matters of the heart of the sexes, I prefer to get my information from Charles Bukowski. The late acclaimed writer and poet takes on the mind-set of the male and female species with straight talk and no inflated bullshit puffery of any kind. According to him, “the state of the kitchen is the state of the mind.”

In “Sensitive,” within the pages of Tales of Ordinary Madness, Bukowski deliberates both men and women and their habits all which seem to be dependent on how they keep their kitchens. As he essays forth his wild mind,

“ ...confused and unsure men, pliable men are the thinkers. Their kitchens are like their minds, cluttered with garbage, dirty ware, impurity, but they are aware of their mind-state and find some humor in it. At times, with a violent burst of fire they defy the eternal deities and come up with a lot of shining that we sometimes call creation; just as at times they will get half drunk and clean up their kitchens, but soon again falls into disorder and they are in the darkness again, in need of BABO, pills, prayers, sex, luck, and salvation.”

While on the other hand he believes the ever-orderly kitchen is the freak.

“His kitchen-state is his mind state...he has let life condition him quickly to a basened and hardened complex of defensive and soothing thought-order. If you listen to him for ten minutes you will know that anything he says in a lifetime will be essentially meaningless and always dull.”

In just a few short sentences, he puts forth genuine thought about the state of mind in relation to how we keep our kitchens. How we function through life. Society sizes one another up by the simplest forms: how we dress, the types of shoes we wear... how clean or impure our kitchens are. We all know what he is talking about, we have experienced or have even let ourselves go at times, even women.
“some women have theories on how to save the world but can’t wash out a coffee cup.” Bukowski adds.

What makes Bukowski’s advice and knowledge about men and women more applicable than the so-called “experts” with letters after their name is that of his no-nonsense, “I don’t give a damn” attitude and perspective. He does not shy away from controversy or the truth. That is why I am fascinated by him. Plus, to many of whom follow his words, he is the literary-equivalent of Led Zeppelin and classic Guns n’ Roses -just to name a few- whose love for the debauchery and perversions of life nearly equaled their genius.
Categorically documenting the sordid details of life living in Los Angeles, Bukowski chronicled what he knew - that old adage of write what you know - he knew his surroundings and the people living in it. He even surmises, “ perhaps I have wandered from kitchens to vindictiveness. There is a lot of snot in each of our souls, and plenty in mine, and i become mixed-up on kitchens, mixed-up on most.”
Bukowski speaks in words on the sexes and on life openly and with scarred but real authenticity and candor. He opens wide his Muse with topics ranging from drinking, women, sex, fighting, the toils of nine to five, and in this example, kitchens.

In a world full of faux know-it-all’s posers bullshitting about the grit and the grind of life on celebrity television and morning talk shows, Bukowski’s words are a haven. An escape.

Charles Bukowski Mondays

If I Taught Creative Writing
By Charles Bukowski

now, if you were teaching creative
writing, he asked, what would you
tell them?
I’d tell them to have an unhappy love
affair, hemorrhoids, bad teeth
and to drink cheap wine,
to keep switching the head of their
bed from wall to wall
and then I’d tell them to have
another unhappy love affair
and never to use a silk typewriter
ribbon,
avoid family picnics
or being photographed in a rose
garden;
read Hemingway only once,
skip Faulkner
ignore Gogol
stare at photos of Gertrude Stein
and read Sherwood Anderson in bed
while eating Ritz crackers,
realize that people who keep
talking about sexual liberation
are more frightened than you are.
listen to E. Power Biggs work the
organ on your radio while you’re
rolling Bull Durham in the dark
in a strange town
with one day left on the rent
after having given up
friends, relatives and jobs.
never consider yourself superior and /
or fair
and never try to be.
have another unhappy love affair.
watch a fly on a summer curtain.
never try to succeed.
don’t shoot pool.
be righteously angry when you
find your car has a flat tire.
take vitamins but don’t lift weights or jog.
then after all this
reverse the procedure.
have a good love affair.
and the thing
you might learn
is that nobody knows anything–
not the State, nor the mice
the garden hose or the North Star.
and if you ever catch me
teaching a creative writing class
and you read this back to me
I’ll give you a straight A
right up the pickle
barrel.

a poem for swingers, a poem for the playgirls of the universe

By Charles Bukowski

I like women who haven’t lived with too many men.

I don’t expect virginity but I simply prefer women

who haven’t been rubbed raw by experience.
there is a quality about women who choose

men sparingly;

it appears in their walk

in their eyes

in their laughter and in their

gentle hearts.

women who have had too many men

seem to choose the next one

out of revenge rather than with

feeling.

when you play the field selfishly everything

works against you:

one can’t insist on love or

demand affection.

you’re finally left with whatever

you have been willing to give

which often is:

nothing.
some women are delicate things

some women are delicious and

wondrous.
if you want to piss on the sun

go ahead

but please leave them

alone.

Charles Bukowski Mondays

Friendly Advice to a lot of Young Men
By Charles Bukowski

Go to Tibet.
Ride a camel.
Read the Bible.
Dye your shoes blue.
Grow a Beard.
Circle the world in a paper canoe.
Subscribe to "The Saturday Evening Post."
Chew on the left side of your mouth only.
Marry a woman with one leg and shave with a straight razor.
And carve your name in her arm.

Brush your teeth with gasoline.
Sleep all day and climb trees at night.
Be a monk and drink buckshot and beer.
Hold your head under water and play the violin.
Do a belly dance before pink candles.
Kill your dog.
Run for Mayor.
Live in a barrel.
Break your head with a hatchet.
Plant tulips in the rain.

But don't write poetry.

the worst and the best

By Charles Bukowski


in the hospitals and jails
it's the worst
in madhouses
it's the worst
in penthouses
it's the worst
in skid row flophouses
it's the worst
at poetry readings
at rock concerts
at benefits for the disabled
it's the worst
at funerals
at weddings
it's the worst
at parades
at skating rinks
at sexual orgies
it's the worst
at midnight
at 3 a.m
at 5:45 p.m.
its the worst

falling through the sky
firing squads
that's the best

thinking of India
looking at popcorn stands
watching the bull get the matador
that's the best

boxed lightbulbs
an old dog scratching
peanuts in a celluloid bag
that's the best

spraying roaches
a clean pair of stockings
natural guts defeating natural talent
that's the best

rugs with cigarette burns
cracks in sidewalks
waitresses still sane
that's the best

my hands dead
my heart dead
silence
adagio of rocks
the world ablaze
that's the best

for me

Charles Bukowski Mondays

So You Want To Be a Writer?

By Charles Bukowski
if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.
don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.