“and now spiritually constipated I’ve grown testy”

I’ve never been a great reader of Bukowski, but, my freshman year of college, when I racked up a fistful of store credit shelving books at the old Book Trader on South Street, I bought his Last Night of the Earth Poems. I wasn’t all that impressed, but I’ve kept page 192, “Only One Cervantes” bookmarked with my receipt ever since. Old Chuck and I don’t have all that much in common, but every so often, when writing’s rough and I’m stuck – watching cartoons and listing failures, doodling endless circles in my ideas notebook, getting in touch with my inner Hank Chinaski – I’ll skim it. The last lines don’t help, exactly, but provide some distant commiseration:

yet look, I am still
lucky,
for writing about a
writer’s block
is better than not writing
at all.

Sometimes, it’s all you have.