As my feet tense
And ache from sleep
Deprivation
With a mix of dehydration
The wind beats the walls
Outside
Of a new house
Ironically groaning
My children lay asleep
As I fold their clothes
And study for school exams
On a leopard print chair
A page of words here
Folding a tiny shirt there
While the water bottle
Sits untouched on the floor
I think about my favorite author
And how I never wrote
Something to honor
Such an influential man
It wasn’t the way he was
With all those women
Or how he wrote about bad jobs,
The booze, the drugs, or nothing
But how a black sail billowed
Over the societal scene
From his middle finger raised
Declaring he didn’t give a single care
He burned through his life
Like the first smoke in a pack
And he always stood up for himself
Like the last cold one from the 30 rack
His thoughts were scribbled
His writing was unconventional
He thought the only piece written about him
Would be the obituary at the funeral
So when my family left me in the pines
I tuned out the world and opened a bottle
Then I found a book called “Factotum”
And my life changed forever
I read every page
Then I read several books after
I wanted to be all of that
My thoughts consumed that I’d be a writer
I wrote to forget
So as not to lose myself in the wash
I wrote to feel something
Then I wrote because it simply made me happy
Now here at a minute after midnight
I take a long drink of water
I ponder the past year and a half
And whisper thanks
To Bukowski
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