WE HOPE YOU all are pumped for a new week of “Poetry from the Gargoyle’s mouth” with a fresh theme and some great poems ahead.

We start this week with senior Erin Hayes reading “one thirty-six a.m.” by Charles Bukowski. This poem has two parts of awesome to it.

It’s awesome in part because it brings to life what it means to stay up into the wee hours of the night working. But, it’s also great because it discusses how writers feel about writing and how difficult or easy the process of writing is for some people.

You all know what it feels like to sit down to write an English essay and have the ideas running through your mind and the perfect words just sitting on the tip of your tongue. You also know what it’s like to struggle with every sentence you write, have nothing to write about, and to have a writer’s block the size of Mt. Everest.

So this week we thought we’d focus on writers, artists, poets, mapmakers, dancers, flint makers, wooden-ship builders, bird-cage makers, and the like and how they have written about their craft. Be sure to check back during this week for more great poetry that will hopefully get you to think about art, in the broadest sense of the word, and the process of making it.

“ONE THIRTY-SIX A.M.”
by Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

I laugh sometimes when I think about
say
Céline at a typewriter
or Dostoevsky …
or Hamsun …
ordinary men with feet, ears, eyes,
ordinary men with hair on their heads
sitting there typing words
while having difficulties with life
while being puzzled almost to madness.

Dostoevsky gets up
he leaves the machine to piss,
comes back
drinks a glass of milk and thinks about
the casino and
the roulette wheel.

Céline stops, gets up, walks to the
window, looks out, thinks, my last patient
died today, I won’t have to make any more
visits there.
when I saw him last
he paid his doctor bill;
it’s those who don't pay their bills,
they live on and on.
Céline walks back, sits down at the
machine
is still for a good two minutes
then begins to type.

Hamsun stands over his machine thinking,
I wonder if they are going to believe
all these things I write?
he sits down, begins to type.
he doesn’t know what a writer’s block
is:
he's a prolific son-of-a-bitch
damn near as magnificent as
the sun.
he types away.

and I laugh
not out loud
but all up and down these walls, these
dirty yellow and blue walls
my white cat asleep on the
table
hiding his eyes from the
light.

he’s not alone tonight
and neither am
I.

Like what you read? Click here for more poems by Charles Bukowski.