Bukowski means a lot to me. I first discovered him when I was 16 or 17 (and read Post Office first, of course) and he impressed the shit out of me. Compared with the German authors I was reading at the time, he was a giant. A dead giant, but still he was someone who had dared to write about drinking, fucking and loosing with all its bleak reality – no other author I read before had dared to do so. I read his words and poems in their German translation first, so after a time he became a bit boring. To be honest, some of his poems are crap. Some of his stories even more. So for a couple of years I stopped reading Buk, until I started reading English books more often. And decided to give his stuff another go. And what an epiphany it was: whereas in the German translation it was merely the story and the setting that fascinated me, in the English original his simple words really hit it home. All the depravity, loneliness, boredom of our meager existence on this planet captured in a few words, knitted together to form poems and stories without real structure and rhyme.

And another great thing about this dirty old man: even though he must have known that some of his stuff was crap, this never stopped him from publishing more and more. I think this is a thing that every writer and blogger should realize: don’t waste your time sitting there starring at the screen, trying to come up with that one text/book/post, put. Stuff. Out. There. You’ll get better along the way.

Maybe this is why I had the last lines of “How is your heart” inked into my skin. Anyway, here are some words to make you sad.

For Jane

what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

image via.