Bukowski Filled My Glass But Drank Me Dry

Stop it! Why are you flicking my ear repeatedly? It's irritating. 
Alcohol...it might be a lot like sex— well, I read a statistic once (don't know if it's true) that 90% of the population enjoys it and that those in that bracket are made comfortable by the 10% that does not.
The following is a paraphrase: Oscar Wilde said Drink is the curse of the writing class.
Anais Nin is quoted as saying, "I have a strong sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day."
But, it was Charles Bukowski who is quoted as saying, “Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn. I guess I’ve lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”

©Bukowski Filled My Glass But Drank Me Dry

Mimi Wolske

All Rights Reserved

I wince at the gaping wounds in my poem;

Frazzled weft of useless words is frayed

Surrealistically away from the warp of worthless thought.

Tramping on the escalator to nowhere in this

World of poetic profiling, I sat at the

Table of prolific drunks; Buowski

Filled my glass with fermented blank verse,

Praised one page of my hieroglyphic ink,

Featured my brain waves in a quick,

Spirit-rupturing work in response—

He drank me dry and threw kisses of sarcasm

before grabbing himself and shaking it at others.

There’s truth in some of what poets write.

Below is a rare video of Bukowski's last poetry reading -- The Last Straw.