The Iron Gates of Writer's Block

8 Count   [C. Bukowski]

from my bed I watch 3 birds on a telephone wire. one flies off. then another. one is left, then it too is gone. my typewriter is tombstone still. and I am reduced to bird watching. just thought I’d let you know, fucker.  Charles Bukowski precisely articulates the anguish of writer's block. It's funny, isn't it? How the lack of words is so perfectly put into words by a poet great.  We've all be gutted of creativity at one point in our lives. Perhaps you, personally, don't write on a daily basis now (most of us don't), but surely you can think back to a moment wherein your mind shut its iron gates around the pool of your vocabulary, trifling it, severing you from the medium that is the sole provider of meaning in life. After all, without language there is no meaning (thanks dad!). Well... I'm there. The iron gates cranked closed right after my father left the island.  The blog silenced. And then, trolling through my Facebook notifications this morning, I read a post from my mother.  What? It's Sunday and I don't have a new blog to read?  The post was subsequently 'liked' by her colleague. Perhaps it was the jolt I needed to seek the keys to reverse the block. My father introduced me to this poem in 2007.  I was a junior in college, staring at a Microsoft office document on my computer screen. Words littered the page, but they were trite, stale, obsolescent. The iron gates closed around the bridge between my language and my feverishly typing fingers. The assignment, a creative non-fiction piece, bobbed tirelessly with the current of time that dried up at the due date less than twelve hours from that moment. I was fucked.  My assignment was certainly far from passable. My peer feedback and revision suggestions from my professor were like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, pointing in opposite directions. I hated my story. I hated the edits. The revision process loomed over me, daunting and ominous. Panicked, sobbing, exhausted, I called my father at eleven-thirty. He was teaching a night class that semester, so he was just arriving home. I gushed my pathetic story through the phone. There was a pause when I finished. Through syncopated air gulps, I waited for his response, hoping it was a magical solution, an easy fix.  "Mia," he said. "Send me the paper; I'll get back to you in an hour." Twenty minutes later, my email notification dinged with his response: Mia: There are no such thing as good writers. Only good rewriters.  Love, Dad ATTACHMENT: CBUKOWSKI8COUNT What? I remember feeling like the kid from A Christmas Story when he opens his writing theme to find his teacher gave him a C+ on the assignment with the heed of warning that he'll shoot his eye out. A cryptic message from my father with an email attachment that most certainly was not my paper. Defeated, I opened the attachment wherein I first read "8 Count" by Charles Bukowski. Needless to say, I finished the assignment. I don't remember how, nor do I remember the grade I earned, though I can assure you that it was a passing grade. Sometimes, we just need a moratorium. We need to not panic when we feel the iron gates shutting, but rather calmly remember where we left the key to lift them back up.  Bukowski's poem is my key. Why I forget this? I'm not quite sure. But here it is. The gates are open again. Just thought I'd like you know, fucker.