I've Been Out Drinking With Bukowski, Again

One NonProfit, 12 months, and 6,000 Subscribers Later...

A year ago this week, I posted my first poem here—I’ve Been Out Drinking With Bukowski, Again—without much of a plan beyond the need to put something honest into the world. I didn’t know who would read it, or whether anyone would stay. I only knew the voice felt true, and that felt like enough to begin.

Fifty-two weeks later, this space has grown into something I could not have predicted: more than 6,000 of you reading alongside me; a body of work taking shape in public; the founding of Ink & Ribbon Press as a nonprofit press devoted to poetry and permanence; a year marked by risk, discipline, generosity, and the slow, quiet accumulation of trust.

Looking back, that first poem already contained the questions that have carried me through this year - about success, doubt, mortality, and the strange relief of admitting we don’t have answers.

So today, rather than rush forward, I want to return to the beginning. To reread that first poem not as an origin myth, but as a mirror. Because in many ways, I am still asking the same questions. The difference now is that I’m asking them in company.

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I’ve Been Out Drinking With Bukowski, Again.

I’m uncertain
if success
really means all that much
whether
the removal of doubt
would change
me.

Consciousness dilated:
white, white,
pure white.

I’m uncertain
if death
really means all that much
whether
the removal of thought
would change
me.

Consciousness dilated:
white, white,
pure white.

I’ve been out drinking with Bukowski, again.
It’s been a while old friend.

There is one certainty we agreed upon:
success and death,
my love,
are nothing more
than pretty words.

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