“What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”
— Charles Bukowski
Title poem of his posthumous 1999 collection, written in his final years in San Pedro while battling leukemia and reflecting on a life of hard labor and drinking.
I worked the post office for eleven years, dying slow under fluorescent lights. I was forty-nine when I quit with nothing but a typewriter and rent due. I drank, I bled on the page, I kept going. Nobody hands you a clean life. The fire comes anyway. You don't dodge it. You walk. That's the whole thing.