Yesterday, my second floor apartment was hot, the sweat poured out of me. A good reason to go to a movie.

Met Carla at the Avanti Cafe, and then we went to the Music Box Theater to see 'Bukowski: Born into This.' A great documentary of a great man and writer. Can poetry, can art, transform a man's life? Yes it can. Bukowski is a supreme example.

As a child, he lived in a kind of hell, his father beat him every day from the age of 6 until 12. Bukowski said his father was his first 'literary teacher.' Lesson learned: there is a world of unreasonable, unearned, pain. In response, no pretense, words must not be wasted.

Later, Bukowski wandered, from flophouse to flophouse, from job to job. He was a man with no money, no connections. His one steady job: he worked for the Post Office for 15 years. No matter what or where he was, he wrote, every day, like a man possessed. Poetry, short stories. Hundreds, thousands.

Many years passed, and finally in L.A. he began to be publised. He established himself in a street paper called, Open City and later the L.A. Free Press; his weekly column, 'Notes of a Dirty Old Man.'

Bukowski had all the vices: writing, women, the horse track, drinking. All of these vices had their attractions. Writing was the one that allowed Bukowski to show his humanity, his humour, his hard-boiledness. He won over a generation of readers with novels, short stories and poems. He gained the world, by pouring himself onto little sheets of white paper.

He was a scarred, wounded soul, but ultimately, he wore his wounds, his scars, like emblems of his art. Write a poem, save a life.