Bukowski: "So You Want to be a Writer?"

Released in a posthumously published collection in 2003, the Bukowski poem  “So You Want to be a Writer?” (above) warns the reader:

if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.

Later, the poem continues:

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die
or it dies in you.

From Open Culture.  Here is more Bukowski from Open Culture:  A Reading of Charles Bukowski’s First Published Story, “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip” (1944)