There’s a photograph somewhere…probably lost now, buried under decades of shit and cigarette ash…of Charles Bukowski sitting at his typewriter, beer in hand, face like a road map of bad decisions. He looks fucking miserable. And completely free.
That’s the contradiction nobody wants to talk about when they start bleating on about “freedom of speech” like it’s some polished trophy you put on a mantelpiece. Real freedom…the kind that actually matters…is ugly. It smells bad. It makes people uncomfortable at dinner parties.
Bukowski understood this. The bastard drunk understood it better than any politician or academic ever could.
The Sanitised Graveyard
We live in an age where everyone claims to champion free expression, but what they really want is acceptable expression. The kind that’s been through the washing machine a few times. The kind that won’t upset anyone’s grandmother or get you unfollowed on social media.
I see it everywhere. In the newsletters that read like they’ve been focus-grouped to death. In the blog posts that say absolutely nothing, because saying something might be dangerous. In the books that could’ve been emails, and the emails that should’ve been deleted.
Everyone’s so bloody terrified of offending someone, of being misunderstood, of not fitting the algorithm’s idea of “engaging content,” that they’ve stopped saying anything real at all.
And here’s the thing that would’ve made Bukowski laugh into his whiskey: we call this progress.
The Typewriter Doesn’t Lie
Bukowski wrote about gambling, drinking, fucking, working soul-crushing jobs at the post office. He wrote about loneliness and rage and the small, terrible moments that make up most of human existence. He wrote badly sometimes. He repeated himself. He was crude and offensive and probably shouldn’t be anyone’s role model.
But Christ, he was honest.
That’s the power of the written word when you’re not trying to sanitise it, when you’re not running it past your internal marketing team or wondering if it’ll play well with your target demographic. When you’re just bleeding onto the page because that’s what writers actually do when they’re not pretending to be content creators.
The typewriter doesn’t lie. The blank page doesn’t care about your brand positioning. The words either mean something or they don’t.
And in our current hellscape of “thought leadership” and “personal branding” and “authentic storytelling” (which is almost never actually authentic), we’ve forgotten what it means to just tell the fucking truth.
Freedom’s Uncomfortable Bed
Real freedom of speech isn’t comfortable. It means tolerating things that make your skin crawl. It means letting people be wrong, be stupid, be offensive. It means occasionally reading something that makes you want to throw your laptop across the room.
Bukowski wrote poems that would get him cancelled faster than you can say “problematic.” But he also wrote about the human condition with more clarity than most writers manage in their entire sanitised careers.
That’s the trade-off nobody wants to acknowledge. You can have speech that’s safe, controlled, and utterly meaningless. Or you can have speech that’s dangerous, offensive, and occasionally transcendent.
You can’t have both.
I’m not saying we should all aspire to be alcoholic misanthropes (though some days it’s tempting). I’m saying that when we start deciding whose voice gets heard based on how palatable it is, we’re not protecting anyone. We’re just building a prettier prison.
The Writer’s Rebellion
Here’s what Bukowski knew that most writers have forgotten: the act of writing honestly is itself an act of rebellion.
Not rebellion for its own sake…that’s just posturing, another form of performance. But rebellion against the forces that want to smooth out every rough edge, that want to turn every piece of writing into something “shareable” and “on-brand.”
When I sit down to write, I’m constantly fighting against the voice that says, “Make it nicer. Make it softer. Don’t say that bit…someone might be offended. Add more dot points. Make it scannable. Think about SEO.”
That voice is the enemy of truth. It’s the enemy of anything worth reading.
The power of the written word isn’t in its ability to please everyone. It’s in its ability to say the thing that hasn’t been said, to articulate the feeling that everyone’s had but nobody’s named, to tell the truth that everyone else is dancing around.
What We’re Losing
Walk into any bookshop…if you can find one that hasn’t been turned into a coffee shop…and you’ll see shelf after shelf of books that all sound the same. Same voice. Same structure. Same careful avoidance of anything that might actually matter.
The memoir that’s “inspiring” but never truly vulnerable. The business book that’s “disruptive” but follows the exact same formula as every other business book. The novel that’s been workshopped into oblivion until there’s nothing left but competent prose saying nothing at all.
We’re drowning in content and starving for meaning.
And the tragedy is that we’re doing this to ourselves. Nobody’s forcing us to sand down every rough edge. We’re choosing to. Because rough edges don’t get book deals. They don’t go viral. They don’t build followings.
Except when they do.
Because deep down, people are fucking desperate for something real. They’re tired of the performance. They’re tired of the careful positioning and the strategic vulnerability and the “authentic” content that’s anything but.
They want the Bukowski sitting at his typewriter, making terrible decisions and telling the truth anyway.
The Unpolished Word
This is where it gets uncomfortable, because I’m not advocating for cruelty masquerading as honesty. I’m not saying “be an arsehole and call it authenticity.”
What I’m saying is this: the most powerful thing you can do as a writer is trust your reader enough to tell them the truth. Not the polished version. Not the version that makes you look good. The version that’s messy and contradictory and sometimes makes you look like an idiot.
The version that sounds like an actual human wrote it, not an algorithm optimising for engagement.
Bukowski was a bastard, but he never pretended to be anything else. He never tried to inspire you or motivate you or sell you a course on “Writing Your Truth in 30 Days.” He just sat at his typewriter and bled.
And decades later, people are still reading.
What Freedom Actually Costs
Here’s what nobody tells you about freedom of speech: it’s expensive. Not in money, but in comfort. In certainty. In the pleasant fiction that if we just control the conversation carefully enough, we can eliminate all harm.
You can’t.
What you can do is create a world where the messy, uncomfortable, occasionally offensive truth is allowed to exist alongside everything else. Where writers can take risks. Where readers can be trusted to think for themselves.
Where the bastard at the typewriter, beer in hand and face like a warning sign, is allowed to do his work.
Because that work matters. Not because it’s always right or always moral or always pleasant to read. But because it’s real. And in a world drowning in carefully crafted bullshit, real is revolutionary.
The Choice We Make
Every time you sit down to write, you make a choice.
You can write what you think people want to hear. You can polish and perfect and position until there’s nothing left but a shiny surface reflecting nothing.
Or you can write like it matters. Like someone’s actually going to read it. Like the words on the page might actually mean something beyond clicks and shares and algorithmic approval.
Bukowski chose the latter. And it cost him. It cost him respectability, stability, and probably years off his life. But it gave him something else: a voice that couldn’t be ignored. Words that still punch you in the gut decades after they were written.
That’s the power we’re giving up when we sanitise everything. When we make freedom of speech contingent on speech being nice. When we turn writing into content and content into nothing at all.
The Bastard’s Legacy
I think about that photograph sometimes. Bukowski at his typewriter, looking miserable and free.
He never wrote an article about “10 Tips for Authentic Writing.” He never started a newsletter about “Building Your Creative Practice.” He never optimised anything for search engines or worried about his personal brand.
He just wrote. Badly sometimes. Brilliantly, other times. Always honestly.
And that…that raw, unpolished, sometimes offensive honesty…is what we’re so desperately missing now. In our writing. In our discourse. In our careful, curated, utterly meaningless conversations about freedom.
Real freedom is uncomfortable. Real writing is messy. Real truth makes people angry.
But it’s the only thing worth fighting for. The only thing worth reading. The only thing that lasts.
Everything else is just noise, carefully optimised for nobody to actually hear.
So write badly if you have to. Write offensively. Write the thing that makes you nervous to publish. But for God’s sake, write something real. The bastards at their typewriters are counting on you.
Until Next Time
Discover more from Dominus Owen Markham
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.