I've been attempting to do this with poetry and can't make it work. Maybe I should try this style instead. Thank you.

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Is this the intro -- interesting if it was intended...I think you shared an email with me regarding this angst in my poem. I liked the prose poem style for what I was trying to convey. maybe I needed to give it more time.....!! relationships are a lot like trying to write I guess.

I meant to say that the @font-face plucked my imagination in emoticon.
Can't do that with a typewriter -- I miss my typewriter at times....

I think this is really relate-able, especially for those of us who've been writing for a very long time. I think most of us have gone thru this- except maybe for Steven King who hasn't had a dry spell in 30 years, somehow. I myself spent a large chunk of my 20's in the block- from around 23-27. I've been writing since grade school (literally) so that was a fairly long block and I honestly just sort of gave up, fell into the 9-5 mentality that I just 'couldn't' juggle my job, my life, and writing too. It was the same story- the day job, the where is my 'voice' blues, the who am I and what am I years.
I also found the talk of becoming a cliché stimulating because it's something you see a lot with writers, especially young writers who haven't gotten comfortable in their own skin. I think it's a universal understanding that being a writer is not something you do, it's who you are. But so many people barrow the lifestyles of writers past and think that makes them a writer.
I remember years ago I met a young poet- we were both in our early 20's at the time- who had a lot of talent. But he was a living, breathing cliché. He was a huge Bukowski fan and lived his life as such- heavy alcoholism (naturally)and a lot of casual sex he didn't remember. Hell, he even made it a habit to bring home prostitutes and pay them just to talk to him, tell him about themselves. He claimed it was all research, naturally, but I couldn't help noticing he'd never written a single word about the hookers. He was so busy trying to live a writers life that he failed to realize the most crucial part-- Writing, learning, growing, and writing some more.

I guess the lifespan of a writer is really determined by the things you talk about here. Whether a person will grow in their craft and continue to write or quit, give up, let the day job and their own notions about who "a writer" is supposed to be swallow them up. This is that turning point that most of us face at some point or another, in some form or another.
The quality of talking to ones self in this piece was pretty neat too. Like 2 sides of the same person, one talking to the other and observing the loss but without the will to stop it... very creative and very authentic.

Bukowski with a dash of Henry Miller's self loathing perhaps?

Not sure how long I have left, but then none of us do, even the ones who are not actively sick with something. But the one thing that I taught myself, and that Buk later confirmed when I first started reading him, is that you have to LIVE life to write about it, and more importantly, if you don't LIVE it, you WASTE it, which is a far bigger crime. Look at a river, or a pond, or a lake: if they stagnate, they die. And make it part of your canon to NEVER believe "your press." It's okay for the rest of the world to think that you are the cat's pajamas, but not you. If you do, you've already got Papa's shotgun between your teeth.