Lewis Mumford said long ago that there wouldn’t be any atomic war. that we would only live under the shadow of fear for some decades, perhaps for the rest of the century.

how in the hell can Lewis Mumford say that? how does he know? as long as there isn’t an atomic war he sounds right. when one happens nobody will care whether he is right or not. [* * *]

[To Tom McNamara]

May sicks, 1965

writers are a sick-head lot, a gathering of neon-light tasters, spitting out their words, their absurdities, their bile, their orange-juice blood. we are down in submarines; we don’t know; a nervous nasty lot…

I’d rather sleep for 3 or 4 days than do anything, so what happens? I can’t sleep at all. I worry about motor tuneups and the death of sparrows. and all the women walking around and me not fucking them. then, sometimes I think I am too much topsoil, I want to get under, forget the toteboard and gambol with the worms (later, I know), so the other night I am wandering around at 4 in the morning and I pick up something by a Chinaman, 300 or 200 B.C., a couple of centuries after Confucius, and here’s this guy running around giving the word to Dukes and State Ministers and Kings, but it doesn’t reach me, I don’t have any armies or loyal subjects or disloyal subjects, only a matter of keeping myself alive another 15 or 20 years if I feel like it. more wasted time. now I’ve got a pain under the collarbone; I’ve been going a pack and a half but my pecker is hard when I awaken the few times I’ve slept. I am angry with white Spanish walls and sound of tires on the pavement. no, I don’t read much anymore—Donleavy, anybody. it’s a matter of the juices saying no, no, no. no. there’s simply no intake. if I power it down against the grain I am deader than I am now and that wd. be some horrible thing, ah.

I hear Lyle Stuart is going to charge $7.50 for Crucifix in a Deathhand, my new book of poems. It has expensive paper, format, plates of artwork and so on, but I can’t see anybody paying $7.50 for a book of poems, and he has 3,000 books of poems, and so I guess he’s going to have to stack them wall to wall and forget it. most of the people, I think, who might go my poems, most of them don’t even have $7.50 and if they did they’d prob. buy something to drink. well, I write the stuff and what they do with it is theirs. the paper is supposed to last 800 years or 1800 years I forget which and I don’t know, except one bomb or bad poetry will take care of all that.