this is an indrawn and particularly kind of cotton and waiting time, faucet dripping, something on the radio 200 years old, the teeth falling out of my head, horns honking, children pissing down their legs in a May afternoon, and below us pipes underground passing the shit to the sea, and the morgues stuffed, men in stained neckties selling ass, more books on Kennedy, myself barely feeling it out—the flailing, the words, the trees, the whores, the ways, Time battering like a tough fullback &, Ace, I do not mean the magazine. smoking cigars and dreaming of Mata Hari. ducking under sparrow droppings. I saw a lizard yesterday. also read a quotation by E. E. Cummings in the newspaper yesterday that I didn’t like. all in all, you gotta figure a newspaper is a bad buy because it can make you terribly unhappy and you even have to pay a dime to get that way. Berlioz. somebody writes and asks if I want to read somewhere. I have to tell him no. it’s true I don’t want to. snails don’t do much for me. I have these pains in my shoulders, neck, back, and I walk as if I were mortar. topside. only the tigerlegs kid with the moth-soul. when it rains I cry like Mortons’ salt.

you keep it going. we all end as turds yet let’s make them WORK for it.

the Spanish troops passed down the streets today their bayonets like whitened teeth and I burned the tablecloth, a picture of Herbert Hoover and a crossword puzzle of Asia. [* * *]

[To Ann Menebroker]

[May 27,] 1965

[* * *] yes, the phone call time was a good time and an odd time, a very odd time, and I am always very close to leaping but then was a very most close time, and I’ll always remember your clear and water-cool voice, you voice sheen blue and easy and clean saying “hello, Buk.” once when I had just gotten out of jail, had just opened the door—the phone rang—“hello, Buk.” It was very good.

and now I get up like an elephant of a man, I have been drinking beer, I am going to piss, gross, gross.

the life hangs with us. it’s not easy. you and I, we work with words but the words are like bricks stones turds clay turtle shells fucked out by sand, what have you? I can’t be generous with myself. I’ve felt better giving a bum 25 cents, I’ve felt better being a bum sleeping on a park bench with my youth yowling over my angry and demented bones than I ever have felt writing a poem. what is it? nothing can please us. we are in a somewhat fine cage. you know this. christ is not the only bastard who was ever nailed to the wood. or bastardess. I include you in. I think as time goes on, the female more and more is beginning to inherit the reality and knowingness of our state of being—which is sadly almost zero. but please keep writing your poems. I think it is something about our Age—that men no longer speak so very well. they are frightened to show any more than muscle. ugg. muscle, I have. but muscle isn’t going to show us through the bomb or through ourselves. I don’t mean to intend a religious yammering or fear of fire. I think if D. H. Lawrence were here now he’d sense some of this—what I would call “unmanliness,” shits, look, it goes up and down but if we want to save it it’s going to take all humans to save it, and if it’s not worth saving (and maybe that’s it?) nothing will save it. [* * *]