some kid in New Orleans tells me you wrote him a personal note and said you’d send your Horse on into him. you don’t know what this means to the kids, al. it can keep them going a couple of years, it can keep the factories and the whores from killing them. but I guess it’ll get them anyway. [* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

Sometime, 1965

oh my god blaz, I write you because I believe you are the only person who’ll understand but the agony is almost too much it’s standing on all four legs—my god my god, there I go, being literary—I want to kill myself so badly but there is no suitable instrument so I keep drinking and wishing—a gun a gun a god damned sweet GUN—wham!—it’s over. I mean, baby, I am sitting here with a toothache that is reaming the life out of me, and it’s not just the pain, it’s everything, it’s this pain on top of all the pains!!—I was writing a poem last night and what happen? I am perfectly content drinking, pounding out my silliness, and then what the shit??? the landlady comes down and she and her husband want to get drunk with me again, they get their kicks that way, I say things that bring them to life, fine, fine, and so I chop the head off the poem and go on down there, and I know what it’s going to be, he puts on his recording of Oklahoma and we all sing, me with a forged frog in my throat, and I say, look, don’t you have Guys and Dolls? I am a guys and dolls man, I am a loser from way back, I like to hear them songs. of course, he don’t got Guys and Dolls he got Oklahoma so we sing Oklahoma until the very tired frog dies and swims in my dead brain. so the old lady finally comes down with the kid and I’ve got an excuse to leave. o.k., so I wake up this morning with this tooth reaming the shit out of me, it still is, sweet baby, but somehow writing you it seems like you can feel my fucking pain and that makes it less. I almost laugh & sometimes I think you are the only living American human being, Blaz I’m nothing, all the poetry I’ve written is swill, I hurt all over, and it’s just not the tooth. now fucking rain dripping down like hemorrhage of my brain and my elbows and knees busted and bloody now from falling down in the streets gaging plunging 2 nights ago, naked albatross of hell, me, falling again and again, until all blood blood, nose blood toes blood, I don’t understand anything, anything, look look, now I wake up this morning and I ask the woman, I tell the woman, OH MOTHER OF GOD THIS TOOTH IS FUCKING THE SHIT OUT OF ME!! I NEVER KNEW PAIN COULD BE SO PAINFUL AND SO CONSTANT!! (I should have remembered from other bad days) and I said look, do we have any aspirin or anything around??