[To Steven Richmond]

June 11, 1965

[* * *] I don’t mix too well with people, I am now so old and have this old woman too and we have gotten this unexpected child, and she’s art, I love her every bone, but it’s all kind of foolish, I am almost done, tired, and I just don’t know what to say to young men, I am not a talker, Webb found that out when I went South, I just sat on a chair, and a couple of profs came down from the University and yammering and I couldn’t say anything, shit, I felt foolish dumb and in many ways am, they were so bright, they came up with a lot of jazz and action and life and I liked them but I could contribute nothing, too many factories, too many drunk tanks, too many women, too many years, too many park benches, too much everything, and that is why I do not invite you over, you’d think I was stale or cheese or freezing you. really, hell, there’s nothing to say. I guess I’m what is known in the terminology as a “loner.” even at work I catch it. old man walks up to me on coffee break. I am sitting on a truck in corner, dark corner, while they talk baseball and so forth, and he walks up:

you mind, he says, if I ask you something?

no, I answer.

you’re kind of exclusive, aren’t you?

yeah.

I mean, you don’t mix with people.

I guess not.

you don’t like people, do you?

most of them I don’t.

you’re anti-social then.

I suppose I am.

You’re miserable! he screamed at me and his face, as they say, contorted, almost tears and he walked away.

Steve, that I’ve gotten a couple of books published has nothing to do with it. I could now get broad and easy imagining that I have scope or some damn thing. it won’t work. I’ve never felt good with the crowd and it started in grammar school, I sensed that they touched each other, understood each other, but that I did not belong. and now, 45 years old, I find I still do not belong, fuck dramatics, but the worst part is that I do not even belong with the best ones, the living ones, I seem sliced off forever by some god damn trick, either my imagining or some type of insanity, but even the good ones leave me dangling and I feel like a fool, and I know that I am a fool for I feel what I know, and my ex-wife used to get mad at me because I laughed at my stupidity and my mistakes, and this is not well: laughing when you fall and she quickly got rid of me when the man did not seem as good to her as the poems, and yet she must have read the poems wrong for the man and the poem were the same thing. so she took her million dollars and married an eskimo. god fuck that. [* * *]