[To Douglas Blazek]

June 12, 1965

well, I gotta figure you aren’t dead but I’m drunk mainly…listening to Dos Passos on radio, my god, he sounds like an englishman! a fop! umm, ummm. they’ve gotten to him, he’s soft and sly and addled, christ, I mean he’s gone back on everything, if you know what I mean. I feel shame for him. his whole speech and thought garbled; here you are an unknown kid in Illinois with more clean and feel and real than a world-famous what????? god, life rakes the shit out of us! now I turn to a little dark Bach organ work, better. Bach was supposed to be a man of God but I always get the idea when listening to his organ works that the devil is talking to me, giving me the straight deal on what is—am I mad? hell yes, maybe so. [* * *]

so I write you a poem:

DRUNK AGAIN AND WONDER, WONDERING, AND SO SIMPLY

DETERRED THAT THE BUCKLE OF MY BELT SNAPS LIKE A FART

IN THIS FROZEN SNOW OF LIFE—

horsefeet down the window’s way

is it real? where am I hell,

drunk again? curtain like the

sadness of a Garbo film

or people climbing into lifeboats

in a shitty swine-like

effectual sea. old songs like

bats in the dark

kissing my nose.

the characters in Camus and

Genet (I guess a lot get into

Genet)

are almost

right—they hardly

try.

why?

it seems to me that

man is rising up to meet God

man is disgusted at last

disgusted

with his waste and

disgusted with God always being

Right—

it is time for man to be Right and

for Man to be the perfect image of Man.

God’s ways may be perfect and good

but for me

I’ve seen enough hurt

and if I am being tested beyond my reason

then what reason I have

can only resent this.

I remember much:

men in unemployment lines forever

good men

frightened and laughing and real

nothing wrong with them

hardly as much wrong as with those who were

sullenly and righteously

working.

I remember much:

old women living with me

who had once been beautiful

and who resented me because I was never

beautiful. God forgot

me.

in jail the last time there was a

blonde boy on the floor

laughing

holding his arm:

“I think my arm is broken. Christ,

they worked me over

but I know if I tell the judge I will only get more

days. I want to get

out.”

there it was. so much real seems never true

or thought of as true. they have a trick—

they hold us all down to

stone—

we presume that what we want is beyond us always

and that

as men we must eat turds and smile