then, too, there’s something else. In America, everybody’s supposed to be making it. if you don’t make it, that’s all right too—only play like you’re making it. riots are accidents. refuse to think. you know how it works. somebody will pass you on the sidewalk, say a neighbor, and he’ll say (sure, he will), “Good morning, nice day, isn’t it?” and you’re supposed to say, “yes, it is a nice day,” and that ends it. but if you say, “no, it isn’t a nice day,” or the answer to the other question (how are you today?) with “I don’t feel so good,” he will act as if struck across the face. you aren’t playing the game, and this is not just a little voice game, it extends all up and down and across through life. phonies, galore, phonies walking around under the same sun that makes roses, that makes wheat. now, I am not a mad seeker after TRUTH, god damn all that; but I can and do get a bellyful of phonies, and although I don’t care to machine gun them down I’d like to get away from them but I can’t because I must live with them, work in their factories, fuck their women and drink their booze and kick their dogs and eat their beans. about the only chance a punk like me has to say anything is on a piece of paper called a poem, someplace in between sleeping, eating, batting a woman off what’s left of your soul and turning a screw in a factory. so if it comes out as a scream sometimes it really is because the pinch is too tight, the Bastard keeps tightening the vise and smiling and you’re supposed to sing The Jelly Roll Blues or say a couple of Hail Marys, but it doesn’t work. we are dying inch by inch, being chopped-up and killed by the minute by the hour. I keep looking at that clock, doing the same dull things over and over and over again with my hands, looking at the clock, and doing the dull thing over and over much faster than I want to in order to keep up with production so I can keep my job and die some more, and I keep looking up at the clock, and I die a minute at a time…ALL THOSE MINUTES THAT I COULD BE SHIT SHIT USING FOR MYSELF!!!…never to be gotten back again, and all around me my fellow-workers laugh a continual hysterical almost female laughter while bragging on their virility as MEN!!!, or there’s the tough type full of hatred, nothing but hatred hatred and not even knowing why, swaggering to the latrine thinking he’s cool, cool, but what a face on this type of job—a kind of flat shiny deadness with 2 little piglet eyes peering out. and everybody TALKING TALKING about…nothing. sports lifts them. they can talk baseball all night, getting fighting mad, or insane, and still not knowing anything about the game. jabber, jabber; my hands moving, moving, the clock hands stuck like arrows in the wall. self-pity? why not? but if we could only do the job quietly without the neurotic jabbering, the fear, the lies, the back-stabbers, the swine, the slickers…and I watch the clock and it finally gets there, and if I am lucky they do not call one or 2 or 3 or 4 hours overtime. the only time I am free is driving from the job to where I live in the early a.m. all other times somebody is getting at me. so I get home (home? 2 rooms? a woman, man and child in the same bed?) (I want riches! I want to fuck Elizabeth Taylor’s maid!) so I get home and I can’t sleep, I can never sleep. I just lay there and listen to the woman and the kid snore. it’s beautiful. and I watch the light change from black to gray to red to orange to yellow and finally it’s morning and I still stay in bed like an invalid and about noon I go to sleep and about 4:30 p.m. I have to get up again and go to work. nuts? sure, I’m nuts. what do I care about sending kids off to school if the world does not fit around them? President Johnson looks like all the idiot and unfeeling men I’ve worked for and quit from and been fired from. bombs like walnuts on a row of trees. the clock, the clock, death riding me home in the car repeating the little dirty jokes of my fellow working man. and some x-whore operating a poetry magazine in the Midwest and giving me a lot of jazz about sparrows singing, the angels of God awakening her. if I don’t crash through with a poem now and then, I am finished. drink alone is not enough. staring at the ceiling is not enough. my little wooden cross. sure. and yours,