I don’t know the actualities. maybe a big name publisher, maybe just shit smeared onto toilet paper with fingernails. but when I wrote you I felt you, the sound and realness of you, the you you you, myself directing the arrow the heart the crooked music of what was left after the factory the racetrack whatever whatever. I can’t feel you’ll let me down; I can’t feel you’ve grown that dead. if it’s only money money, my god, I’ll try to send you a little each day each week each month; whatever I have.

I ask you out of whatever is left of my soul, out of what tiny bit of gentility and mirror of a sweat shot of sun I have left, please send in your letters and you’ll be received where you should be received: where I met you, say, peeling an orange and talking about Picasso, anything, guts, spirals, pawnshop brokers, rain, almost love, broken doors, donkeys without names. I guess I must sound like a cock-sucking preacher. I am tired. I only want all the parts to be all the parts like the river running after the 6 horse. I can’t say anymore. your move and the night grows dank with the sweat of violets pimping.

love, ya ya ya.

[To William Want-ling]

[Early October 1965]

thanks for the Dos thing, I will comb it like I did the same central caves of the novel, only what bothered me about Brothers [Karamazov] was this unreal division of the brothers into those cast types like chessmen, each with his own move. a wonderful diveboard for stunting but I wonder about the critics who rate the Brothers Dos’s #1 work. Crime seemed the more evil and normal and natural work. I think that Dos wanted to say a lot more than he did in Crime & but lost his guts, his nerve and his senses. a great novel, still. and since I haven’t written a nearby companion piece I had better shut up. [* * *]

it is 5 a.m. as I write this yet the woman snores over and through Mozart. I cannot help thinking that snoring is an infirmity of the soul, a true voice speaking through sleep. my father was the most vile beast I ever met and he snored louder and with more ugliness than anybody I have ever heard. [* * *]

I was never good with the women, never really tried to be, couldn’t get my back up to go through the prelims, the fake talk. it cost me too much. then, too, a kind of withered pride. they all looked kind of pukey to me, even those the boys called “fine.” too much battle. I settled for the old ones. those nobody wanted. a fifth on the dresser, a little talk, a kind of dead fuck (tho, not always), then more drink, more easy talk and then another fuck. but not much strain or pretense. kind of a wearisomeness. I just just can’t pay the price of tight new pussy, and won’t, it’s too high. always was. for me. [* * *] but it’s all shit in pink drawers and squatting to piss, finally. [* * *]