there is a poet-novelist who said, “Bukowski worries about his soul.” this is too pat of course and puts em in a neat box. but I have packed the meat on my shoulder and have seen the threads come out of statues. I don’t need a soul; all I need is a light bulb, some beer and a chair to sit in. but some want to take that from me. now I have been shipped the poet-novelist’s latest book of poems and I am supposed to review the bit for a mag. I don’t know what to do. it looks very much as if my friend has not worried about his soul. christ, how we snipe! should I shoot him down? we are all a bunch of bitches. dying is often a slow process. why rack a man because his poems have started to fail anymore than rack a man because his eyesight is failing or his teeth falling out or his pecker failing to get hard? we gotta have a winner, what? yet, in another sense, there are some men who sell too easy; one second a man is his brother’s keeper and the next second he is Brutus. [* * *] then too, you might figure it this way: a real man is gonna lose his teeth his hair and his balls long before the soul??? it is confusing. yet I keep looking at faces, I keep watching ways things are done. I’m no Virgin. I’ve rolled and been rolled and yet, in a certain sense, there is just so far that you ought to go, just so much that you should do. I don’t speak of morality and code—that jazz has held the world back too long. I speak of simple things, although I can’t say just what they are but you know them when they come upon you. Genet’s seeming immorality and depravity are nothing of the sort. because he is neither depraved nor immoral toward himself. he does what is proper toward himself. the greatest immorality is going for gold against the grain of yourself when you don’t need the gold, the possession—like taping dead oranges on an orange tree. of course, most of us figure we need some of the gold. there’s always an excuse to die: the wife, the baby, the girlfriends; there is always an excuse to go to the cowardice that most men are naturally inherent to because his father was inherent to it and his father’s father etc. there’s always an excuse to be a prick. it even seems clever. graft. babes with long legs and tights pussies. new cars. then often immorality and immortality lock legs and you’ve got jism all over the bed. Oxford. grants. lectures, poetry readings. mouth, mouth, mouth. we are sucked forever into the traps. I’ve always found the face and the ways and the honesty of a ditch digger more alive than any English prof. of course, nowadays even the ditch diggers are getting sophisticated. trouble everywhere. what am I saying? I’ve lost the string. good. good, then. [* * *]