we’ve got to live with loss like we used to

maybe still do

live with a bad

whore

but

we know all along what it is

we take is standing like Hemingway

or we dismiss it like

Camus

but we know

about it

this is the way it works and

we wind our clocks and we

wait on

midnight or the carnival

a hamburger sandwich or the

garbage man.

we live with it we live until we

die.

how’s that for hot shit? I throw in free poems that will never be used. I am a truly tough spit baby crying outa a blinkin’ blinking eye thing. [* * *]

Want-ling must have requested some quotable aphorisms.

[To William Want-ling]

November 11, 1965

They beat you down with their factories, their booze, their women until you are no longer of any use to them or yourself.

—Bukowski

The trouble with women is that in creating new men they tend to destroy old ones, and you and I know that women are not very good artists.

—Bukowski, again.

[* * *]

I have never met a man that I have truly liked. I have met men that I would drink with, laugh with, fight for—but only in a manner of hope instead of reality.

—B.

I only loved one woman and, unlike all the others, she was the only one who never demanded or asked for the spoken word of it. and even over her grave I said nothing, not even in my head, but the sunlight knew and my shoelaces and [illegible].