I like your photo and will send you one of mine if I can steal a WANTED ad from the local post office. you look like a rough baby, kid, and I’d hate to meet you coming down any dark (or light) alley. but actually, in the 50’s and 60’s a different type of poet has evolved through the dense brutality of our age. we’ve had to be tough enough to live and at the same time to save the soul. the university boys are merely soft and tricky and clever but they don’t know even what a wall looks like or a cat or a fish or a landlord or a policeman or a blade of grass, unless they attempt to imagine these things and they do attempt, and, of course, the mockery of our age is that these safe and clever and dead men are published everywhere. this is why the audience for poetry is so small—the masses know that most of it is fake—has nothing to do with lives, their or anyone’s, has nothing to do with Life. [* * *]

[To Steven Richmond]

February 2, 1966

[* * *] LSD, yeah, the big parade—everybody’s doin’ it now. take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. what a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me. All the death does not lie lay ly with the academics or the poetry workshops or the pawnbrokers…[* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

February 3, 1966

[* * *] our boy MacNamara has quit his job and now I seem to get a letter a day from him. that’s nice. nice and frightening. I don’t know quite what to say, finally. I mean, the thing can get kind of religious. but whatdy you do when ya lose yore bible?

I guess I told you the woman and I split, she has the girl with her. finally it was her poetry workshop and church group that turned my gut. christ, you know I work nights, and after being pissed all over with the overtime bit, take me hours to fall asleep and then I’d be awakened by the shits giggling and making dull jokes in the other room. they just can’t get together enough and talk talk talk, and, baby, complaint is bad, I guess, but if you could only see the look of them, the flat cardboard soul stink of them, maybe you’d know. if they had only had the decency to wait until I was at work…to discuss their freedom marches, peace marches, civil rights bits, poetry readings…how can you be made sick even by cardboard people who seem to want to do everything right? ah, christ, sometimes I think I am crazy! maybe it was simply that they were FORMULA people, even down in the shitpit where I dragged my ass to work I found a people more real and even they were nothing, but still a relief in comparison. there wasn’t any argument; don’t ever remember cussing her gang, although might have done so while drunk. now she has them and I have me and we can all die separately. [* * *]