but look here, how can you find things out, feel things, even have a chance to yawn or look at the wallpaper if your jaws are going all the time? I guess we all feel badly enough and I have felt plenty of times like going to bed and crying for a week (Hemingway is far from my ideal, or, at the other end, Camus either) but what I felt like crying about I was not certain—it could not be worded or spoken, not over a telephone or not even to myself exactly, and maybe that’s the reasons for this fucking thing called Art, Creation, whatever, sometimes we hang it in just RIGHT—we get it all, the dizzy broads on the phones, the flunky fired from his shithouse job, the guys like me wanting to cry in bed, the cat run over, the empty beer cans, me writing a letter to you and me being ½ nuts with old airplanes running through my brain, ah. [* * *]

[To Steven Richmond]

February, 1966

[* * *] yes, the sickheads will think Earth is another dirty mag. they do not realize that the cuss word is used only as explosion of fury-agony when nothing else fits that space. but you are still a good enough human to tell a real poem from an unreal one, and I think that Earth one, #1, was right in there, right up there, alive and burning, as good as Ole and Wormwood, maybe better. you got rights to be proud of your baby, baby. and that damn cunt in Sacramento who wrote me that Earth was shit, she still writes me as if all were sweet. I have not answered. the Promethean Lamp made me heave and I threw it into the trash but I did not bother to get highly vindictive with the editors, to show them my hot prong because I figured they were dead anyway and that in the machinery of the human affair such things as the Lamp were expected in my nightmares. yet these sisters who sit at home in their gardens and piddle with poetry while their husbands are out there being chewed-up by the world, these piss-pure sisters have always got to let us know what they think they think from inside their sea-dead skulls. fuck em. I want to congratulate you sweetheart on putting out one of the most vibrant bouncing searing jumping living of the littles and I am honored and proud and scared and sick-dizzy that I had a poem or something for you that you could use. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

February 28, 1966