[To Douglas Blazek]

March 1, 1966

I enter the Queen of Angels hospital tomorrow. dear doctor wants to probe a bit more tomorrow a.m. to see if he can find anymore worse, but so far just surgery for hemorrhoids which have gotten so damned bad I can’t function anymore. I am hoping, of course, that he doesn’t find any dirty words like “cancer.” anyhow, if you don’t hear from me in some time you will know that I am sparring around a few rounds…and if you don’t hear from me at all, finally, you’ll know I lost the damn fight. This would be a time, I’d think, when I should be sitting down and pounding out immortal poems…anything I haven’t said, anything that I should say. but I am disinterested. no desire at all. I believe Webb is pissed at me because I cannot make trip—I promised—to come down and cut more tape. But he gets so tied in his projects that he doesn’t realize that things can happen to people. I mailed him 3 tapes yesterday, old ones, and now the machine is dead…the sea rolls in. [* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

March 8, 1966

back, still stupid with spinals, knives, shots, people, gowns, noise, stink, the o big ass load of pain, hurrah, I am sitting here (barely) on a fat red pillow trying to make my mind think down to the keys…not much luck. I feel rather upside-down. get up continually and go to can and there are little snake turds without eyes, cut somewhat like death, and each bowel movement about a childbirth, gripping elbows, saying, “wwoowoo! sweet son of a bitch, mother, sing to me, sing to me!!” that shit sliding past the incisions of 15 years’ worth of hemorrhoids and distorted intestine chopped loose…. when you think about poem, poems, or stories, about this time, all that doesn’t make much sense. I’m afraid the poem has never quite come up to the actuality and certainly hasn’t solved it, althought I don’t suggest we throw our rusty guns away.

[* * *] managed to get out to old ’57 Plymouth and start it last night, let it run, and so that’s still alive. I was laying flat on my ass in the dark of night, moaning, my foot on the accelerator, charging the fucking thing. 2 old women came by and stared at me laying in there, they thought I was nuts, but strangely strangely I didn’t even care what they thought. I stared at their moth-dry, white-pigment, chalky, room-for-rent, casket faces; their bodies like sticks of hardened shit, even the moonlight seeming to vomit away from them…it didn’t matter, and they moved on creaking and chirping nothings of waste. to think, they might even once have been half-decent fucks, but now more stupid than armies, less clean than dirt. anyhow, I think the car is ready to go, and with a little time, I am going to be around some more, as indecent and imperfect and vulgar as ever. you think you can remove this old German-Polack like a bathtub ring? hah, they gotta rub me harder than that! [* * *]