[* * *] still down with this flu or whatever it is and couldn’t get to work again tonight. maybe keeping this flu is deliberate? do you think that going down to the liquor store in my bare feet is lengthening the case? or sitting up in that cold grandstand watching them run? I sit way in back by myself and they’ve got 40 sparrow ups there in the eaves, singing, chirping, shitting, but they have, so far, been very nice and have not shit on me. found a dead one on the pavement other day. didn’t know what to do. couldn’t touch it. couldn’t move away. just sat there looking at the dead bird and feeling very sad for it, for everything, the works, and kept telling myself, you shouldn’t you shouldn’t, that’s the mathematics of it, you ought to know by now. but that god damned bird hung in the center of my mind and I missed a couple of good plays. went down and had a couple of drinks, looked at some of the flaxy piss-dead women and drove on in. 25,000 people at the track and they had to show only me the sparrow. tough shit.

[To William Want-ling]

January 28, 1966

[* * *] you know, baby, I think that the cleansers are the jails and the hospitals and the new whores, and without these Time seems to take it in the choppers—as waste. I think that unless a man is in constant realignment with himself he must die. the women might be good to us and actually love us as we trot off to our factories with our little gay lunch-buckets but that’s because they are not dumb. they know that we walk into and are chewed by the very teeth of death, for they see us when we leave and they see us WHEN WE COME BACK. a hot bath, a meal and good night’s sleep, even a good fuck does not return everything. listen, don’t put me down as against women—I’d hate to be one and I know that they have their own personal world of horror. but life keeps chewing us up and how often can we keep getting up off the deck, and what for? me, I’ve just gone limp all over and let them punch. down at the coffee break area they call me, HANK THE PLANK (my first name in Henry, middle name Charles), BIG TIME, MONEY!, etc., but they don’t know that when I go home in the morning that I comb agony and poems out of my hair. but to hell with that. [* * *]