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. [* * *]

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