Louis Delpino was a fellow contributor to the little magazines. The Sparrow and the Cock was a long poem that he typed up and bound as a booklet dedicated to Bukowski as a thank-you for a recent phone call. The projected book of tributes to poets recently arrested was edited by T. L. Kryss (who had edited the tribute to Jim Lowell of Asphodel Bookshop) with Delpino and Douglas Blazek. It was published as Forever Worship the Second Coming (San Francisco: Black Rabbit Press, 1968).

[To Louis Delpino]

August 2, 1967

almost every day I get a piece of mail from somewhere from somebody saying, “hey, fucker, how come you ain’t answered my letter?”: it’s all right to be a good guy and to send 12 page drunken letters to 40 different people but after a while there just isn’t enough Bukowski to go around any more. then too, like other people I’ve got my troubles—job eating me up, car that won’t run, days of depression, sickness, so forth. have been real sick, job is hanging, I’m about finished there, and no trade, 47, no way to make it. not even writing poems anymore. meanwhile my little girl runs through here like all is sweet, climbing on the back of my neck and all that.

but not writing letters doesn’t cure much. I mean, I walk around like say, thinking of that very good poem you sent me—it’s in the bookcase now, somewhere, about madame somebody and that one fuck. one of the best poems I’ve read in 4 or 5 years, and I kept thinking I’ll write Lou about it when I feel better but I’ve never felt better. then your letter this morning about Richmond so now I must answer. I wrote Kyrass telling him I can’t do the Richmond. Cryass? Kryss? anyhow, I don’t know Richmond. I mean, I’ve been drunk with him, seen him 4 or 5 times but I don’t know him. there’s nothing you can write about him. he holes up pretty much by himself, won’t let people know where he lives. not that I give a damn, I’m a loner myself. but others complain that when they do find him, show at his door, he tells them, “go away, I’m busy.” and he is, and that’s his business. he usually has some bitch in there that has wandered into his bookstore, or whatever it has now turned out to be. he is covered with hair, fucks a lot, and I believe he is on the acid. also has dollars from family. told me once he is coming into a million or half million when he is 25. he was drunk, so I don’t know. anyway, the thing with Richmond is that very few people know him; I’m one that doesn’t. I wrote a foreword to a book of his poems, and that’s about it. Richmond is just a certain type. I don’t believe he wants anything written about himself, nor would he want me to write it. I did the foreword to his poems and that’s about as far as I want to go. book called Hitler Painted Roses.