frankly, I get a little tired of the Kryss books on these poet cats who get busted. I take it that this one is to be the 3rd. shit, a lot of people get busted who aren’t poets, or when they do they don’t think the bust is so special. plus too many of the bust-poets can’t write a cat turd. or when they do write, it’s all about busts, the nazi-state, so forth so forth. they become neurotic and closed-in. at least Behan, Genet, those, made a logical literary form out of their incarcerations. these other boys cry too much in mama’s hanky.

like I say, I haven’t been feeling good. maybe cranky, maybe cancer, maybe insanity. only God knows and He’s jacking off. but no Richmond. o.k.? fine. and thanks for the very good poem about Madame somebody.

[To Carl Weissner]

August 8, 1967

[* * *] christ, shit, broken stick—I will be 47 on the 16th and it won’t be long before they are dumping me, and it’s not death flapping down like that, it’s just that I haven’t been able to BREATHE properly. it has been like living inside a sardine can and then somebody comes along and hits me with a hammer. no fair. although, granted, I’ve helped them kill me, done almost everything possible to hurry along the process; and given a choice of walking through a gateway or ramming a wall, I have always seemed to ram the wall. but it’s not entirely stupidity. there’s a lot of sensible well-worked disgust resting within me too. why walk through the gateway when there’s a guy on the other side waiting with an ax? and these carbonated waterlumps who are my fellow man, how did they get here?

I haven’t written a poem in 4 or 5 months but I refuse to worry. it is not my idea to walk down the streets with poems glued to my forehead. the concern of the poem is to form itself—too many fellows pull them out with ganglia attached, no eyes, no feet; just dull puss and putty put-together. I have done it myself—worried about shadows and axes and the human face. something on paper—a bit of snot—it appears to help but it does not. now sometimes I just climb in bed and waste the few good hours—listen to sounds—the burbling turds of the city—the lost cunts—the flash false happiness flowers—what a machine we’ve built! this way I can work it out pretty good, in a kind of black cave of my mind, making little quiet measurements like a tailor. it is when I get drunk and then drunk and then drunk, and then the dank screeching hangover in steel collar and chains and dementia, worst kind of chicken-shit fears, real, but chicken-shit anyhow. my whole bedroom walls are glued with quiet experimental screams. I have them framed in blue and grey and green and red and yellow and whatever, and even when the dive bombers come and the city shakes and the electric light blinks on and off and the cat puffs up in anger under the palm tree, even then the screams hold their places, like places on a map yes, like tatoos. [* * *]