Delpino worked in the Philadelphia post office. He had recently had part of his drum set stolen.

[To Louis Delpino]

August 12, 1967

jesus, I sure as hell don’t want to start any tedious correspondence but I am down to my last beer, and thot I’d drop this is the box on the way up to the liquor store. I’ve just beat out my weekly column for Open City. something about bullfights on t.v. and Ernie H. [* * *]

I pity your ass in the post office. I’ve been there 10 years. each night is more hell than the preceding one. they put in an air-conditioner that doesn’t work. we can’t breathe. people fall off their stools. the supervisors are hatchet-men, hand-picked. everything is graced with fear and stupidity. there and everywhere. try to get your drums back, for Christ’s sake!, they’ll murder you.

hot hot here. the beer the beer, that’s all there is. all of me is a big fat mound of beer. awakened several times in the night with nightmares. I don’t know where I am going.

Neeli Cherry by. I showed him The Sparrow and the Cock.

“god damn, this is good writing!”

“yes, it is.”

“who is he?”

“just somebody who lives in Philadelphia.”

well, man, I am down to the bottom of my beerbottle and there is no keeping me in here. sorry on the Richmond. just got a special delivery from Kryss who says he doesn’t believe I can’t do some writing on Richmond. well, it just isn’t there. you can’t set up a bank shot unless the run is proper.

be good to your wife. she probably thinks you are crazy.

Kryss writes that he is going to do a book of poems by WILLIE. that’s more like it.

like you, the mousy little mag scene is beginning to become less and less with me. I think because it is manned mostly by the very young, who then fade and some more very young replace them. which is all right in a way but in another way neither grows bones or heart. the poetry has this blithe lively sameness, the newness of sex, the terribleness of evil and so forth. all right for a while. then as it keeps being said you begin to yawn and yawn and yawn and YAWN. what’s new for the new is old for the old, and what is needed is darker earth and an almost plausible way. I am not speaking of religion; I am speaking of a movement forward from the same old crap. and I don’t think we are going to get it. The Sparrow and the Cock was pure literature. I am tired of propaganda. now I’ve got to get me some more beer. [* * *]

Michael Forrest was the first author other than Bukowski that Black Sparrow Press published.

[To Michael Forrest]

Sunday August 20, 1967