6 teeth pulled today, so stayed here tonight and wrote the review on Zukofsky. use it if you want to. I am bleeding like a river of shit and I guess I shouldn’t get any beer, will swallow blood, haha, and cold beer will scream the holes in my jaw, old daddy getting there, there are only so many teeth to be pulled then I am FREE. ya. guy going to build me a bridge. will try to hold onto my remaining teeth a while. don’t know how I will pay him but we never discuss this thing. very nice. I think he was drunk, he sang all the time he was working, and one tooth just didn’t want to come out and he screamed STUPID THING, STUPID TOOTH! what’s all this talk about teeth? came out and smashed my tail light against a phone pole. poor old ’57. I told those people I wouldn’t eat any walnuts but maybe if I warm up the beer…??? anyhow, Zukofsky in here, and hope you are making it through the days, you know like killing a bull every ten minutes or being put in a gunnysack with 14 monkeys. how do we last, old man? sometimes I think that we are braver than all the armies of history, and then I know that’s stupid: the armies don’t count, and we hardly do. except to the walls, a couple of faces and our own way of waiting. I am down to 4 codeine but that should get me through the night. knives, pliers, hospitals. watch out for spiders.

P.S. no arrival of F.B.I. rather disappointed.

[To Ann Menebroker]

January 19, 1967