I pretend that the blood from my mouth is bad teeth and the blood from my ass is from hemorrhoids and then I feel better and take another drink. What man wants to waste his time in hospitals? I am not so particularly concerned with writing poetry as I am concerned with standing around in the sun or just sleeping or getting drunk or looking at the poor face of some old woman I have made love to and watching her eyes eating into my face, into my body, this delight delight, until I am ashamed and turn my eyes down. I am tired as hell but the longer I live the more something begins to take shape. I thought the whiskey would finally ride my brain down, and maybe it has, and as I type this to you I am listening to some new Broadway musical, they are pretty similar, it is more Artless in its shouting than a blowjob whore, but it is a moment, a sound, not bad, and I am writing this to you and I am drunk but I am still alive, and we write on, over and over, live on, your wife, your kids, myself, Jon, Lou, WILDCAT, and tomorrow’s entries. The fucking stage, yeah, the fucking stage, we are all there. [* * *]

Jory Sherman’s My Face in Wax with an introduction by Bukowski was published by Windfall Press, Chicago, in 1965.

The end of this letter refers to Karl Shapiro’s introduction to the first book of Jack Hirschman (A Correspondence of Americans [Indiana Univ. Press, I960]), who in the 1960s was teaching at UCLA. “Was invited to dinner by Jack and his wife Ruth,” Bukowski notes. “I drank a lot of wine and made an ass out of myself. Jack has the ability to get off some strong lines and poems, strange and original.”

[To John William Corrington]

May 23, 1963

got yr 2 letters right one on the other, and I am hanging in (yet); sometimes I think u think I think I am sliding under the table. Drunk phone calls are my specialty. Cost me 50 bucks a month, which if the mules don’t start dancing, I’m gona haveta stop doing, but don’t worry, there’s bloody ass but windows with screens, and how are YOU doing? They went bad again today, and my feet hurt, and no money ha, but that’s not it, it’s the TIME melting like vanilla, boy, and I am going ha, and that’s it, a crotch, a crotch of grey waiting to stretch out and stop farting, and fucking old things, but the drinking’s not bad, the drinking lifts, verily, John, fills the gap I’m not filling at the time, it’s beans on the shelf, things going, radios, and all the words of silence that crawl the walls like cockroaches. Bang, bang, you’re dead. [* * *]