[To Jon and Louise Webb]

September, 1963

[* * *] It took a lot of guts to turn down the Roman offer but hell, you’ve been there and you know it is only finally chopchop and twist and chop and demand and then you’ve had it. You depend on their money and the “free editorial reign” but they’ve got ways of pulling their money out or getting nasty, and all these fingers running through your brain like neckties. I know that I have always felt better broke than not because when you are broke you have nothing to lose and are loose, and when you get it you worry about protecting it and you don’t do anything but protect it. [* * *]

Gypsy, take vitamins, even I do—99¢ for a month’s supply—and eat bread and potatoes, and when you can’t sleep at night don’t fight it, get up and read a newspaper, something dull, the financial sect., war, marches, weather reports, so forth. And be kind to yourself when you’re feeling bad, try to think of something good that once happened to you or of something good that might happen to you. We are often too tough with ourselves. I know that this sounds like a corner preacher or etc. but try a little of it: OL’ BUK’S EASY WONDER CURE. I wish I could give you about 20 of my pounds; I am a swine; in a morgue I would look like a stuffed turkey. [* * *]

[P.S.] no man is an island but why are so many of them flecks of dirt?

[To Neeli Cherry]

September 20, 1963

well, kid, I got your burnt Bukowski poem bust-out booklet, and it was somewhat like finding angels female with good figures and some wing in The Daily Racing Form, and I thank you for the toast (burnt) and I guess you are neva gon forget I threw one a your poems in the fire. but you’ve got to remember it was a hot night and the fingers of my mind were sweating, I was almost out of stuff to drink and your old man kept running in and out of the back door with this constant stagger of logs and I was standing in front of the fireplace and it got hotter and hotter and I thought I was a wheel from the old Lafayette Escadrille and when you handed me a poem there was nothing left to do but dump it along with the rest of me. ;;;ah, a hell of an excuse. !!!