[* * *] Wild telegram from Orlani Mahak. Perhaps she needs…friendship?…but she appears to be supporting a very young poet and thinker (I only know as David) and it so happens I like David and would also have to work around the stuff I have on hand now and I don’t like to tiptoe or to spoil somebody else’s game. Besides, all this has very little to do with writing the poem, and I am still interested in that, and I realize that if I had not written the poem the Orlani Mahaks would not be telegramming me, but it is the stuff of my own kind of life I am interested in, and what this other stuff is I don’t quite know. I don’t want to become anybody’s pet. I know that Henry Miller was good at it. Henry, like the rest of us, hated to work for somebody else; but I hate to be petted by somebody else. Which does not make me a better Artist than Henry Miller, just a different person, and not nearly so famous, thank the gods! [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

November 10, 1963

[* * *] No poems lately, although I may knock off a couple to send with this, I doubt it, I’ve got to be alone and the woman has just come back [* * *]

Now she sings, “There is no Christ upon the Cross

and we are sad…”

She makes these songs up. You see why I drink?

Now she sings, “Buk is bleeding from the asshole,

Buk is bleeding from the asshole,

and we don’t give a

damn

damn

damn…!”

You see why I drink? You see? You see?

Get some drawings out of Patchen…those upside down soft elephant creatures asking us to save the world of flowers and baby’s hands, they’re good like sunlight on putty in the window says. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

November 26, 1963: THE DAY

I came back from the store and there was the package against the door “don’t open ’til Xmas,” but to hell with that, I have been waiting, and I tore the paper off, saw the miracle: jacket, cover, skeleton in sand, the works the works…peeling back the pages I ate the whole insides, read the poems I have forgotten, the good Corrington, back page wherein you describe paper, type etc., the humor-agony bug-rat breakdown struggle which goes so well along with the author. And to say you’ve come through is nothing; that you’ve come through in this way…page by page, inch by inch, breakdown by breakdown, cut fingers, landladies, the street corner, the hours, my god, if the poems have been wasted the BOOK has not been wasted, little calm and precious beauties and loves of doing like a garden of good, like mountains, like everything that counts…by god, you’ve done it, you’ve done it, and I’m proud and struck and awed that you have—the both of you—caught me up in it.