[* * *] Frances says you should come to Los Angeles but I do not agree. This is one big town full of phonies, as you realize. Arizona has such nice little lizards and horny toads running through the hot sand or sitting on top of big rocks looking at you. You can’t get that here. I remember once walking out of a small Arizona town, the sun came down like magic, all yellow still, I kept going out into the desert, there was nobody around, not a human in sight. I almost didn’t come back. But as you see, I have. [* * *]

By the way, in case you do do the book, I still, at this moment lean to the title For Regions Lower than Crying, although I may come up with a later preference, I could go with this one without being hurt too much; the title fits the series of edgy sequence of my titles, makes sense thru the looking glass…. Although I realize this title might bear a first similarity to A. E. Housman’s “Brooks Too Broad for Leaping,” but whereas Housman’s title relates directly to death, the impossibility of escaping it, mine relates to the utter sadness, the almost unbearability of existence. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

March 11, 1964

[* * *] Two people down at the mill think I have cancer. Maybe I am starting to smell? Anyhow, feel god awful weak and only feel good in bed, but probably only the cause of too much drinking and gambling and working at the same time, and down where I am getting it you have to work and sweat and bleed for it, I do mean. The people are half wild with fear and something they know not of; they tremble and jerk with work neurosis, all cackling flat laughter of the deserted innards, and I am beginning to feel that way too; it is contemptuous what we have done to life and the living and ourselves. I was hoping for luck and skill in the gambling to free me but this too appears only another trap where they throw sand on the living. All the traps, and I walk into all the traps, every one that’s there, I spread myself with olive oil and ointment, with hemorrhoid salve and I say whoops, LET’S GO, BABIES!!!

It’s a hell of a juncture to bust loose and I guess I’ll never bust loose, not writing poetry, and it appears I can’t even do that anymore, and I sure can’t go the novel, not the way I feel, the novel seems like nothing but WORK, a grandiose concept of saying a lot of nothing, and I guess the idea of the poems, good or bad, is to keep me from going crazier. I could pay money to hear some psychiatrist tell me this, and then we’d both feel better; only he’d feel better than I because he’d have my money and a nice secretary to look at walking around the room and to fuck. ah, wilderness, my wilderness. [* * *]