the wind is blowing singing inside of my head with holy tiger’s feet and also banging the shade and I have pulled down the dirty window, and it’s all over, god, it’s all over, xmas, New Year’s night, and now I feel better, almost as good as they pretended to feel, these hardhearts, these shards, these sharks, and now the woman downstairs beats on the ceiling with the end of a broom handle, my typewriter disturbs her, it punctuates the Javanese exotic head-sounds of her T.V. Well, it is a god damned bad fix, and we go on. Wow. Walking the streets. Drinking coffee. Writing letters to ladies in Sacramento. Another cigarette. A Parliament. Go with cancer. I will be sorry. I will be. I remember reading a book by by…shit, he was one of my favorites, yet I cannot remember his name…yes, Knut Hamsun, book about a nut house and one of the patients, he was called the Suicide, always talking about it, you know, and then one day the building caught on fire and who came crawling laboriously painfully like a snail down the hot rain pipe? Of course, the S.

And this is enough wind for early 64. [* * *]

The book of poems here envisioned appeared as Cold Dogs in the Courtyard from Literary Times-Cyfoeth in 1965.

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

January 4, 1964

[* * *] I have been kind of dreaming lately, in spite of It Catches, which shows you how we go on like grub, I have been thinking of the 4 books and the stuff I have written; and with these 4 editors I have…I have had no part in the selection, didn’t want to, didn’t trust myself, and yet lately I have been thinking that what the 4 have skipped (much of it) is not only pretty good stuff but maybe my best??? This is a hell of a statement I know. And so I was hoping to get somebody to run these poems in book form; I was going to write a foreword telling a little about how things work, and this is what is left, and god damn you, reader, what do you think? I was going to call the book Cold Dogs in the Courtyard, meaning rejected poems, of course. [* * *]