Yes yes, if you have the special interview issue of Lit. Times I do wish you’d mail it. why they refuse to mail me one when I send $ I don’t know. guilt? they feel, somehow, I guess as if they’ve ruptured or fucked me. they shouldn’t worry—everytime I step out the door 4 thieves and a bloody toothed cocksucker dog chase me around the block. ah.—the circular is sweetfire (Ole ad), and it sure as hell creates an interest, and talking about me in the same hairbreath as Whitman and Rimbaud gives lift to this sagging soul so torn by complaining bitch of woman, and I allow myself a small lift, a splash of water in the eye, a cool can of beer as 45 pigeons circle in the lot across the street, and the mountains are dark today dark, and they are dropping lumber ripping lumber tearing holes in the ground, and a man sits on an orange machine lighting a cigarette and where one hour ago I could see a house from this small kitchen window, I now see matches of misery where there were once dark halls to walk down in order to piss at 3 a.m. in the morning, and Bukowski floats dead, upside-down in a pound, pockets full of rejects, head still crackling racket of complaining womanhood or ladies from Mass who think I don’t rhyme with reason. Anyhow, it will be an apartment house. everything passes. m.m. had all that leg and ass and killed herself. we are confused. we don’t stick together. Hemingway shotgun. Chatterton rat poison. Pascal’s last bath. we all of us ache and are incomplete forever. no victory. another night’s sleep, if you can sleep. sometimes I don’t sleep for 2 or 3 or 4 days or nights, or so it seems. madness? why not? what man is holy enough to last? the stupid are the survivors. they’ve got good lasting qualities. I must be stupid. I never thought I’d almost live to see 45. god it’s gross. I walk around an old man and I still feel the way I felt when I was 11 or 12 or 14—that is—sick, unpleasant, not knowing; aching from the sight of wooden faces, wooden jaws, wooden arms, wooden eyes, wooden blood, wooden voices. jesus mother am I the only one stuck in this fright of un-wonder?

I watch this guy playing with his machine from the window. I would say he is dead but the woman would object on grounds of my inhumanity. He’s young, has too much hair under a dirty felt hat, and no ass at all, the pants fall flat, a straight line down from the neck to the heels, a line like a hard board. He scratches at mud on his machine. He has a little rag and a scraper and he works at the mud. he picks away. inside of his head it is like inside the head of a blackbird skipping over a wet lawn. tick, tick, and that’s it. I am supposed to save this man for democracy. I’m supposed to say something, nice about him. I can’t.