[* * *] I really don’t know if there is enough plentitude of talent to deserve even one magazine. and when I say talent I mean JUICE TO MAKE THE EARS JUMP and the hands look like hands, know they are hands and the window screens to look like mother’s panties, I mean SOMETHING. I just don’t think it’s there—maybe a line or 2, and then limp again, making the same old picture. maybe it’s the human race, maybe we’re just full of shit and no light, maybe we’re still full of shit after we shit it out.

There are many things that bother me. I know that I have never passed a man on the street that I liked—most of them giving off a kind of ether of disgust and stumbling and clay-eating, snot-eating grievance. I don’t like the human race at all. this is my confessional, father, pass the wine. [* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

December 9, 1964

no murals, noting nothing, the overtime has got me, I am dead, dog-fucked tired and the old woman drops tin cans in the bathtub and walks around complaining that life is hard, the baby is cranky she says and she has a cold and maybe the baby has a cold too. my old woman has had a cold ever since I messed-up with her. well, look. yeah, a cold head too. what I mean. I got Ole and the few moments I have left before going into the mill again, maybe I could say something, although I feel my sight is a little twisted today. what’s wrong with the foreword, introduction? I agree, we gotta put balls on poetry. this lisping home freak has layed pale in dead libraries long enough, let’s bomb on out. [* * *]

let me say off and on and over as time keeps running that it was a lively number a good number and I can say this easy without lying which I have not learned to do yet and so you wanted to know and so now I’ve told you, & we look FORWARD to more Ole, poetry with balls!!

and I will put this in an envelope and tool through traffic, weaving around the old ladies and grinding toward the death, my foot to the floor, all insurance companies have already dropped me and the police leap out from behind the palm trees of night on their scooters to hunt down the nub of snarling over the wheel, go go go!, down Sunset, to Alpine street, then a left and out of car and leap into fire of death and fire of dead faces and why I still will be able to walk around and move my fingers I’ll never know. [* * *]

• 1965 •

[To Jim Roman]

January 11, 1965

Who the hell is U. Grant Roman via “ML” and signed Jim Roman?