Let me say that the spotlight Jon puts on me I accept with honor from the German blood that unpollutes the Polack in me; I cannot deny this: I still play with the old words: honor, truth. That I am pretty well pulled to pieces by the spiders of the world does not affect me, I hope it does not god damn effect [sic] me, in this sense. Anyhow, I still like to play with bluebirds and old dreams among the toy cannon. I go my way, antiquated and ruined. [***]
[To John William Corrington]
December 24, 1962
[***] Don’t keep urging me to leave the City of the Angels, this beautiful fucking place where Saints jack off in the sky. I am beholden. Look, kid, I don’t got no trade, savvy? Here maybe there are a couple of race tracks I got the smell of, and I know where the rescue missions are located, and it only gets cold at night, and there are a couple of places where maybe they will let me sleep on the floor or drop me a dollar from a hardshell hand. I traveled until I was almost cuckoo, from 19 to 28. I saw it. Sometimes I weighed 200 pounds, other times, 128. I saw that there was nothing. I saw the South like a gourd of light, with dryslab faces and poverty, history running like shit from the walls and everybody burning to poke you down. You, Willie, are a good kind of South, but there’s another kind of South too, and you know it. But no better or worse than New York or Chi or Philly. But to go running off through the same scene would be like taking a dose of salts after a good bowel movement. Here in L.A. they leave you alone. You lay dead in a room for 5 or 6 days and it’s not until you begin to stink or fail to pay your rent that they come in and drag you out. This has advantages if you are not heavy in love with the roving tribes. Here I’ve just got phantoms and a dirty floor from my own feet. Peace, cousin. [***]
…On the poems about Jane, I kept copies, sent them out somewhere…. As to the poems I put in the letters, that is what they are for, the letters, and I do not save these poems or intend them for publication. If I can’t spare a couple off the elbow, then what the hell’s the use?
No, Jane doesn’t leave. Some deaths won’t. They are imbedded, fingered in the brain forever. And the life comes back, scores of life like an old movie. I’ve wanted to write this story but it’s too big for me. I am weak and let it go. [***]
· 1963 ·
[To John William Corrington]
February 19, 1963
[***] It seemed to me the man in Camus’ Stranger showed more courage than the Hemingway man because his courage was a courage of acceptance rather than defiance. With Hem victory or at least a good defeat seemed reasonable. With Camus—this did not matter. Or so I gather, having heard a few chapters over the radio (The Stranger). I could not be this type of Camus because I could not accept everything in order to dismiss it, or ignore it, or play at rot. Somewhere between Hem and Camus I stand, or sit this morning, sick, pale, white, old. Tomorrow it might be better. [***]
[To Jon and Louise Webb]
May [?20], 1963
I am so in love with the book you are doing. this keeps the keenly biting down somewhat and I go on, but very much afraid I am hypo of some sort and only decency of—of what?? effrontery? is in destroying myself, and I keep drinking and looking out of windows, flowers, grass, people down there…grass people down there…ah, ha, I can still laugh, and you people are so good, god damn it, my madness, I am so unkind, this is the book, my love, yours, but I look ahead, and if I am there, here, anywhere, I have a title for another book, be there another book, another me, another anything: LEAP OUT OF ANY WINDOW. Really my love grows sadder, my life grows realer, too real, I can hardly beat it like cherries blooming in a fucking glass of scotch, within the gall of scotch…things crawling growing inside my sick-gut mind, the whole world waving waving
hello and goodbye
and I’ve been so rotten
there’s so little left to do. you either bleed to death in small drops or you go out like a snarling tambourine, why not, car doors slam across my living
my way
and their way
tangle like angry panthers
in a cave
and they know the way
they know the way
And,
yes
of course I’ve been drunk
u might have guessed
missed work missed work
god damn them
and so a job I hate prob. gone
and I can do nothing
have no trade
but maybe luck
luck
image
flat floating fish
stunned and pecked to death
getting by
in a lost mirage.
Please do not take this letter too seriously or bother making phone calls because all our dimes are thin, thin, thin, like slivers in our final coffin poking our eyes alive, g.d. g.d., this is the ending of the birdsong, this is the coconut eaten, this is slime upon the walls, this is a flat tire, this is dirty laundry, this is everything eaten from its insides out and its outsides in, this is a bad morning,
this is a bad day, this is gas stations under moonlight, this is
the lousy screw with his precious freedom walk outside the bars, these
are the bars filled with the lonely hemorrhoids of life, this is the
world waiting upon the mailman and the bomb, this is a cat
crucified by a dog, this a man cruxed by a woman or the other way around,
this is a worm crawling an apple under a temperature of 69 degrees, this
is all is Christ dangling from nails dangling dangling
this is the horse that did not quite qinuto quatro win
this is the whore that did not quite love
this is the city that did not burn down to new empire
this is the rodent staring with the square blue eyes
these are madmen’s tears
like the lava of a fish crying for greater things,
these are tootsie rolls and buns,
these are things that smash me dead
like blank faces
like envelopes
like buns
like mercenary women
like countries that proclaim justice
because they are strong enough to say what they want
to seem to believe;
…like that last kiss and that first kiss,
like the hands that once loved you
resting upon coffin-bottoms while oranges still round young
and full to the shape of the sun,
and these things you know,
please cry with me,
please be weak,
please do not become knowing
or fancy as that man
who takes the bull to hell
like a spider working a fly,
oh Hemingway was a liar,
I do not call this Art
and I do not call this Life,
for all your fancy jurists and all your fancy ways
and all your fancy gods—
I cannot see, I cannot see,
and I grow tired
the larvae crawl the eyes of my soul,
the bricks fall,
Stalingrad again, or Greece
or Berlin
or the fingers of myself
working out toward a god
or a leaf or a sound or a symbol
or a meaning.
I am not wise enough
and this is a terrible thing;
it is so easy to become wise enough
that I cannot do it,
I cannot see it
I cannot be it.
It is a becoming thing
and becoming things fit me
like loose shelves and [? saucers]
in an earthquake.
ah jesus
I talk too much
I mouth words like a mimic
I roll and stroll
and beat my silly bloody breasts
and miss the point
miss the point.
a
h, god damn, sweet soldiers,
sweet whores, sweet friends,
the point is in
and down
and working,
can’t you see
that???
like a gaunt and noble
and giant cock
working forever
reaming the original guts of life
out of you?
Pan, Pan, I am so sad,
and where does the working go?
where’s the Peace?
where’s the victory?
oh, god damn it, I know:
we are tried
again and again
and that’s our sustenance:
working finely with these master
teeth,
but I grow sick of Henry Miller
and the balustrades,
I’m tired of D.H. riding the thighs of his
eternal and saving cow,
and when Hemingway met an enemy without a flag
he surrendered
which is not bad at all
but he should have known earlier
or he would not have fucked around with so
much stuff,
but still a great man
whatever great means
or I would not be talking about him
in this round dull and sickening morning,
now now now
where are we at? ha?
what’s it mean?
I’m not the first to toss this grain
of salt,
but really am more vicious and desperate and
wanting
perhaps
than many of the rest,
and that is why you read this
and that is why this screen in front of my face
is all that separates me
from the sweet black pavement that looks for its own
freedom.
You think I bluff?
Of course.
so long…as long
(you are the pretty grammarian)
as I remain alive I bluff.
your criticism is justified
but your life
is not? not.
period.
definite statements
are generally
like love:
they turn out
badly. Of course,
you know that real love
like real life
only comes along in the shape
of a body
every 2 or 3 centuries.
I know. You think it is
Christ or Joan of Arc
or something obvious.
I do not think that way at all
and that is why we do not get
along.
But the real Christ or the fucking real
man is the man
who does not cuckold to the Arts,
a man who does not suck the nearest breast,
is a man who paints the walls of his life
kindly
and nobody
ever knows,
and this is the man of men
the walls of walls
and Hells Heruculius [sic] Jericho does not bring them
down,
only the sweet substances of his hands and his walk
and his life
like a bumblebee in the flower of a bull’s death
sings these sweet songs to us,
o go away
go away
everything
the swaying of the planets
the muscles on a freak
the flat floating sorrow of a punk pudding
my insides screaming for the love of violins
such a giant drunk falling falling
across the face of this world
oh sweet cream and peaches
oh sweet love and hate
oh sweet dynasties of burning,
oh walnuts and tits
haunches and dogs,
oh simple moon
voices lips eyelashes
destroy me
I beg you
I beg you
destroy me forever
because my eyes have grown too large
my wisdom like a beautiful peacock
that can only separate pebbles from corn,
yes, yes, that is so,
do not laugh,
or what the hell
laugh
yes do laugh…
I am so serious
like a god damned kid with a yoyo,
and I too dislike serious
people—
when you’re serious about life and death
you not only become a bore,
but serious enough…
you destroy yourself.
this is not what I mean.
what I mean is
what are we going to do this afternoon
while sitting around
eating apples and
destroying hangovers
and preparing for
future hangovers?
all that I can see is the
bird-like and drifting
Savannah of sunlight,
my harmless
so far
arms and hands and
veins,
and darling
sweet love of life
and child and blossom
do not think I am cruel
because I am afraid,
and now
spreading across my mind
they ring a god damned gong
across the afternoon
why? why?
as I am drunk again
as I understand nothing
as the sink is stopped and as the flowers
poke holes in my eyes
as love runs like a rat down the drain
and I become myself
ugly
real
vicious
standing with the worst armies
in the worst time
in the worst land
in the worst minute
or the worst light
slashing through this screen
taking me taking me
goodbye forever oh friend of my love.
[To John William Corrington]
August 28, 1963
[***] Well, they marched for freedom on the capital today. That’s nice. I prefer a black and WHITE freedom. Someday they are going to find out you can’t get a job whether you are black or white. And when you vote—either way, either man can be bad. And they are going to find out that water tastes the same, but then you can’t blame a man for wanting small things. They want to go into any church; I don’t want to go into a church. They want to vote; I don’t want to vote. They want to live where the white man lives; I don’t care where I live. They want equal rights, which means the rights I’ve got, and these rights are so small, so insignificant in the living of everyday life that I spit on them. There are rights that are talked about and then there are things that happen. A man will never make it through the machinery of the State. A man must make it through his own bones and mind and his own laws. Great men don’t wait on the State. They ignore it or make their own to suit their passions. So the thing in Washington today, the Freedom March, while seeming a lot in essence, in spirit and etc., the forwarding of Man, wow, it is hardly all that at all, and it rolls along in its quiet slime drowning itself as it inspects itself. [***]
[To John William Corrington]
September 3, 1963
[***] I wait mainly on your next novel, the Civil War is all right, and you prob. wanted to write it with your South hand, but must guess (since you ain’t talking) that most of the rewrite was to make it stop looking like the South won the war. And yet, even now, the way the Feds have to play with the city cops it looks like the South wasn’t played with too much. I really don’t know what the war was fought for; I mean, I’ve read the history books and I still don’t know. A lot of wars
, I think, are fought mostly over SPEECHES AND PROCLAMATIONS and then after everything is over, the whole works returns to the same hard bubble. Yeah, I know. This is pretty simple thinking. [***]
[To John William Corrington]
October 18, 1963
[***] I may have to move from here. Only reason I have stayed here so long is that I am forced to live in apartments or rooms, and all these years here there hasn’t been anybody with a loud T.V. Now there is. The guy downstairs died of a heart attack and somebody else moved in there. This somebody blares the T.V. up through my floorboards. I don’t have a T.V. and I don’t mind other people having them—as long as I don’t have to listen. I can listen to lovers’ quarrels and/or beatings without distaste but these quiz contests, news broadcasts and COMEDY? that stinks up through my floorboards is like getting slapped across the soul (?) with a dirty floormop. The masses give me trouble not because they are basically stupid but because they push their stupidity into my life. People are always talking about vague things like “freedoms” or newspaper things like “civil rights,” and this all sounds good and makes them think they are saying something. This wordage is putty without shape. The most needed thing is THE FREEDOM AND RIGHT OF PRIVACY FROM OTHER PEOPLE’S SOUNDS OF LIFE. It is difficult for a poor man to attain this. Neeli Cherry of Black Cat Review asked me to write something about “Civil Rights,” but I knew what he wanted. What other people call civil rights, I don’t even want. Nobody really has any rights anyhow, not even the rich; you save what you can and try not to be fooled too often. There’s a law for them and a law for me and if my law is broken too often, I am dead. I didn’t write the article for Cherry on c. rights. Somebody else will give him what he wants. Sure.
Living on Luck Page 4