August 12, 1986 Hello John: Thanks for the good letter. I don… You know my old saying, “Slavery… And what hurts is the steadily dim…

“Chinaski, you got a following in Denver...” “yeah?” “yeah, I got a magazine and I wan… poems from you...”

you haven’t lived until you’ve been in a flophouse with nothing but one light bulb

They are building a house half a block down and I sit up here with the shades down listening to the sounds,

it was on the 2nd floor on Coronad… I used to get drunk and throw the radio through the wi… while it was playing, and, of cour… it would break the glass in the wi…

there’s a bluebird in my heart tha… wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I’m not goi… to let anybody see

they found him walking along the f… all red in front he had taken a rusty tin can and cut off his sexual

Born like this Into this As the chalk faces smile As Mrs. Death laughs As the elevators break

we have everything and we have not… and some men do it in churches and some men do it by tearing butt… in half and some men do it in Palm Spring…

I even hear the mountains the way they laugh up and down their blue sides and down in the water the fish cry

not much chance, completely cut loose from purpose, he was a young man riding a bus

the critics now have me drinking champagne and driving a BMW and also married to a socialite from

the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break

good weather is like good women— it doesn’t always happen and when it does

I was always a natural slob I liked to lay upon the bed in undershirt (stained, of course) (and with cigarette holes)