places to hunt places to hide are getting harder to find, and pet canaries and goldfish too, did you… that?

I was editing a little magazine at the time, The Laxative Approach. I had two co-editors and we felt that we were printing the best poets of our time. Also some of the other kind. One o...

It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody, and so I went and the next thing I knew I ...

I walked into the counselor’s office. It was Eddie Beaver sitting behind the desk. The clerks called him “Skinny Beaver.” He had a pointed head, pointed nose, pointed chin. He was all p...

ask the sidewalk painters of Paris ask the sunlight on a sleeping dog ask the 3 pigs ask the paperboy ask the music of Donizetti

The toughest in the station. Apartment houses with boxes that had scrubbed-out names or no names at all, under tiny lightbulbs in dark halls. Old ladies standing in halls, up and down t...

old Butch, they fixed him the girls don’t look like much anymore. when Big Sam moved out of the back

Shirley came to town with a broken… and met the Chicano who smoked long slim cigars and they got a place together on Beacon street

in junior high school Big Max was a problem. we’d be sitting during lunch hour eating our peanut butter sandwiche… and potato chips.

I’m glad when they arrive and I’m glad when they leave I’m glad when I hear their heels approaching my door and I’m glad when those heels

he sits all day at the bus stop at Sunset and Western his sleeping bag beside him. he’s dirty. nobody bothers him.

Back in L.A., there was almost a week of peace. Then the phone rang. It was the owner of a Manhattan Beach nightclub, Marty Seavers. I had read there a couple of times before. The club ...

I read a book about John Dos Pas… the book once radical—communist John ended up in the Hollywood Hi… and reading the Wall Street Journal