if you’re a man, Los Angeles is w… battle; or if you’re a woman, and… the rest, you sail it against a mo… when you grow grey you can hide in… in a mansion so nobody can see how…

she lived in Galveston and was int… T.M. and I went down to visit her and w… continually even though it was ver… weather

New Year’s Eve was another bad night for me to get through. My parents had always delighted in New Year’s Eve, listening to it approach on the radio, city by city, until it arrived in L...

I keep thinking it will be outside now waiting for me blue front bumper twisted

a poem is a city filled with stree… filled with saints, heroes, beggar… filled with banality and booze, filled with rain and thunder and p… drought, a poem is a city at war,

They had me in the counselor’s office in one of the back rooms of the second floor. “Let me see how you look, Chinaski.” He looked at me. “All right, Mr. Chinaski, we’d like to know whe...

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

I was asked to give a reading at a famous nightclub, The Lancer, on Hollywood Boulevard. I agreed to read two nights. I was to follow a rock group, The Big Rape, each night. I was getti...

in the men’s room at the track this boy of about 7 or 8 years old came out of a stall

first they used to, he told me, gun and bomb the elephants, you could hear their screams over… but you flew high to bomb the peop… you never saw it,

a great white light dawns across t… continent as we fawn over our failed traditi… often kill to preserve them or sometimes kill just to kill.

if I suffer at this typewriter think how I’d feel among the lettuce— pickers of Salinas?