I walked off the job again and the police stopped me for running a red light at Serrano… my mind was rather gone and I stood in a patch of leaves

The next night Bobby and Valerie came over. They had recently moved into my apartment building and now lived across the court. Bobby had on his tight knit shirt. Everything always fitte...

One day, just like in grammar school, like with David, a boy attached himself to me. He was small and thin and had almost no hair on top of his head. The guys called him Baldy. His real...

They had this thing called Training Class, and so for 30 minutes each night, anyhow, we didn’t have to stick mail. A big Italiano got up on the lecture platform to tell us where it was....

up in northern California he stood in the pulpit and had been reading for some time he had been reading poems about nature and the goodness

That summer, July 1934, they gunned down John Dillinger outside the movie house in Chicago. He never had a chance. The Lady in Red had fingered him. More than a year earlier the banks h...

One morning a few days later I entered Lydia’s courtyard as she was walking in from the alley. She had been over to see her friend Tina who lived in an apartment house on the corner. Sh...

Cleo’s going to make it now she’s got her shit together she split with Barney Barney wasn’t good for her she got a bigger apartment

There was this place. It stretched over the sea, it was built over the sea. An old place, but with a touch of class. We got a room on the first floor. You could hear the ocean running d...

the droll noon where squadrons of worms creep up like stripteasers to be raped by blackbirds. I go outside

Jimmy Hatcher worked part time in a grocery store. While none of us could get jobs he could always get one. He had his little movie star face and his mother had a great body. With his f...

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,

I took the envelope home to my mother and handed it to her and walked into the bedroom. My bedroom. The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even ...