a woman told a man when he got off a plane that I was dead. a magazine printed the fact that I was dead

I feel gypped by dunces as if reality were the property of little men with luck and a headstart, and I sit in the cold

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

escape from the black widow spider is a miracle as great as art. what a web she can weave slowly drawing you to her she’ll embrace you

for five years I have been looking across the way at the side of a red apartment hou… there must be people in there even love in there

That evening the phone rang. It was Mercedes. I had met her after giving a poetry reading at Venice Beach. She was about 28, fair body, pretty good legs, a blonde about 5~feet-5, a blue...

I finally, got a day off, and you know what I did? I got up early before Joyce got back in and I went down to the market to do a little shopping, and maybe I was crazy. I walked through...

they say that nothing is wasted: either that or it all is.

the swans drown in bilge water, take down the signs, test the poisons, barricade the cow from the bull,

have we gone wrong again? we laugh less and less, become more sadly sane. all we want is the absence of others.

it is like this when you slip down, done like a wound-up victrola (you remember those?) and you go downtown

they get up on their garage roof both of them 80 or 90 years old standing on the slant she wanting to fall really all the way

In the morning Dee Dee drove me to the Sunset Strip for breakfast. The Mercedes was black and shone in the sun. We drove past the billboards and the nightclubs and the fancy restaurants...