awaken at 11:30 a.m. get into my chinos and a clean gre… open a Miller’s, and nothing in the mailbox but the Berkeley Tribe

But the next morning it was the sa… “That’s all, Chinaski. Nothing fo… It went on for a week. I sat ther… Then Bobby Hansen, one of the old… “I don’t care. I’m not kissing hi…

swans die in the Spring too and there it floated dead on a Sunday sideways circling in the current

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

monkey feet small and blue walking toward you as the back of a building falls of… and an airplane chews the white sk…

people went into vacant lots and pulled up greens to cook and the men rolled Bull Durham or smoked Wings (10 a pack) and the dogs were thin and the cats were thin and the cats learned h...

absolutely sesamoid said the skeleton shoving his chalky foot upon my desk, and that was it,

R.O.T.C. kept me away from sports while the other guys practiced every day. They made the school teams, won their letters and got the girls. My days were spent mostly marching around in...

vain vanilla ladies strutting while van Gogh did it to himself. girls pulling on silk hose

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...

boy, don’t come around here tellin… can’t cut it, that they’re pitching you low and insid… they are conspiring against you, that all you want is a chance but…

he talked about Steinbeck and Tho… wrote like a cross between the two… and I lived in a hotel on Figuero… close to the bars and he lived further uptown in a s…

the girls were young and worked the streets but often couldn’t score, they

the wind blows hard to night and it’s a cold wind and I think about the boys on the row. hope some of them have a bottle

sit on this bench and look at the sea and the freaks and the lovers. need new eyes a new mouth new pillows, a new woman.