#Americans #XXCentury #1993 #ThePleasuresOfTheDamned
my mother knocked on my rooming-house do… and came in looked in the dresser drawer: Henry you don’t have any clean stockings?
#1993 #ThePleasuresOfTheDamned
I drank for the next week. I drank night and day and wrote 25 or 30 mournful poems about lost love. It was Friday night when the phone rang. It was Mercedes. “I got married,” she said, ...
#1978 #Women
We were in the air twenty minutes when she took a mirror out of her purse and began to make up her face, mostly the eyes. She worked at her eyes with a small brush, concentrating on the...
in the hospitals I’ve been in you see the crosses on the walls with the thin palm leaves behind them yellowed and browned it is the signal to accept the inevitabl…
#1977 #LoveIsADogFromHell
maybe I’ll win the Irish Sweepstakes maybe I’ll go nuts maybe Harcourt Brace will call or maybe unemployment insurance or rich lesbian at the top of a hill.
On the elevator up, I was the only white man there. It seemed strange. They talked about the riots, not looking at me. “Jesus,” said a coal black guy, "it’s really something. These guys...
#1971 #PostOffice
they took my man off the street the other day he wore an L.A. Rams sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off
I have a saying, “the tough ones always… back.” but Vera was kinder than most, and so I was surprised when she arrived that night
They had this thing called Training Cla… A big Italiano got up on the lecture pl… “. . . now there’s nothing like the smel… Good god, I thought, am I hearing right… “. . . so take a bath everyday. You will…
don’t worry about rejections, pard, I’ve been rejected before. sometimes you make a mistake, taking the wrong poem
consistency is terrific: shark-mouth grubby interior with an almost perfect body, long blazing hair—
#1977 #LoveIsADogFromHell #ThePleasuresOfTheDamned
she cut my toenails the night before, and in the morning she said, “I think I… just lay here all day.” which meant she wasn’t going to work. she was at my apartment—which meant anot…
if I suffer at this typewriter think how I’d feel among the lettuce-pickers of Salinas?
It’s never quite right, he said, the way… the way the music sounds, the way the wo… written. It’s never quite right, he said, all the… taught, all the loves we chase, all the…
it sits outside my window now like and old woman going to market; it sits and watches me, it sweats nevously through wire and fog and dog—bark
#1973 #BurningInWaterDrowningInFlame #ItCatchesMyHeartInItsHands