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

are more beautiful than movie stars and they lounge on the lawn sunbathing

16 years old during the depression I’d come home drunk and all my clothing— shorts, shirts, stockings—

you no faces no faces at all laughing at nothing—

I went to my place, started drinking. I snapped on the radio and found some classical music. I got my Coleman lantern out of the closet. I turned out the lights and sat playing with the...

the kid went back to New York Cit… he met in a kibbutz. he left his mother at the age of 32, a well-kept fellow, sense of h… wore the same pair of shorts

like the fox run with the hunted and if I’m not the happiest man on earth

Four or five days passed. The phone rang. It was Tammie. “Listen, Hank. You know that little bridge you cross in your car when you drive to my mother’s place?” “Well, right by there the...

She wasn’t really a cop, she was a clerk-cop. And she started coming in and telling me about a guy who wore a purple stick pin and was a “real gentleman.” “Well,” I’d ask, “how was old ...

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

I’m not going to die easy; I’ve sat on your suicide beds in some of the worst holes in America,

The toughest in the station. Apartment houses with boxes that had scrubbed-out names or no names at all, under tiny lightbulbs in dark halls. Old ladies standing in halls, up and down t...

my mother, father and I walked to the market once a week for our government relief food: cans of beans, cans of