the balance is preserved by the sn… the Santa Monica cliffs; the luck is in walking down Wester… and having the girls in a massage parlor holler at you, “Hello, Swe…

But there were some good moments. My sometime friend from the neighborhood, Gene, who was a year older than I, had a buddy, Harry Gibson, who had had one professional fight (he’d lost)....

I heard it first while screwing a… who had the biggest box in Scranton. I listened to it again as I wrote… to my mother

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...

That night I gave another bad reading. I didn’t care. They didn’t care. If John Cage could get one thousand dollars for eating an apple, I’d accept $500 plus air fare for being a lemon....

we take what we can see— the engines driving us mad, lovers finally hating; this fish in the market staring upward into our minds;

ask the sidewalk painters of Paris ask the sunlight on a sleeping dog ask the 3 pigs ask the paperboy ask the music of Donizetti

once we were young at this machine. . . drinking

it was up in San Francisco after my poetry reading. it had been a nice crowd I had gotten my money I had this place upstairs

Then I developed a new system at the racetrack. I pulled in $3,000 in a month and a half while only going to the track two or three times a week. I began to dream. I saw a little house ...

I had to take a shit but instead I went into this shop to have a key made. the woman was dressed

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...