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...

I was editing a little magazine at the time, The Laxative Approach. I had two co-editors and we felt that we were printing the best poets of our time. Also some of the other kind. One o...

I had to fly to Illinois to give a reading at the University. I hated readings, but they helped with the rent and maybe they helped sell books. They got me out of east Hollywood, they g...

my friend is worried about dying he lives in Frisco I live in L.A. he goes to the gym and works with the iron and hits

On Thursday night Bobby phoned again. “Hey, man, what are you doing?” “Oh, come on, man, I’ll just stay for a few beers. . . .” “You treat him mean. He gets lonely when his wife is at w...

they stop out front here looks as if the car is on fire the smoke blazes blue from the hoo… the motor sounds like cannon shots the car humps wildly

the girls are coming home in their… and I sit by the window and watch. there’s a girl in a red dress driving a white car

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...

she sits up there drinking wine while her husband is at work. she puts quite

That evening after dinner Joanna produced some mescaline. “You ever tried this stuff?” Joanna had some paints and brushes and paper spread on the table. Then I remembered she was an art...

at exactly 12:00 midnight 1973-74 Los Angeles it began to rain on the palm leaves outside my window

watch them push the crippled and t… in their wheelchairs on to the electric lift which carries them up into the lon… where each chair is locked down

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…

Slipping keenly into bright ashes, target of vanilla tears your sure body lit candles for men on dark nights, and now your night is darker