Our man was there to meet us, Gary Benson. He also wrote poetry and drove a cab. He was very fat but at least he didn’t look like a poet, he didn’t look North Beach or East Village or l...

I was in the 4th grade when I found out about it. I was probably one of the last to know, because I still didn’t talk to anybody. A boy walked up to “Your mother has a hole . . .”—he to...

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…

the elephants are caked with mud a… and the rhinos don’t move the zebras are stupid dead stems and the lions don’t roar the lions don’t care

once we were young at this machine. . . drinking

the problem, of course, isn’t the… it’s the living parts which make up the Dem… the next person you pass on the st… multiply

sitting on a 2nd-floor porch at 1:… while looking out over the city. could be worse. we needn’t accomplish great things…

The phone rang the next morning. Lydia had gone back to her place. It was Bobby, the kid who lived in the next block and worked in the porno bookstore. “Mindy’s down here. She wants you...

red hair real she whirled it and she asked “is my ass still on?”

The next morning Tammie found a prescription in her purse. “I’ve got to get this filled,” she said. “Look at it.” It was wrinkled and the ink had run. “Well, he tried to get this prescr...

drive to the beach at night in the winter and sit and look at the burned-dow… wonder why they just let it sit th… in the water.

if I suffer at this typewriter think how I’d feel among the lettuce— pickers of Salinas?

We were eating meatballs and spaghetti. My problems were always discussed at dinner time. Dinner time was almost always an unhappy time. I didn’t answer my father’s question. “Henry, an...

long ago he edited a little magazi… was up in San Francisco during the beat era during the reading-poetry-with-jaz… and I remember him because he neve…

with old cars, especially when you… and drive them for many years a love affair is inevitable: you even learn to accept their little