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....

Lila Jane was a girl my age who lived next door. I still wasn’t allowed to play with the children in the neighborhood, but sitting in the bedroom often got dull. I would go out and walk...

I never wear dark shades but this red head went to get a prescription filled on Hollywood… and she kept haggling and working… me, snapping and snarling.

I used to take the back off the telephone and stuff it with ra… and when somebody knocked I wouldn’t answer and if they pers… I’d tell them in terms vulgar

I was casing next to G.G. early one morning. That’s what they called him: G.G. His actual name was George Greene. But for years he was simply called G.G. and after a while he looked lik...

sleep at Lila’s and in the morning we get the breakfast special at th… then it’s up to her friend Buffy’s… Buffy has boy twins, father in dou… in a $150-a-month apt.

call it love stand it up in the failing light put it in a dress pray sing beg cry laugh

the blazing shark wants my balls as I walk through the meat section looking for salami and cheese purple housewives

cleaned my place the other day first time in ten years and found 100 rejected poems: fastened them all to a clipboard much bad reading.

That summer, July 1934, they gunned down John Dillinger outside the movie house in Chicago. He never had a chance. The Lady in Red had fingered him. More than a year earlier the banks h...

they’d come around and they’d ask “you finished your 2nd novel yet?” “no.”

drunk and writing poems at 3 a.m. what counts now is one more tight