the strong men the muscle men there they sit down at the beach cocoa tans

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.

That evening the phone rang. It was Mercedes. I had met her after giving a poetry reading at Venice Beach. She was about 28, fair body, pretty good legs, a blonde about 5~feet-5, a blue...

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

Jack London drinking his life awa… writing of strange and heroic men. Eugene O’Neill drinking himself o… while writing his dark and poetic works.

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...

Vallejo writing about loneliness while starving to death; Van Gogh’s ear rejected by a whore;

Hugo Wolf went mad while eating a… and writing his 253rd song; it was… April and the worms came out of th… humming Tannhäuser, and he spilled… with his ink, and his blood fell o…

Frank liked airplanes. He lent me all his pulp magazines about World War 1. The best was Flying Aces. The dog-fights were great, the Spads and the Fokkers mixing it. I read all the stor...

Bruckner wasn’t bad even though he got down on his knees and proclaimed Wagner the master.

An old man asked me for a cigarett… and I carefully dealt out two. Been lookin’ for job. Gonna stand in the sun and smoke.” He was close to rags and rage

A month went by. R.A. Dwight, the editor of Dogbite Press wrote and asked me to do a foreword to Keesing’s Selected Poems. Keesing, with the help of his death, was at last going to get ...