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are not lyrical. You do not sing! You write bar talk. The type of thing you write you can hear in any bar on any day.”
    I have always been one of those people who do everything wrong. This is essentially because I am not involved in the march.
    Nothing is quite real to me. Streetcars. bombs. bugs. women. lightglobes. areas of grass. All unreal. I am outside. Death which is true enough, even this appears unreal. Not so long ago I was in the charity ward of a hospital in one of our greater cities. This is wording it badly: the whole god damned hospital was a charity ward, a place to crawl around in, a kind of purgatory on earth where the dying are allowed to lay in the stink of their sheets for days and the appearance of a nurse is redemption and the appearance of a doctor is like God Himself. All this is pretty much outside . They do keep the men and the women in separate wards. This is about all the individuality, all the identity we were allowed to retain: what’s left of the gender. [* * *]
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    [To Ann Bauman]
    October 8, 1962
     
    [* * *] I have taken a 30 day leave of absence (without pay) from my post office job. The job was driving me mad (if you’ll allow a platitude), but I find this time to drink and gamble—think—also leads to madness.
    I was 42 on August 16th. That I have lived this long is a true miracle. I cannot hope for many more days. They will catch me. They will get me in their bloody net and I will have done.
    I wish Sacramento were around the corner. I am usually—in spite of all doubt and razors and grief—fairly strong, but tonight I would have liked to talk to you. This letter then will have to do—and perhaps tomorrow—t & t & tomorrow—I will be more the hard steel German-Polack who bats out the sounds of living from the top of a beercan.
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    Photographs were needed for the Outsider feature .
     
     
    [To Jon Webb]
    [?October 15, 1962]
     
    Well, I have been shot. It’s all over.
    J. phoned and I told him I needed to be shot and J. is a great contact man and he came up with a brother-in-law, one John Stevens who works in a factory and shoots on the side, so over they came from Pasadena, J. and Stevens and J.’s wife and some other young man (I never did quite get where he fit), and they dragged the stuff in, and somebody said, “This guy doesn’t even look like a writer,” which is something I have heard before and before and before. Such as, “You wouldn’t think he was the guy who wrote those poems…” Or, “I don’t know, I expected, I expected well, more fire out of you.” People have these ideas of what a writer should be, and this is set up both by the movies and by the writers themselves. We can’t deny that such people as D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas and so forth had a scabbard of personality that cut down into people. I say or do nothing brilliant. The most brilliant thing I do is to get drunk—which any fool can do. If there is any dramatics in me, it must wait on the Art Form. If there is any ham in me it must wait on the Art Form. If there is any D. H. Lawrence in me it must wait on the A.F. I am pretty much tired and when it comes to playing writer, somebody else will have to do it.
    Anyhow, they set the thing up and I got out the beer and J. and his wife talked to me, trying to make me forget the camera, but I’d be a fool to forget the camera, my mind is not that bad. If there were a snake in the room I would not forget the snake in the room. And flick, flick, you could hear the thing going. It is not essentially a happy mood and I kept thinking, this has nothing to do with the poem, this is how men die. Kennedy might phone me any day now and ask me to do a foreword to a campaign speech or something, and I will have to tell him what Frost did not. So flick, flick, more beer, another chair, another shirt, another cigarette, J.’s wife laughing, enjoying it all, like watching a bear poked with a cigarette. Then they stuck me behind the