Beerspit Night and Cursing (11 page)

What was good for Pound is not good for me. I do not
WANT
a “map of the world in my head”, I do not want any such clutterings; the words I use will be mine because I know they will, and it’s as simple as that.

Christ, not a cig in the house, ah, here’s a butt unner a bacon rind! Sir Francis Bacon I salute you, ass…. Sheri, I enjoy ur stuff even tho u rack me and protect Sherman, an I may be rong on Jory, Christ am rong mos a ma life, but Sherman really seem
AWFULLY AMBITIOUS
and could make good door to door
SALESMAN
, an he may have thot I was somethin’ an’ in ur terms he is “innocent” but the innocents are more patrons of hell than the enemy, I dunno I dunno I dunno…if he would only sit still for a minute and keep his god d. hands off the telephone. I must stop knocking Jory, tho—for some reason I do not feel good doing it.

Well, I don’t know what the hell.

Of course, passant poems tire and I am tiring of them but I must be tired enough so that a new expressive medium is just not another conclamation, but hell, all this wiring and writing down is not only stupid but tiring. It is in doing—and in another way, not doing—that we renew? The seasons are not stupid, the days and the nights, can we ever beat them? Need we? I think so. You, Sheri, dislike Buk disliking cat-killing birds, but I do and must face myself with lackings in the face of so-called normal intelligence that accepts the inevblty. of
NATURE
. I can only accept what the animal
BUK
says in the unlearning. Too much has been taught. We must be
UNTAUGHT
. I believe that is why I enjoy the company of slaughterhouse workers, boxers, whores, Communists, queers, jockeys, waitresses—their knowledge is
SPINAL
.

…soon’s I get poem or something I will send on up.

Rite now you tell Po’ Li my head feels like burnt-out lite gobble.

L.,

Buk-thing

[
postcard dated by SM 13 October 1960, written around drawing of CB being chased by several women
]

Deer Sheri: “leveret” is a hare in the first year of its age…still trying to clean this place up: met animal in bathroom this morning the size of sick camel—I left and went down to gas
station. Still no word on 15 or 20 pomes I sent to S.F. Review so nothin’ to show u for possible A&P. much jitter life: editor pro. usin’ pomes to wipe windshield—or worse…basta! basta!…and so we scratch for a name and a way.

L.,

Buk

Los Angeles, Calif. Oct. 19 or 20 or wot, 1960

Dear Sheri, muh:

beast-time passing of scars through closed windows, and a senseless sun,
peine forte et dure
, the cuckold of unreason, a Samson hesitates in the fine web of quiver and titan spires, and no Samson at all—say the buprestid beetle or ordinary man can only grin esperanto hurricanes closer to coma. and if beetles grin, men wear hairshirts to cover their wisdom. looky, baby, what I mean here: splendid then: the caprification and the didactic load, but what are you going to do for passion when there’s only India and only India can amend the spare revenge, the sparrow-lovers,
si vis me flere dolendum est primum ipse tibi
, the oxen are as golden as the sun through golden eyes, but now the tablets sit in morphia, and hear hear!!, doctrines and deductions curd into a leaf and die, not because we fail ourselves, but other certain empires we shut away with a mouldy and indelicate, stucco, pontifical nay.

Sure, old friend, I’ve read Pound and Eliot and Cummings and I can toss the words fancy, see here: the spathic lameness of reverie in metempirical phrases is the catch-crotch of the high bulgarians, and I am the last to blot or censure the mystery and high-dove go of the language, it is simply that coming out of the slaughterhouses and whorehouses wilted and impugned with
foretaste,—the placenta must go, and the intortion and the divine bullshit, and also…the eunuchs, the civets, the cloisters of footmen, the lavender founts, oblique sirens, everything dastardly sirroco and weeping

and the wergild price is not enough, nor the fancy getaway run of rabbits or rats or genuii—

…the drunker one gets the more mountains appear in the hill of the head, and barking like cats and snarling like gods, and all the puppies in the boot with tap-root smiles and the lion chewing off my left leg and belching blue sparks, ya gotta have a forest and colza and perch and reverie, and letters from Spain and a bag of wet walnuts; and really love, or thinking about love, or getting ready for love—or hate, which is the same thing in a smaller way. the welt of living is so hackneyed, let me luxuriate and mull over the junk of death, puffing through my simple lungs, my spiral brain twisted and decayed as a rotten tooth; the jocund blood rattles in its simple sack, spying on Time, ah ha, but what can be said? It has all been said. We are a sub-species, a sub-species of saving and doing, well-read, inbred, half-wit, constipated roar, rabbit-roar…o, beg in the roads wet with perfume and palsy, oh shit! these soft-hearted sounds—would that I could drum alive the granite gods! would that this rip of red across my eyes mean the voices and sounds and figures, that the full haze of the iguana/—oh christ, how do you say it say it say it drunk and not-drunk, ignorant in the high-seas of death, a gutter-guy scratching for a comb in catalysis of peaches and tigers and beer, can you tell me that frogs are less a manoeuvre than our leap beyond the lycée of breathing?

burn there greater things than poems or blondes in nylon and garter, crst, I mean the young blondes, Sheri, of beerspit night and cursing; burn there greater things than fighting for your life in a 4 rounder, the gloves bombing your guts when you only want love?…or people who think you are a bastard because you can sit in a room for 3 weeks, the sick shades
down, without the desire to look upon the face of your brother? tell me, is this madness? burn there greater things than when the music claws and crawls like ants from the floor, up your arms, your chest, your ass, and sings in your head, sings words, crazy words and love, and all the walls are forests of burning music and you laugh drunk-weird and move to the typewriter and all the crazy blondes and all the crazy gloves, Shakespeare as close as the pepper shaker, Beethoven in your wallet along side the hock ticket and the name of a whore, the blood of 4-rounders coming like an aria, and out the
DOOR
(the typewriter can wait) into the jails, the dives, the fox-crazy traffic, the torn signs yelling names of old lovers through the malaria of breathing, and see see see
BANG
, already the bartender marks you with his scientist’s eye and the old whores preen in the mirror, and the night is fine by god by god by god, juke boxes and screaming and the deer marching on the windows, and you begin talking through your scarred unholy face, you lie about the last 4-rounder you won in ’53, or you remember the time you were in the same magazine with Lorca and Sartre and everybody else. well, shit. it’s old stuff. but so are magnolias and wars and mountains and bullfights, and everywhere the sound comes on and a woman calls your name and you laugh and it doesn’t matter, and the bartender comes on like God, heaven in a bottle, the cash-register of hell, and purgatory until 2 a.m., so drink to the dead bull, the dead poem, dead love, everything dead in the face of morning, your fingers slowly closing about the lie and tossing it down your throat.

…there is nothing subtle about dying or dumping garbage, or the spider, and this fist full of nickels and the barking of dogs tonight when the beast puffs on beer and moonlight and

and I hold to the wall not man enough to cry

as the city dumps its sorrow in

wine bottles and stale kisses,

and the handcuffs and crutches and slabs

fuck like mad

got yr letter: awright, the classics are a condition, ok wit me. I don wanna make a romantic outa ya, u stay sprung out and
yet set tha weigh ya r…. Wang I heard frum another source, tell me he can no make his mind up w. he prefer man or woman. I dunno, I don care, but seems ¾ of Art world homo.

Ya see wot heffect y has got ona me? Yos gut me rritin’
Martinellies
jaw haw rite, a rite, a rite…da stars are thick wit sickness, bad-time sickness, vury, an I jus knock pounda coffee on floor, all over, n ahm toooooo sick to pick up wit hit and high sit shit and looky upon it, the crumbs of coffee coffeeeeee-effeeeee sittin lookin at me wit all its I’s, an nobody wins…I must out and mail this.

sheri muh deer,

Buk goin now—

Buk

L.A., Oct. 21

Dear Sherelli:

More list a “Yankee names”. Your boys Ginsburg, Sherman,
McClure…

Your last letter a real swath of sythces, but why do you blame
ME
? Not sythces, sickles—what is it you cut wheat down with? I got a dictonairy but I am sick today, bleeding.

What Wang does to his contemporaires they may enhohjoy but am no contemp a Wang’s—women for me, and not too many.

I am still pickin’ up coffee, whata life.

Don eat that lobster or what.

wen I say seawater infected with gentle distillers of decay—that me that a little of that in you…will eat out the pestilence and impurity. I don’ see why I am so hard to get across to u.

on the utter hand
I UNDERSTAND YOU PERFECTLY
.

it is one hell of a situation.

anytime u are in L.A., stop by, preferably alone—I will not rape you. now do not get angry because I invited you through the door. this—from Buk—is a rarity. unlisted phone:
NO
. 1-6385.

good day at track yestiday, could do no wrong. No, it was day before yestiday, beer waitress blew me a kiss.

no pomes no nottin now, sick sick sick

going to bed to dream about fountains, rome fts, riot founts, blue blooo sleep.

the beginning of dust.

ok Shed, easy now.

yah,

Charles
Buk

Horse angels, feather-whip gaiety Hoc octobra hoc hastra hixty [27 October 1960]

m d sher—

oke, vents open; horse sky animal dangling, head hed hed eye, bang bang bang
BLUE CLOUDS NOT WHITE
, They iza comin in, hit d. double $117.00 bang bang, the bulls are veering off, sum otha wins—10, twnet fift on nose, hell wallet fulla stuffins not of money but of
TIME
to breathe n by a paint brush n new typewriter ribbon n house, am gona buy a little shack Sheri n I may quit everything and huddle in the corner and dream spain and Spam and dogs with wowfree muzzles on deathsass, so look, I received the photo a Martingale and
Ernie
back against sea chalk cliffs that will dip with bombers and sigh; ah, writ, thisa good thing u remember Gramps Jr. because altho I have failed n my first poems r no morean scratchings,
I AM LOADED FOR BEAR
an I cannot stop myself: I am six feet taller evra morning wen I wake up, no matter if wi hoo or what or how sick six, ther is somethin wirlin, n tha t weeh it gost, go dame u, u got me writin lak a friggin goat in lacepatch a curtain belly ballet bullets, so.

Very well. And so. The cliffs and Ernst. I wish u very well.