Beerspit Night and Cursing (31 page)

Buk

[
postcard dated by SM 25 April 1961
]

Shed:

o, o, I find out now

m. wood little rocks that burn…cracked one a my only saucers. now sky and ceiling filled with grace. little spiders without legs floating down in air…Pascin alcoholic, prematurely gray, at age 45 looked 20 years older. Suicide, June 2nd., 1930. Born 1885…

well,

Buk

25/april/61 sm pbx 46 san gregorio calif

in dealing with superior people—total freedom of action & truth at every degree is necessary & possible

in dealing with inferior people beware of setting even a minor model for action…because…the inferior person is apelike & does not know the Laws of Harmony but only the Law of Imitation…& will
APE
any model set before he/she

a good rule to discover the inner man…observe if what you
place before him is carried on by him in a way which harmonises…or does he merely ape…or imitate…& stop all flow of intelligence/

April, perhaps 29, xtywon, nited states

Yes, Shed:

You tell
McNaughton kitty
I am quiet old man who drinks gallons of beer because his insides missing people who meet me (and I try to keep this from happening) say like poet William Pillin,

why, I thought you were a
YOUNGER
man…

or like a woman I once lived with:

said:

I don’t know, I thought you’d be more…

More
WHAT
?

oh, more
fiery
! or something. I thought from reading your poems…

They don’t understand that a man can be sitting in a chair blinking like a staid frog and it is a gentle seeping of the light, in…and if you ever
do
finally throw a fit as all creatures finally must do when the nerves are caught raw…they run to the secret lover to tell about the beast.

;;;this pighead won’t read; I come to grips with plenty of shit elsewhere, and I must draw down my laws for non-shit hours so that I may breathe.

The boys evidently think I am something. I am amused at a letter that I rec. today, beginning: “I am extremely pleased that you are willing to have your poetry read at our session May 5.”

They are getting a boy to babble my words into the mike. Fine. But they suggest I meet the “reader”, if I want to. Hell, I might as well do it myself if I have to meet some goddamned “reader”. Why I wanna meet a reader? They want buttons off
my shirt, or what? I’ve always been a loner, and because a few people have read my poems I am not going to skid off half-cocked and let them piss on me. If the poem bothers them enough, let them make it walk on their airwaves. I brought it out of the singular odd womb that is Buk. I will not cut the head off my poem and say it cannot go on the air, but I will not curl its hair and dress it in Sunday best for a few admirers to paw over…Where were these bastards when I was starving & freezing in Atlanta in shirtsleeves trying to get up the guts to reach over my head and touch the raw wires that hung globeless like the snakes of Hell while I tried to put down the word? Where were they? They were slobbering up the milk from some warm mother’s tit…and they still are.

Don’t be mama shed slapping at my bloody mouse soul and telling me to go warble in a mike…What can I tell them when they say—

Could you give us any information you’d like used concerning publication and life history?

What can I tell them? Doesn’t the poem
SAY
?

Jory fooled me and still does because now and then he manages to get off a poem in completely original (compared to others) vernacular.

But the hours I have watched him on my phone dialing the powers-that-be. Some editor. “This is Jory Sherman. I just got into town. I’m over at Charles Bukowski’s and, etc. etc., I want to give some readings and etc. etc.”

Jory never knew it. He thought it was perfectly natural. And I did not let him know that his soul had pewked before me.

And the way he dragged me around like a lame dog when I told him I did not want it, and I finally had to say no.

And he still writes very well, at times, and I am puzzled.

That is why I do not break it off completely with him. He was one time blessed by some very dark and quiet god and it is this core of a blessing that keeps him running halfway toward a sinking sun no matter how many times he leaps the rails. He’s lucky but doesn’t know it.

I took a lashing of fire to even open my eyelids.

If any half-pale god speaks through me it is because I lifted rocks and killed rattlers across my path. I am not blessed; I have been beaten witless and mumbling. I know very little besides
shades of light and that one man must always be one. The Jorys stun me with their easy victories.

Jory would spew his guts readily into the mike, into the assembled throng…I only
WONDER
what the assembled throng is??? Duty, or Pound with the term “education” always ready, or Ginsburg following the “line”—it’s not god damned
NEARLY ENOUGH
!!!

For Sherman it would just mean more clean linen, a photograph in an honorable position, and shoes for baby. Ginsburg and Pound, of course, are rock-hard in
SIGHT
—that is, whatever they see

THEY SEE ROCK-HARD AND ALL THE WAY
, and this is important.

But Ginsburg fails hard as H.D. fails soft. They both fail in unnatural poses, duty and the Greeks be damned. You tell me that once you were unable to understand H.D. Perhaps someday you will be able to understand C.B. And I don’t mean Christ’s Balls.

There are only 2 contemporaries I look up to—Pound and Jeffers, and as the days go on, it is almost becoming a level stare. Martinelli is the most beautiful female I have ever known, and I can only place it in these simple terms.

…look here…the horror I related, I know it was wrong, but I am saved because I have others others that have not happened to the average, and they will not know. Balls, what does it matter? What does even the poem matter? I can feel my bones now rid of my rotten belly my rotten mind I can feel my bones now straightening and sighing and what can they do with me without their microphones and Shermans, and their Cubas to chew like tough steaks?

Shed, I have something that will amuse you. I don’t know, it is the Chinese or somebody something like that

I read sometimes but fail to get it straight.

They say this—that the way you live
NOW
will cause you to be what you are in reincarnation—that is, if you have been pretty tough straight baby, you prob. lion in reincar. If you pretty poor piss, maybe you end up next time being snail rat what have you…lowest of forms.

I do not disclaim this view any more than I disclaim boy on cross with nails. All views good to me in what they bring—I will drink beer with a capitalist or a red and fuck either of their
wives when they are not looking if it seems within the proper mainspring of unwinding, the living thing to do.

But what I am saying now is that I see people now with the animal they are
going to be
ALREADY TAKING SHAPE WITHIN THEM
while they are still supposed to be homosapiens among us.

There is one person I know that perfectly well reminds me of an ant-eater. o, it is so plain, I do wish you could see it! And another, not even an
animal
, just a fuckin’ bunch of sunflower seeds in pod to be pecked dry by the passing birds. Many are not so easy to pinpoint, and the animal-god may have troubles too…segregationist troubles to make Georgia and Alabama seem well G. and A. only. Anyhow, out at the track today it was hot and as usual I was hiding my coat over an empty counter that is never used except on Saturdays, and I noticed a little rat-face watching me. I sensed the evil there; I thought simply not much good, that one. And sure enough, after the last race, I reached for the coat and it was gone. Nothing tragic, certainly. He’d even put up a little box so he could reach over and get it, short-legged nothing of a nip of nothing. And when he got it home he found out it couldn’t, wdnt fit. What then? A hock shop? 2 dollars? I would not even burn this type in hell. They do not even deserve to suffer pain. Let him be just a bit of sand caught in somebody’s sock in the year 5000 A.D.

I hearby consign him to return as
SAND
.

Sent an English teacher, dept. of Louisiana State College, your way, A and P with some pomes. Maybe he won’t show. Has a tendency to be blithe and clever. Writes a strong letter but poems, so far, weak. William Corrington. Maybe you can straighten him, if he shows.

Sorry, darling, you must stand these with me.

It is a test of our love.

And he is far more idealistic than Sherman. And, I think, down under all the coating ok if you can shiv it away.

…I may not be able to write for a while, some bit of minor trouble, so trying to get as much out of way as possible…do not sleep off yet…

I must turn my back on H.D. because we do not fit. She started basically wrong because she was afraid to use her real name because Hilda Doolittle did not sound like poetess. And other things I attempted to explain in last letter back, but
maybe I had a “skinful” or you thot I had or wot whot wot.

always have a skinfull, how you expect meee to keep moving on, woman?

…Man is not
supposed
to understand the “nature of the female”. If he did he would avoid her entirely and nature’s natural plan would go down the drain.

Perhaps you are right in saying I have never had a woman, and only the fear of Buk, but it’s a buk wanting to live to see a natural daylight and not an accessory to a pair of breasts and a womb like it seems he just got away from not so long ago, and here we are looking for another
MOTHER
sucking teats, begging, slobbering…

A woman must give me
BOTH
flesh and spirit, and unless I am drunk, I will not take less than both.

Pascin wanted to bring the picture-frame women, the blasé pure untouchable nudes not only down to the end of his cock but down to the end of his vulgar (so-called) brush where he could say you bastards make me sick this motherly white god awful balloon blob surrounded by angels, is not it…this is it and this is love this is love that modern man shall know love running and sloppy and unglorified and still for it all when it happens love or sex or fire just as
GOOD
az yours your Greek white banana love without come or after-effect, this is us sloppy and lazy and filthy and real this is us loving the only way we know how.

No matter that he couldn’t draw hands and feet! He wasn’t looking for hands and feet.

Degas ok. just going to get him a little longer to slip into the banana world, just as any new of insight against Greek-Romano Classical tradition which you seen to uphold, and which I admire but cert. can see the cracks forming in—

the profane is the beautiful and the sacred is yesterday. You must bury your h.d’s and yesterdays; only pop pound seems strong enough to advance with us…t.s.eliot a string of beans, wallace stevens just the stringing of a name across an autographed copy…only Jeffers a real buk-boy throwing on a log and saying “fuck ’em. I made a god outa crap, but they’re making crap into a god.”

Woman dialates from her love of man into the love and
extension of man into another man (son, offspring), and original man is singular and therefore jealous until he sees part of his own image…then all blunts because the image has been broken into three…

I took the olib. you sent me and rolled it into newspaper and smoked it. Not bad. got a vision and headache and blood-spitting. Vision mostly I was drinking water from trough. Long head and ears. I was either rabbit or donkey.

and you tell Gib that a little leaking on old car ok. It only save you oil change worry. However, if she come out too fast, valve-grind or piston-heads may be worth more than car. Rings or plugs won’t help. Best deal I know is to work in a little sawdust (very fine) into crankcase, sift it down oil-fill while listening to engine work and as sounds better and better keep adding but when starts to choke burn engine awhile until you get true soft sound

and if too much smoke from ass add proper smokeless additives, and then drive whole mess down to salesman on yoused car lot, n act prop. naive so he won’t pull crankcase plug.

I only say these things because the fucking guy took my coat while I was trying to nurse a 3 to one shot in with 50 on the nose.

No more drawings for a moment, Shed.

Big vultures come to pick my eyes.

love as truly as I can make it,

Buk

L.A.
May 1, 1961

Dear Sheri:

They have found me a boy to read my lines, and now the gods allow me to go ahead and do what pleases me.

L.,

Buk

Los Angeles, Calif.
May ?, 1961

Dear Sheri:

Enclosed more Kaja. This a little better, I think, than the others.

Also, enclosed photo Buk. You may got crows to scare away.

Love baby,

Buk

[
note on bottom in SM’s hand
:] She emotes at the lowest conceit heat—

14/maggio/61 pobx 756/ half moon calif

buk/ your foto is just what yr letters say: hermit of sort; poet & man of many adventures;

that kaja lowest yet/ quote from local newspaper: “A recent New York State police report on the typical check forger published in NY Times described him as a native white male, older than other criminals, with high intelligence & residing in an acceptable residential area. He is personally likable attractive & ingratiating & has a knack of convincing others that he is painfully pure in heart. He likes to live well & is a past master in fooling workaday merchants & well to do widows”

sounds
JUST LIKE
the “kaja” female’s totally UNpoetic dyed in wool, pidgeon hole mind soft shit & cold cream spew/ no thank you buk/ when we finally pin her down she’ll be a runt with thick glasses on & an overly active pituatary gland/ oh shit ever since ezra pound did “portraits” via word; every crab louse that learned to write is doing them;