the difference between a bad poet and a good one is luck

I suppose so. I was living in an attic in Philadelphia It became very hot in the summer and so I stayed in the bars. I didn’t have any money and so with what was almost left I put a small ad in the paper and said I was a writer looking for work . . . which was a god damned lie; I was a writer looking for a little time and a little food and some attic rent. a couple days later when I finally came home from somewhere the landlady said, there was somebody looking for you. and I said, there must be some mistake. she said, no, it was a writer and he said he wanted you to help him write a history book. oh, fine, I said, and I knew with that I had another week’s rent—I mean, on the cuff— so I sat around drinking wine on credit and watching the hot pigeons suffer and fuck on my hot roof. I turned the radio on real loud drank the wine and wondered how I could make a history book interesting but true. but the bastard never came back, and I had to finally sign on with a railroad track gang going West and they gave us cans of food but no openers and we broke the cans against the seats and sides of railroad cars a hundred years old with dust the food wasn’t cooked and the water tasted like candlewick and I leaped off into a clump of brush somewhere in Texas all green with nice-looking houses in the distance I found a park slept all night and then they found me and put me in a cell and they asked me about murders and robberies. they wanted to get a lot of stuff off the books to prove their efficiency but I wasn’t that tired and they drove me to the next big town fifty-seven miles away the big one kicked me in the ass and they drove off. but I lucked it: two weeks later I was sitting in the office of the city hall half-asleep in the sun like the big fly on my elbow and now and then she took me down to a meeting of the council and I listened very gravely as if I knew what was happening as if I knew how the funds of a halfass town were being dismantled. later I went to bed and woke up with teethmarks all over me, and I said, Christ, watch it, baby! you might give me cancer! and I’m rewriting the history of the Crimean War! and they all came to her house— all the cowboys, all the cowboys: fat, dull and covered with dust. and we all shook hands. I had on a pair of old bluejeans, and they said oh, you’re a writer, eh? and I said: well, some think so. and some still think so . . . others, of course, haven’t quite wised up yet. two weeks later they ran me out of town.