Nothing in my experience, prepared me for the kind of honest open love you gave me.  I'm so used to bullshit and hostility, deceit and pettiness, evil and hatred.  Those things are my natural habitat.  They have shaped me.  I look at the world through eyes that suspect, doubt, fear, hate, cheat, mock, are selfish and vain.  All things unacceptable, I see them as natural and have even come to accept them as such.  I look around the ugly vile cell and know that I truly belong in a place this dank and dirty, for where else should I be?  There's water all over the floor from the fucking toilet that don't flush right.  The shower is filthy and the thin mattress they gave me is almost black, it's so old.  I have no pillow.  There are dead cockroaches in the corners.  At nite there are mosquitoes and the lite is very dim.  I'm alone here with my thoughts and I can feel the oldness.  Remember I told you about The Oldness?  And you told me how ugly it was - the oldness, the oldness.  I can hear the tumbrel wheels creek.  So fucking ugly and coming so close to me.  When I was a child … I had a dream about being beheaded.  But it was more than just a dream.  More like a memory.  It brought me right out of the bed.  And it was sort of a turning point in my life … Recently it has begun to make a little sense.  I owe a debt, from a long time ago.  Nicole, this must depress you.  I've never told anybody of this thing, except my mother the nite I had that nitemare and she came in to comfort me but we never spoke of it after that.  And I started to tell you one nite and I told you quite a bit of it before it became plain to me that you didn't want to hear it.  There have been years when I haven't even thought much of it at all and then something (a picture of a guillotine, a headmans block, or a broad ax, or even a rope) will bring it all back and for days it will seem I'm on the verge of knowing something very personal, something about myself.  Something that somehow wasn't completed and makes me different.  Something I owe, I guess.  Wish I knew.

Once you asked me if I was the devil, remember?  I'm not.  The devil would be far more clever than I, would operate on a much larger scale and of course would feel no remorse.  So I'm not Beelzebub.  And I know the devil can't feel love.  But I might be further from God than I am from the devil.  Which is not a good thing.  It seems that I know evil more intimately than I know goodness and that's not a good thing either.  I want to get even, to be made even, whole, my debts paid (whatever it may take!) to have no blemish, no reason to feel guilt or fear.  I hope this ain't corny, but I'd like to stand in the sight of God.  To know that I'm just and right and clean.  When you're this way you know it.  And when you're not, you know that too.  It's all inside of us, each of us - but I guess I ran from it and when I did try to approach it, I went about it wrong, became discouraged, bored, lazy, and finally unacceptable.  But what do I do now?  I don't know.  Hang myself?

I've thought about that for years, I may do that.  Hope the state executes me?  That's more acceptable and easier than suicide.  But they haven't executed anybody here since 1963 (just about the last year for legal executions anywhere).  What do I do, rot in prison?  Growing old and bitter and eventually work this around in my mind to where it reads that I'm the one who's getting fucked around, that I'm just an innocent victim of society's bullshit?  What do I do?  Spend a life in prison searching for the God I've wanted to know for such a long time?  Resume my painting?  Write poetry?  Play handball?  Eat my heart out for the wondrous love you gave me that I threw away Monday nite because I was so spoiled and couldn't immediately have a white pickup truck I wanted?  What do I do?  We always have a choice, don't we?

I'm not asking you to answer these questions for me, Angel, please don't think that I am.  I have to make my own choice.  But anything you want to comment on or suggest, or say, is always welcome.

God, I love you, Nicole.

Will you send me a picture of you.  I want one real bad.  In color 'cause you have such a beautiful color to you.  Hope I see you again.  I get choked up sometimes when I look at you.  The last few times I've seen you that's happened to me.  I kind of lose my sense of time and place.  It's like shifting into another awareness almost sorta going blank and being aware only of a Love (capitol L) that can't adequately be put into words.  I look into your eyes and I can see for at least a thousand years.  I see no evil in you, or menace.  I see beauty and strength and love that doesn't have any bullshit to it.  You're just you and you're real and you're not afraid, are you?  I haven't seen you show any fear.  That's remarkable.  Fear is an ugly thing.  I haven't seen any in you.  It's like you've passed your test in life and know it.  Like you've been up to the edge.  And looked over.  You're precious, Nicole.  These things I write here are things I know are true and they make up part of the reason I love you so utterly.  I love that vein in your forehead.  And I love the vein in your right tit.  Didn't know I loved that one, did you?

I can hear a radio in the background and they're playing "Afternoon Delight".  We had a few afternoon delights, didn't we?  I made you come one time in the afternoon and we were both covered with sweat.  I could have held you forever then.

When I thought I had lost you - Nicole, that Monday night, the next day, and the days that followed, I felt like a man whose flesh had been stripped.  I've never felt such pain.  And it kept building.  I couldn't drown it and I couldn't shake it.  It shadowed all of my hours.  I once thought that I'd really been through some rough things, that I was immune to pain.  One time I was chained to a bed for two weeks spread-eagled hand and foot, flat on my back.  When they came in to laughingly ask me how I was doing, I spit on them and got punched out for it.  And they shot me with that foul drug Prolixin and made a zombie out of me for four months.  I was virtually paralyzed.  I couldn't stand up without help and when I was raised to my feet I'd wonder what the fuck I wanted to stand up for and I'd sit back down.  When it was driving me the worst I went for three weeks without sleep.  I just sat on the corner of the bed - I hallucinated to the edge of insanity.  I wondered if I'd ever be the same again, if I'd ever be able to draw and paint again.  I lost about 50 pounds.  I just couldn't get the food to my mouth.  Getting up to take a piss was a major effort, I dreaded it, it would take me about 15 to 20 minutes - I couldn't get the pants buttoned.  After a while I could barely see; my eyes had filled with some kind of white discharge that dried real thick on the lashes and I couldn't reach up to wipe it away and I couldn't see through it.  Every 3 days or so they'd take me out of my cell to shower and shave.  I hated that, it was such an effort!  They'd hand me this electric razor and stand me in front of a mirror.  I'd just stand there.  There was no way on earth I could get that razor to my face.  Sometimes they'd talk bad to me, say: "well, you're one of them tough guys, huh?  Can't button your pants . . . "  shit like that.  I just had to look at them and take it.  Sometimes I'd reply: "Fuck your mother, you pig."  They'd get pretty pissed about that but it wasn't really much consolation to me … I never begged them and I never cried not even when I was alone and I was completely alone.  I knew that would pass, eventually, and it did.  I was able to shake it.

That was a bad experience.  I've had others - unpleasant experiences of a long duration.  I've always shaken them off and felt strong for it.

But I've never felt the kind of pain I felt when I thought I'd lost you.  I couldn't shake that off - I only wanted you back, that's all I knew.  I stayed at your house a few nites, and it was so lonely, Nicole.  I was depressed.  I'd walk those rooms and wonder where you were.  When you called me that Thursday at work to tell me you were moving I felt my heart breaking.  Really.  It's a physical pain - it's not just in the mind.  It was something I could feel.  And it felt bad.  Friday I looked for you and I didn't know where to look.  Your mother wouldn't tell.

I felt so alone and depressed.  Like I was in a void.  And it didn't lessen any.  I had lost the only thing of real value I'd ever had or known.  My life had lost meaning, it had become a gulf, empty and void but for the shadows and the ever-present ghosts who have followed me for so long.

I don't ever want to feel that pain again.  I am so completely in love with you, Nicole.  I miss you so much, Baby.  When I read your two letters and picture your pretty face the darkness rolls back and I know that I am loved.  And that's a beautiful thing.  The hurt stops.  We were together for only two months but it is the fullest two months I've known in this life.  I wouldn't trade it for anything.  Just two months but I believe that I have known you, that we've known each other, for so much longer - a thousand, two thousand years?  -I don't know what we were to each other before, I will know, as you will also when it becomes ultimately clear one day - but I feel we were always lovers.  I knew this when I saw you that first nite, May 13th, Thursday, at Sterlings.  There are some things you just know.  And it went so deep so fast - it was a recognition, a re-newal, a reunion.  Me and you Nicole; from a long time ago.  I have always loved you, Angel.  Let's don't ever hurt each other again.

(From the psychiatric hospital)

A posse member's supervising me because I have a pencil - they broke it in half then tore the eraser out - I asked them what the fuck that was for and they told me so that I wouldn't stab anybody.  Unbelievable!  . . . Nicole, what the fuck kind of journey am I on?

Three nuts are having an argument outside my door because one of them emptied my urinal an hour ago and forgot to chart it.  The first loony is accusing the second loony of gross negligence and dereliction of duty in his failure to properly chart on the log hanging outside my door the time of day he emptied my urinal.  The third loony is bouncing from foot to foot trying to get a word in edgewise.  The second loony is becoming quite excited and is trying to appeal to me to settle this national disaster.  I don't know what the fuck to say but I'd hate to see this poor buffoon lose his T.V.  privileges or something - he's the same chap who sat so patiently outside my door the other day while I wrote a letter - so I tell 'em "Hey, it's okay man, everything is really cool, this guy is on the ball.  Didn't spill a drop and brought that urinal back clean as a whistle!"  Now they don't know what to say but it appears to have settled the argument.  They're getting a pen to make the required chart entry.

Oh, Nicole, I'm so lonesome.  I miss the life we had.  I miss being in the same bed with you, holding your pretty face in my hands looking into your charming alarming eyes.  Coming home to you at nite - how slowly the days went when I was at work!

God, Nicole!  You're the most important person in the world.

I remember one time when we were fucking and we were really bucking up against each other.  Hard.  Wild.  How I'd love to do that.

The drinking fountain is across from my cell and it is really funny the way some of these guys drink water.  This one dude sucks up thep the water for 2 or 3 minutes at a time!  He 'bout got in a fight cause of it yesterday - this other cat got impatient, pushed him and said, "You don't need to drink so long."  Another dude really slurps, I've never heard anything like it, he sounds like a sump pump.  A truly startling noise.

What a bum life.

There's a one man band parading up and down the hall making strange tuneless lip farts.