pain, I’ve watched men have their entire lives destroyed for
55 cents an hour or less.
well,
maybe it’s the masonry or maybe it’s the water pump, or maybe it’s the
hog in the hedge, or maybe it’s the end of luck. angels are flying
low tonight with burning wings, your mother is the victim of
her ordinary nightmares as 40 faucets drip, the cat has
leukemia, there are only 245 days left until Christmas, and my dental
technician hates me.
so now
I wake up with a stiff neck instead of a stiff
dick and
you
can always reach me here in
east Hollywood but
please please please
don’t
try.
I never bring my wife
I park, get out, lock the car, it’s a perfect day, warm
and easy, I feel all right, I begin walking toward the
entrance and a little fat guy joins me. he walks at my side.
I don’t know where he came from.
“hi,” he says, “how you doing?”
“o.k.,” I say.
he says, “I guess you don’t remember me. you’ve seen me
maybe two or three times.”
“maybe so,” I say, “I’m at the track every day.”
“I come maybe three or four times a month,” he says.
“with your wife?” I ask.
“oh no,” he says, “I never bring my wife.”
“who do you like in the first?” he asks.
I tell him that I haven’t bought my Racing Form yet.
we walk along and I walk faster. he struggles to keep up.
“where do you sit?” he asks.
I tell him that I sit in different places.
“that goddamned Gilligan,” he says, “is the worst
jock here. I lost a bundle on him the other day. why
do they use him?”
I tell him that Whittingham and Longden think he’s all
right.
“sure, they’re friends,” he answers. “I know something about
Gilligan. want to hear it?”
I tell him to forget it.
we are nearing the newspaper stand near the entrance
and I slant off toward it as if I was going to buy
a paper.
“good luck,” I tell him and drift off.
he appears startled, his eyes look shocked, he reminds me
of a woman who feels secure only when somebody’s thumb is
up her ass.
he looks around, spots a gray-haired old man with a
limp, rushes up, catches stride with the old guy and begins
talking to him.
I pay my way in, find a seat far from everybody, sit down.
I have seven or eight good quiet minutes, then I hear a
movement: a young man has seated himself near me, not next
to me but one seat away although there are hundreds of
empty seats.
another Mickey Mouse, I think. why do they always find
me?
I keep working at my figures.
then I hear his voice: “Blue Baron will take the
feature.”
I make a note to scratch that dog and I look up and
it seems that his remark was directed to me: there’s
nobody else within fifty yards.
I see his face.
he has a face women would love: utterly bland and
blank.
he has remained almost untouched by circumstance, he’s
a miracle of zero.
I gaze upon him, enchanted.
it’s like looking at a lake of milk
never rippled by even a pebble.
I look back down at my Form.
“who do you like?” he asked.
“sir,” I tell him, “I prefer not to talk.”
he looks at me from behind his perfectly trimmed black
mustache, there is not one hair out of place;
I’ve tried mustaches; I’ve never cared enough for mirrors
to keep a mustache looking that unnatural.
he says, “I’ve heard about you. you don’t like to talk
to anybody.”
I get up, take my papers, walk three rows down and sixteen
seats over. I go to my last resort, take out my
red rubber earplugs, jam them in.
being my brother’s keeper would only narrow me down to a
brick-walled place
where everything is the same.
I feel for the lonely, I sense their need, but I also feel
that the lonely are for one another and that they should
find each other and leave me alone.
so, plugs in, I miss the flag-raising ceremony, being deep
into the Form.
I would like to be human
if only they would let me.
going to the track is like going anywhere else except,
generally speaking,
there are more lonely people there, which doesn’t help.
they have a right to be there and I have a right to be there.
this is a democracy and we are all part of one
unhappy family.
an interview at 70
the interviewer leans toward
me, “some say that you are not
as wild as you used to
be.”
“well,” I say, “I can’t keep on
forever writing poems about
spilling beer into the laps of
whores.
a man matures and moves on to other
things.”
“but some still want the same
old Chinaski!”
“and that’s just what they’ve
got,” I say.
“tell us about the
racetrack,” he suggests.
“there’s nothing to
tell.”
“you have to wait
until he gets mellow
until after midnight
to hear the really good
stuff,”
says my wife.
the interviewer is not
used to waiting.
he stares at his
notes.
he wants some
grand statements, some
grand conclusions,
something grand to
happen now.
he is confused by his
misconceptions and
preconceptions.
and the worst thing
about him?
he’s not
wild
enough.
2 views
my friend says, how can you write so many poems
from that window? I write from the womb,
he tells me. the dark thing of pain,
the featherpoint of pain.
well, this is very impressive
only I know that we both receive a good many
rejections, smoke a great many cigarettes,
drink too much and attempt to steal each other’s
women, which is not poetry at all.
and he reads me his poems
he always reads me his poem
and I listen and do not say too much,
> I look out of the window,
and there is the same street
my street
my drunken, rained-on, sunned-on,
childrened-on street,
and at night I watch this street
sometimes
when it thinks I am not looking,
the 1 or 2 cars moving quietly,
the same old man, still alive, on his
nightly walk,
the shades of houses down,
love has failed but
hangs on
then lets go.
but now it is daylight and children
who will some day be old men and women
walking through last moments,
these children run around a red car
screaming their good nothings,
then my friend puts down his poem.
well, what do you think? he asks.
try so and so, I name a magazine,
and then oddly
I think of guitars under the sea
trying to play music;
it is sad and good and quiet.
he sees me standing at the window.
what’s out there?
look, I say,
and see…
he is eleven years younger than I.
he turns away from the window. I need a beer,
I’m out of beer.
I walk to the refrigerator
and the subject is closed.
van Gogh and 9 innings
the battleship nights in Georgia
when we all
went down.
do you know? there was this Russian who
leaped to music well enough to make you cry
and he went insane
and they put him someplace and fed
him and
shocked him with electric wires and cold water
and then
hot water and he wrote books about himself
he couldn’t read or
remember.
out at the ball game
in Atlanta
I watched them hurrying, sweating,
and I sat there thinking about the
Dutchman
(instead of the Russian)
the Dutchman with the toothbrush
stroke
who never learned to properly mix his
paints and who couldn’t make even a
whore love him
and it all ended then
for him and for the whore
and he cut off his ear and continued to
beg for paints
and they write books about him
now
but he’s dead and can’t read them
and I saw some of his stuff at a
gallery,
last year—they had it roped off and
guarded so you couldn’t touch the
work.
somebody won that ball game in Atlanta and the
whore
didn’t want his
ear.
9 a.m.
blazing as a fort blazes
this first impromptu note—
sunlight—
foul betrayer
breaking through kisses and perfume and nylon,
showing a city of broken teeth
and insane laws,
bringing a ruined alley to the eye,
this diamond in the rough;
and inside my palm
a small sore
berry-red
that even Christ w’d n’t ignore
as the ladies pass
shifting their rotted gears
and peppermint fences and spoiled dogs
blazing as
you burn;
9 a.m. sunlight
gives us apples and whores
and now thankfully
I can again remember
when I was young
when I walked in gold
when rivers had mirrors
and there was no end.
lousy day
in the old days
after the races I would often end up with a
high yellow or a crazy white in some motel
room
but now I’m 70 and have to get up four times
each night to piss
and about the only thing that really concerns me is
freeway traffic.
today I dropped $810.00 at the track and when
I tried to enter the freeway a
guy in a red Camaro almost ran me
off the road (red automobiles have always
annoyed me) so I swung after him, rode his
bumper hard, then swung around and we rode side-by-side.
looking over at him I saw he was a slight young
boy who looked like a cost accountant, so I ran
my window down and screamed at him while
honking, informing him that he was a piece
of subnormal dung but he just continued to stare
straight ahead so I hit the gas and left him
behind and my next thought was, I wonder if I
should tell my wife about this?
and then quickly a voice from somewhere
answered, don’t be a sucker, pal, she’ll
just turn it into an unflattering joke.
“oh, hahaha! he probably didn’t even know
you were there!”
if a man lives for 70 years he learns
one or two things—the first being: don’t confide unnecessarily
in your wife.
the second being: others may sometimes
understand you but
none of them will understand you
better than your wife
does.
sadness in the air
here I am alone sitting
like some wimp
listening to Chopin
the night wind blowing in
through the
torn curtains.
won $546 at the track today but
now I’m thinking that
dying is such a strange and
ordinary thing.
I just hope that I’ll never need
false teeth before I
go.
Wm. Holden cracked his head
on a coffee table
while drunk and
bled to death;
stiff and dead for 4 days
before they found him.
I wonder how Chopin went?
things pass away, that’s not
news.
here in L.A.
I’ve seen so many good
Mexican fighters
come and go
climbing through the
ropes
young and glistening with
ambition
and then
vanish.
where do they go?
where are they tonight
as I listen to Chopin?
maybe I’m in a better
business?
I don’t think so.
writers go fast
too
they forget how to lead
with a
straight hard sentence
then they teach class
write critical articles
bitch
get stale
>
vanish.
Holden slipped on a
throw rug
his head hitting the
nightstand
he had a .22 alcohol
blood count.
myself
I’ve gone down
many times usually
over a telephone cord.
I hate telephones
anyhow
whenever one rings
I jump.
people ask, “why do you
jump when the telephone
rings?”
if they don’t know
you can’t tell them.
it’s getting cold.
I go to shut the window.
I do.
Chopin continues.
when you drink alone
like Wm. Holden
sometimes you’ve got
something on your mind
that you can’t tell
anybody.
in many cases it’s
better to keep
silent.
we were not put here to
enjoy easy days and
nights
and when the telephone
rings
you too will know that
we’re all
in the wrong business
and if you don’t know
what that means
you don’t feel the
sadness in the air.
the great debate
he sent me his latest book.
I had once liked his writing
very much.
he had been wonderfully crude, simple,
troubled.
now he had learned how to gracefully
arrange his words and thoughts
on paper.
now he taught courses at the
universities.
but I wondered about
The People Look Like Flowers at Last: New Poems Page 15