when you can laugh at the breadman
because his legs are too long, days
of looking at hedges…
and nothing, and nothing. the days of
the bosses, yellow men
with bad breath and big feet, men
who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk
as if melody had never been invented, men
who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and
profit, men with expensive wives they possess
like 60 acres of ground to be drilled
or shown-off or to be walled away from
the incompetent, men who’d kill you
because they’re crazy and justify it because
it’s the law, men who stand in front of
windows 30 feet wide and see nothing,
men with luxury yachts who can sail around
the world and yet never get out of their vest
pockets, men like snails, men like eels, men
like slugs, and not as good…
and nothing. getting your last paycheck
at a harbor, at a factory, at a hospital, at an
aircraft plant, at a penny arcade, at a
barbershop, at a job you didn’t want
anyway.
income tax, sickness, servility, broken
arms, broken heads—all the stuffing
come out like an old pillow.
we have everything and we have nothing.
some do it well enough for a while and
then give way. fame gets them or disgust
or age or lack of proper diet or ink
across the eyes or children in college
or new cars or broken backs while skiing
in Switzerland or new politics or new wives
or just natural change and decay—
the man you knew yesterday hooking
for ten rounds or drinking for three days and
three nights by the Sawtooth mountains now
just something under a sheet or a cross
or a stone or under an easy delusion,
or packing a bible or a golf bag or a
briefcase: how they go, how they go!—all
the ones you thought would never go.
days like this. like your day today.
maybe the rain on the window trying to
get through to you. what do you see today?
what is it? where are you? the best
days are sometimes the first, sometimes
the middle and even sometimes the last.
the vacant lots are not bad, churches in
Europe on postcards are not bad. people in
wax museums frozen into their best sterility
are not bad, horrible but not bad. the
cannon, think of the cannon. and toast for
breakfast the coffee hot enough you
know your tongue is still there. three
geraniums outside a window, trying to be
red and trying to be pink and trying to be
geraniums. no wonder sometimes the women
cry, no wonder the mules don’t want
to go up the hill. are you in a hotel room
in Detroit looking for a cigarette? one more
good day. a little bit of it. and as
the nurses come out of the building after
their shift, having had enough, eight nurses
with different names and different places
to go—walking across the lawn, some of them
want cocoa and a paper, some of them want a
hot bath, some of them want a man, some
of them are hardly thinking at all. enough
and not enough. arcs and pilgrims, oranges
gutters, ferns, antibodies, boxes of
tissue paper.
in the most decent sometimes sun
there is the softsmoke feeling from urns
and the canned sound of old battleplanes
and if you go inside and run your finger
along the window ledge you’ll find
dirt, maybe even earth.
and if you look out the window
there will be the day, and as you
get older you’ll keep looking
keep looking
sucking your tongue in a little
ah ah no no maybe
some do it naturally
some obscenely
everywhere.
sway with me
sway with me, everything sad—
madmen in stone houses
without doors,
lepers streaming love and song
frogs trying to figure
the sky;
sway with me, sad things—
fingers split on a forge
old age like breakfast shells
used books, used people
used flowers, used love
I need you
I need you
I need you:
it has run away
like a horse or a dog,
dead or lost
or unforgiving.
lack of almost everything
the essence of the belly
like a white balloon sacked
is disturbing
like the running of feet
on the stairs
when you don’t know
who is there.
of course, if you turn on the radio
you might forget
the fat under your shirt
or the rats lined up in order
like old women on Hollywood Blvd
waiting on a comedy
show.
I think of old men
in four dollar rooms
looking for socks in dresser drawers
while standing in brown underwear
all the time the clock ticking on
warm as a
cobra.
ah, there are some decent things, maybe:
the sky, the circus
the legs of ladies getting out of cars,
the peach coming through the door
like a Mozart symphony.
the scale says 198. that’s what
I weigh. it is 2:10 a.m.
dedication is for chess players.
the glorious single cause is
waiting on the anvil
while
smoking, pissing, reading Genet
or the funny papers;
but maybe it’s early enough yet
to write your aunt in
Palm Springs and tell her
what’s wrong.
no. 6
I’ll settle for the 6 horse
on a rainy afternoon
a paper cup of coffee
in my hand
a little way to go,
the wind twirling out
small wrens from
the upper grandstand roof,
the jocks coming out
for a middle race
silent
and the easy rain making
everything
at once
almost alike,
the horses at peace with
each other
before the drunken war
and I am under the grandstand
feeling for
cigarettes
settling for coffee,
then the horses walk by
taking their little men
away—
it is funereal and graceful
and glad
like the opening
of flowers.
don’t come round but if you do…
yeah sure, I’ll be in unless I’m out
don’t knock if the lights are out
or you hear voices or then
I might be reading Proust
if someone slips Proust under my door
or one of his bones for my stew,
and I can’t loan money or
the ph
one
or what’s left of my car
though you can have yesterday’s newspaper
an old shirt or a bologna sandwich
or sleep on the couch
if you don’t scream at night
and you can talk about yourself
that’s only normal;
hard times are upon us all
only I am not trying to raise a family
to send through Harvard
or buy hunting land,
I am not aiming high
I am only trying to keep myself alive
just a little longer,
so if you sometimes knock
and I don’t answer
and there isn’t a woman in here
maybe I have broken my jaw
and am looking for wire
or I am chasing the butterflies in
my wallpaper,
I mean if I don’t answer
I don’t answer, and the reason is
that I am not yet ready to kill you
or love you, or even accept you,
it means I don’t want to talk
I am busy, I am mad, I am glad
or maybe I’m stringing up a rope;
so even if the lights are on
and you hear sound
like breathing or praying or singing
a radio or the roll of dice
or typing—
go away, it is not the day
the night, the hour;
it is not the ignorance of impoliteness,
I wish to hurt nothing, not even a bug
but sometimes I gather evidence of a kind
that takes some sorting,
and your blue eyes, be they blue
and your hair, if you have some
or your mind—they cannot enter
until the rope is cut or knotted
or until I have shaven into
new mirrors, until the world is
stopped or opened
forever.
startled into life like fire
in grievous deity my cat
walks around
he walks around and around
with
electric tail and
push-button
eyes
he is
alive and
plush and
final as a plum tree
neither of us understands
cathedrals or
the man outside
watering his
lawn
if I were all the man
that he is
cat—
if there were men
like this
the world could
begin
he leaps up on the couch
and walks through
porticoes of my
admiration.
stew
stew at noon, my dear; and look:
the ants, the sawdust, the mica
plants, the shadows of banks like
bad jokes;
do you think we’ll hear
The Bartered Bride today?
how’s your tooth?
I should wash my feet and
clean my nails
not that I’d feel more like Christ
but
less like a leper—
which is important when
poverty is a small game you play
with your time.
let’s see: first the mailman
then yesterday’s copy of the Times.
we might
this way
get blown up a day too
late.
then there’s the library or
a walk down the boulevards.
many great men have
walked down the boulevards
but it’s terrible to be
a great man
like a monkey carrying a 5 pound
sack of potatoes up a 40 foot hill.
Paris can wait.
more salt?
after we eat
let’s sleep, let’s sleep.
we can’t make any money
awake.
lilies in my brain
the lilies storm my brain
by god by god
like nazi storm troopers!
do you think I’m going
tizzy?
your blue sweater
with tits hanging
loose, and
I think vaguely of Christ
on the cross, I don’t know
why, and icecream
cones. this July day
lilies storm my brain,
I’ll remember this
but
if only I had a
camera
or a big dog walking beside
me. big dogs make things
concrete
don’t they?
a big dog to wrinkle his
snot-nose
like this lake gypped of
clear surface
by a quick and clever
wind.
you’re here, yet I’m sad
again. I feel my porkchop ribs
over my lambchop heart ugh
gullible hard-working
intestines, dejected penis
chewing-gum bladder
liver turning to fat
like a penny-arcade trout
ashamed buttocks
practical ears
moth-like hands
spearfish nose
rock-slide mouth and
the rest. the rest:
lilies in my brain
hoping good times
thinking old times:
Capone and the diamonds
Charlie Chaplin
Laurel and Hardy
Clara Bow
the rest.
it never happened
but it seemed like
there were times when rot
stopped
waited like a streetcar
at a signal.
now I
like a movie punk
(lilies up there)
take your hand
and we walk forward
to rent a boat
to drown in. I breathe the wind, flex my muscles
but only my belly
wiggles.
we get in
the motor churns the
slime.
the city buildings
come down like ostrich
mouths
and hollow out
our brains
yet the sun
comes in
zap! zap! zap!
brilliant germs crawl our
chapped flesh. my
I feel as if I were in
church: everything
stinks. I hold the rubber sides
of everywhere
my balls are snowballs
I see stricken bells of malaria
old men getting into
bed, into model-T Fords
as the fish swim below us
full of dirty words and macaroni
and crossword puzzles
and the death of me, you and
the Katzenjammer
kids.
i am dead but i know the dead are not like this
the dead can sleep
they don’t get up and rage
they don’t have a wife.
her white face
like a flower in a closed
window lifts up and
looks at me.
the curtain smokes a cigarette
and a moth dies in a
freeway crash
as I examine the shadows of my
hands.
an owl, the size of a baby clock
rings for me, come on come on
it says as Jerusalem is hustled
down crotch-stained halls.
the 5 a.m. grass is nasal now
in hums of battleships
and valleys
in the raped light that brings on
the fascist birds.
I put out the lamp and get in bed
beside her, she thinks I’m there
mumbles a rosy gratitude
as I stretch my legs
to coffin length
get in and swim away
from frogs and fortunes.
like a violet in the snow
in the earliest possible day
in the blue-headed noon
I will telegraph you
a
boney hand
decorated with
sharkskin
a
large boy with
yellow teeth and an epileptic
father
will bring it
to your
door
smile
and
accept
it is better than
the
alternative
letter from too far
she wrote me a letter from a small
room near the Seine.
she said she was going to dancing
class, she got up, she said
at 5 o’clock in the morning
and typed at poems
or painted
and when she felt like crying
she had a special bench
by the river.
her book of Songs
would be out
in the Fall.
I did not know what to tell her
but
I told her
to get any bad teeth pulled
and be careful of the French
lover.
I put her photo by the radio
near the fan
Burning in Water, Drowing in Flame Page 5