pink sun pink sun
I hate your holiness
crawling your gilded cross of life
as my fingers and feet and face
come down to this
sleeping with the whore of your fancy wife
you must some day die for nothing
as I
have lived.
crucifix in a deathhand
yes, they begin out in a willow, I think
the starch mountains begin out in the willow
and keep right on going without regard for
pumas and nectarines
somehow these mountains are like
an old woman with a bad memory and
a shopping basket.
we are in a basin, that is the
idea. down in the sand and the alleys,
this land punched-in, cuffed-out, divided,
held like a crucifix in a deathhand,
this land bought, resold, bought again and
sold again, the wars long over,
the Spaniards all the way back in Spain
down in the thimble again, and now
real estaters, subdividers, landlords, freeway
engineers arguing. this is their land and
I walk on it, live on it a little while
near Hollywood here I see young men in rooms
listening to glazed recordings
and I think too of old men sick of music
sick of everything, and death like suicide
I think is sometimes voluntary, and to get your
hold on the land here it is best to return to the
Grand Central Market, see the old Mexican women,
the poor…I am sure you have seen these same women
many years before
arguing
with the same young Japanese clerks
witty, knowledgeable and golden
among their soaring store of oranges, apples
avocados, tomatoes, cucumbers—
and you know how these look, they do look good
as if you could eat them all
light a cigar and smoke away the bad world.
then it’s best to go back to the bars, the same bars
wooden, stale, merciless, green
with the young policeman walking through
scared and looking for trouble,
and the beer is still bad
it has an edge that already mixes with vomit and
decay, and you’ve got to be strong in the shadows
to ignore it, to ignore the poor and to ignore yourself
and the shopping bag between your legs
down there feeling good with its avocados and
oranges and fresh fish and wine bottles, who needs
a Fort Lauderdale winter?
25 years ago there used to be a whore there
with a film over one eye, who was too fat
and made little silver bells out of cigarette
tinfoil. the sun seemed warmer then
although this was probably not
true, and you take your shopping bag
outside and walk along the street
and the green beer hangs there
just above your stomach like
a short and shameful shawl, and
you look around and no longer
see any
old men.
grass
at the window
I watch a man with a
power mower
the sounds of his doing race like
flies and bees
on the wallpaper,
it is like a warm fire, and
better than eating steak,
and the grass is green enough
and the sun is sun enough
and what’s left of my life
stands there
checking glints of green flying;
it is a giant disrobing of
care, stumbling away from
doing.
suddenly I understand
old men in rockers
bats in Colorado caves
tiny lice crawling into
the eyes of dead birds.
back and forth
he follows his gasoline
sound. it is
interesting enough,
with
the streets
flat on their Spring backs
and smiling.
fuzz
3 small boys run toward me
blowing whistles
and they scream
you’re under arrest!
you’re drunk!
and they begin
hitting me on the legs with
their toy clubs.
one even has a
badge. another has
handcuffs but my hands are high in the air.
when I go into the liquor store
they whirl around outside
like bees
shut out from their nest.
I buy a fifth of cheap
whiskey
and
3
candy bars.
no lady godiva
she came to my place drunk
riding a deer up on the front porch:
so many women want to save the world
but can’t keep their own kitchens straight,
but me…
we went inside where I lit three red
candles
poured the wine and I took notes on
her:
latitude behind,
longitude in
front. and the
rest. amazing.
a woman such as this
could find
a zinnia in Hot Springs
Arkansas.
we ate venison for three weeks.
then she slept with the landlord to help pay
the rent.
then I found her a job as a waitress.
I slept all day and when she came home
I was full of the brilliant conversation that she
so much
adored.
she died quickly one night leaving the world
much the way it had
been.
now I get up early and
go down to the loading docks and wait for
cabbages
oranges
potatoes
to fall from the trucks or to be
thrown away.
by noon I have eaten and am asleep
dreaming of paying the rent
with numbered chunks of plastic
issued by a better
world.
the workers
they laugh continually
even when
a board falls down
and destroys a face
or distorts a
body
they continue to
laugh,
when the color of the eye
becomes a fearful pale
because of the poor
light
they still laugh;
wrinkled and imbecile
at an early age
they joke about it:
a man who looks sixty
will say
I’m 32, and
then they’ll laugh
they’ll all laugh;
they are sometimes let
outside for a little air
but are chained to return
by chains they would not
break
if they could;
even outside, among
free men
they continue to laugh,
they walk about
with a hobbled and inane
gait
as if they’d lost their
senses; outside
they chew a little bread,
haggle, sleep, count their pennies,
gaze at the clock
and return;
sometimes in the
confines
they even grow serious
a moment, they speak of
Outside, of how horrible
it must be
to be
shut Outside
forever, never to be let
back in;
it’s warm as they work
and they sweat a
bit,
but they work hard and
well, they work so hard
the nerves revolt
and cause trembling,
but often they are
praised by those
who have risen up
out of them
like stars,
and now the stars
watch
watch too
for those few
who might attempt a
slower pace or
show disinterest
or falsify an
illness
in order to gain
rest (rest must be
earned to gain strength
for a more perfect
job).
sometimes one dies
or goes mad
and then from Outside
a new one enters
and is given
opportunity.
I have been there
many years;
at first I believed the work
monotonous, even
silly
but now I see
it all has meaning,
and the workers
without faces
I can see are not really
ugly, and that
the heads without eyes—
I know now that those eyes
can see
and are able to
do the work.
the women workers
are often the best,
adapting naturally,
and some of these I
made love to in our
resting hours; at first
they appeared to be
like female apes
but later
with insight
I realized
that they were things
as real and alive as
myself.
the other night
an old worker
grey and blind
no longer useful
was retired
to the Outside.
speech! speech!
we demanded.
it was
hell, he said.
we laughed
all 4000 of us:
he had kept his
humor
to the
end.
beans with garlic
this is important enough:
to get your feelings down,
it is better than shaving
or cooking beans with garlic.
it is the little we can do
this small bravery of knowledge
and there is of course
madness and terror too
in knowing
that some part of you
wound up like a clock
can never be wound again
once it stops.
but now
there’s a ticking under your shirt
and you whirl the beans with a spoon,
one love dead, one love departed
another love…
ah! as many loves as beans
yes, count them now
sad, sad
your feelings boiling over flame,
get this down.
mama
here I am
in the ground
my mouth
open
and
I can’t even say
mama,
and
the dogs run by and stop and piss
on my stone; I get it all
except the sun
and my suit is looking
bad
and yesterday
the last of my left
arm gone
very little left, all harp-like
without music.
at least a drunk
in bed with a cigarette
might cause 5 fire
engines and
33 men.
I can’t
do
any
thing.
but p.s.—Hector Richmond in the next
tomb thinks only of Mozart and candy
caterpillars.
he is
very bad
company.
machineguns towers & timeclocks
I feel gypped by dunces
as if reality were the property
of little men
with luck and a headstart,
and I sit in the cold
wondering about purple flowers
along a fence
while the rest of them
stack gold
and Cadillacs and
ladyfriends,
I wonder about palmleaves
and gravestones
and the preciousness of a
cocoon-like sleep;
to be a lizard would be
bad enough
to be scalding in the sun
would be bad enough
but not so bad
as being built up to
Man-size and Man-life
and not wanting the
game, not wanting
machineguns and towers and
timeclocks,
not wanting a carwash
a toothpull
a wristwatch, cufflinks
a pocket radio
tweezers and cotton
a cabinet full of iodine,
not wanting cocktail parties
a front lawn
sing-togethers
new shoes, Christmas presents
life insurance, Newsweek
162 baseball games
a vacation in Bermuda.
not wanting not wanting,
and I judge the purple flowers
better off than I
the lizard better off
the dark green hose
the ever grass
the trees the birds,
the cats dreaming in the butter
sun are
better off than
I, getting into this old coat now
feeling for my cigarettes
car keys
a roadmap back,
going out
down the walk
like a man to be executed
walking toward it
surely,
going into it
without guards
driving toward it
racing at it
70 miles per hour,
jockeying
cussing
dropping ashes
deadly ashes of every
deadly thing
burning,
the caterpillar knows less
horror
the armies of ants are
braver
the kiss of a snake
less ravenous,
I only want the sky
to burn me more and more
burn me out
so that the sun begins at
6 in the morning
and goes past midnight
like a drunken door always open,
I drive toward it
not wanting it
getting it getting it
as the cat stretches
yawns
and rolls over into
another dream.
something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you…
we have everything and we have nothing
and some men do it in churches
and some men do it by tearing butterflies
in half
and some men do it in Palm Springs
laying it into butterblondes
Cadillacs and butterflies
nothing and everything,
the face melting down to the last puff
in a cellar in Corpus Christi.
there’s something for the touts, the nuns,
the grocery clerks and you…
something at 8 a.m., something in the library
something in the river,
everything and nothing.
in the slaughterhouse it comes running along
the ceiling on a hook, and you swing it—
one
two
three
and then you’ve got it, $200 worth of dead
meat, its bones against your bones
something and nothing.
it’s always early enough to die and
it’s always too late,
and the drill of blood in the basin white
it tells you nothing at all
and the gravediggers playing poker over
5 a.m. coffee, waiting for the grass
to dismiss the frost…
they tell you nothing at all.
we have everything and we have nothing—
days with glass edges and the impossible stink
of river moss—worse than shit;
checkerboard days of moves and countermoves,
fagged interest, with as much sense in defeat as
in victory; slow days like mules
humping it slagged and sullen and sun-glazed
up a road where a madman sits waiting among
bluejays and wrens netted in and sucked a flakey
grey.
good days too of wine and shouting, fights
in alleys, fat legs of women striving around
your bowels buried in moans,
the signs in bullrings like diamonds hollering
Mother Capri, violets coming out of the ground
telling you to forget the dead armies and the loves
that robbed you.
days when children say funny and brilliant things
like savages trying to send you a message through
their bodies while their bodies are still
alive enough to transmit and feel and run up
and down without locks and paychecks and
ideals and possessions and beetle-like
opinions.
days when you can cry all day long in
a green room with the door locked, days
Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame Page 4