it’s like being married:
you accept
everything
as if
it hadn’t happened.
shot of red-eye
I used to hold my social security card
up in the air,
he told me,
but I was so small
they couldn’t see it,
all those big
guys around.
you mean the place with the
big green screen?
I asked.
yeah. well, anyhow, I finally got on
the other day
picking tomatoes, and Jesus Christ,
I couldn’t get anywhere
it was too hot, too hot
and I couldn’t get anything in my sack
so I lay under the truck
in the shade and drank
wine. I didn’t make a
dime.
have a drink, I said.
sure, he said.
two big women came in and
I mean BIG
and they sat next to
us.
shot of red-eye, one of them
said to the bartender.
likewise, said the other.
they pulled their dresses up
around their hips and
swung their legs.
um, umm. I think I’m going mad, I told
my friend from the tomato fields.
Jesus, he said, Jesus and Mary, I can’t
believe what I see.
it’s all
there, I said.
you a fighter? the one next to me
asked.
no, I said.
what happened to your
face?
automobile accident on the San Berdoo
freeway. some drunk jumped the divider. I was
the drunk.
how old are you, daddy?
old enough to slice the melon, I said,
tapping my cigar ashes into my beer to give me
strength.
can you buy a melon? she asked.
have you ever been chased across the Mojave and
raped?
no, she said.
I pulled out my last 20 and with an old man’s
virile abandon ordered
four drinks.
both girls smiled and pulled their dresses
higher, if that was possible.
who’s your friend? they asked.
this is Lord Chesterfield, I told them.
pleased ta meetcha, they
said.
hello, bitches, he answered.
we walked through the 3rd street tunnel
to a green hotel. the girls had a
key.
there was one bed and we all got
in. I don’t know who got
who.
the next morning my friend and I
were down at the Farm Labor Market
on San Pedro Street
holding up and waving our social
security cards.
they couldn’t see
his.
I was the last one on the truck out. a big woman stood
up against me. she smelled like
port wine.
honey, she asked, whatever happened to your
face?
fair grounds, a dancing bear who
didn’t.
bullshit, she said.
maybe so, I said, but get your hand out
from around my
balls. everybody’s looking.
when we got to the
fields the sun was
really up
and the world
looked
terrible.
i met a genius
I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
it’s not pretty.
it was the first time I’d
realized
that.
poverty
it is the man you’ve never seen who
keeps you going,
the one who might arrive
someday.
he isn’t out on the streets or
in the buildings or in the
stadiums,
or if he’s there
I’ve missed him somehow.
he isn’t one of our presidents
or statesmen or actors.
I wonder if he’s there.
I walk down the streets
past drugstores and hospitals and
theatres and cafes
and I wonder if he is there.
I have looked almost half a century
and he has not been seen.
a living man, truly alive,
say when he brings his hands down
from lighting a cigarette
you see his eyes
like the eyes of a tiger staring past
into the wind.
but when the hands come down
it is always the
other eyes
that are there
always always.
and soon it will be too late for me
and I will have lived a life
with drugstores, cats, sheets, saliva,
newspapers, women, doors and other assortments,
but nowhere
a living man.
to kiss the worms goodnight
kool enough to die but not
kill I take my doctor’s green
pill
drink tea
as the sharks swim through vases of
flowers
ten times around they go
twenty
searching for my sissy
heart
in a freak May night in
Los Angeles
Sunday
somebody playing
Beethoven
I sit behind pulled shades
in ambush
as ambitious men with new automobiles and
new blondes
command the streets
I sit in a rented room
carving a wooden rifle
drawing pictures of naked ladies
bulls
love affairs
old men
on the walls with children’s
crayons
it is up to each of us to live in
whatever way we can
as the generals, doctors, policemen
warn and torture
us
I bathe once a day
am frightened by cats and
shadows
sleep hardly at all
when my heart stops
the whole world will get quicker
better
warmer
summer will follow summer
the air will be lake clear
and the meaning
too
but meanwhile
the green pill
these greasy floors off the
avenue and
down there a plot of worms of worms of
worms
and up here
no nymph blonde
to love me to sleep while I am
waiting.
john dillinger and le chasseur maudit
it’s unfortunate, and simply not the style, but I don’t care:
girls remind me of hair in the sink, girls remind me of intestines
and bladders and excretory movements; it’s unfortunate also that
ice-cream bells, babies, engine-valves, plagiostomes, palm trees,
footsteps in the hall…all excite me with the cold calmness
of the gravestone; nowhere, perhaps, is there sanctuary except
in hearing that ther
e were other desperate men:
Dillinger, Rimbaud, Villon, Babyface Nelson, Seneca, Van Gogh,
or desperate women: lady wrestlers, nurses, waitresses, whores
poetesses…although,
I do suppose the breaking out of ice-cubes is important
or a mouse nosing an empty beercan—
two hollow emptinesses looking into each other,
or the nightsea stuck with soiled ships
that enter the chary web of your brain with their lights,
with their salty lights
that touch you and leave you
for the more solid love of some India;
or driving great distances without reason
sleep-drugged through open windows that
tear and flap your shirt like a frightened bird,
and always the stoplights, always red,
nightfire and defeat, defeat…
scorpions, scraps, fardels:
x-jobs, x-wives, x-faces, x-lives,
Beethoven in his grave as dead as a beet;
red wheel-barrows, yes, perhaps,
or a letter from Hell signed by the devil
or two good boys beating the guts out of each other
in some cheap stadium full of screaming smoke,
but mostly, I don’t care, sitting here
with a mouthful of rotten teeth,
sitting here reading Herrick and Spenser and
Marvell and Hopkins and Bronte (Emily, today);
and listening to the Dvorak Midday Witch
or Franck’s Le Chasseur Maudit,
actually I don’t care, and it’s unfortunate:
I have been getting letters from a young poet
(very young, it seems) telling me that some day
I will most surely be recognized as
one of the world’s great poets. Poet!
a malversation: today I walked in the sun and streets
of this city: seeing nothing, learning nothing, being
nothing, and coming back to my room
I passed an old woman who smiled a horrible smile;
she was already dead, and everywhere I remembered wires:
telephone wires, electric wires, wires for electric faces
trapped like goldfish in the glass and smiling,
and the birds were gone, none of the birds wanted wire
or the smiling of wire
and I closed my door (at last)
but through the windows it was the same:
a horn honked, somebody laughed, a toilet flushed,
and oddly then
I thought of all the horses with numbers
that have gone by in the screaming,
gone by like Socrates, gone by like Lorca,
like Chatterton…
I’d rather imagine our death will not matter too much
except as a matter of disposal, a problem,
like dumping the garbage,
and although I have saved the young poet’s letters,
I do not believe them
but like at the
diseased palm trees
and the end of the sun,
I sometimes look.
the flower lover
in the Valkerie Mountains
among the strutting peacocks
I found a flower
as large as my
head
and when I reached in to smell
it
I lost an ear lobe
part of my nose
one eye
and half a pack of
cigarettes.
I came back
the next day
to hack the damned thing
down
but found it so
beautiful I
killed a
peacock
instead.
traffic ticket
I walked off the job again
and the police stopped me
for running a red light at Serrano Ave.
my mind was rather gone
and I stood in a patch of leaves
ankle-deep
and kept my head turned
so they couldn’t smell the liquor
too much
and I took the ticket and went to my room
and got a good symphony on the radio,
one of the Russians or Germans,
one of the dark tough boys
but still I felt lonely and cold
and kept lighting cigarettes
and I turned on the heater
and then down on the floor
I saw a magazine with my photo
on the cover
and I walked over and picked it up
but it wasn’t me
because yesterday is gone
and today is only catsup
and racing hounds
and sickness
and women some women
momentarily as beautiful
as any of the cathedrals,
and now they play Bartok
who knew what he was doing
which meant he didn’t know what he was doing,
and tomorrow I suppose I will go back
to the fucking job
like a man to a wife with four kids
if they’ll have me
but today I know that I have gotten out of
some kind of net,
30 seconds more and I would have been dead,
and it is important to recognize
one should recognize
that type of moment
if he wants to continue
to avail the gut and the sacked skull of a
flower a mountain a ship a woman
the code of the frost and the stone
everything lapsing into a sense of moment
that cleans like the best damn soap on the market
and brings Paris, Spain, the groans of Hemingway,
the blue madonna, the new-born bull,
a night in a closet with red paint
right down in on you,
and I hope to pay the ticket
even though I did not (I think) run the red light
but
they said I did.
a little sleep and peace of stillness
if you’re a man, Los Angeles is where you hang it up and
battle; or if you’re a woman, and you’ve got enough leg and
the rest, you sail it against a mountain backdrop so
when you grow grey you can hide in Beverly Hills
in a mansion so nobody can see how you’ve decayed.
so we moved here—and what do we come up against
except a religious maniac in the next shack who
drinks cheap wine and has visions and plays his radio
as loudly as possible, my god!
I know all the spirituals now!
I know how very much I have sinned and I realize I must die
and I’ve got to get ready…
but I could use a little sleep first
just a little sleep and peace of silence.
I open the window and there he is
out on the lawn
dancing to a hymn
a spiritual
a whatever.
he has on a pair of red bathing trunks
he’s well-tanned and drunk on wine
but his movements are hard and awkward—
he’s too fat
a walnut-like man, distorted and shapeless at
55.
and he waves his arms in the sun and the birds fly up
frightened
and then he whirls back into his doorway.
but the view from the street here is good—
there are Japanese and old women and young girls and
beggars.
we have large palms
plenty of birds
and the parking’s not bad…
but our religious maniac does not work
&nb
sp; he’s too clever to work
and so we both lie around
listen to his radio
drink
and I wonder which of us will get to hell first—
him with his bible or me with my Racing Form
but if I’ve got to hear him down there I know I’m going to have to
have some help, and the next dance will be mine.
right now I wish I had something to sell so I could hide in a place
with walls twelve feet high
with moats
and high-yellow mamas.
but it looks like some long days and nights ahead,
as always.
at the least I can only hope for the weakening of a
radio tube,
and at the most for his death,
which we are both praying and
ready for.
he even looked like a nice guy
he packaged it up neatly in different sections
sending the legs to an aunt in St. Louis
the head to a scoutmaster in Brooklyn
the belly to a cross-eyed butcher in Des Moines,
the female organs were sent to a young priest in Los Angeles;
Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame Page 8