and I say don’t forget, baby, I’m a shipping clerk. what’ve I got to lose
but a ball of string?
the gentlemen in the corner who look like Russians get up, knock
their plates and cups on the floor and wipe their mouths on the tablecloth.
some belch (and one farts). they laugh evilly and leave without anyone bothering them. a ribbed and moiled cat comes out of somewhere,
begins licking the plates on the floor and then jumps up on the
table and walks around like his feet are wet.
I try black. the croupier’s eyes dart like beetles. he makes futile
almost habitual movements to brush them away.
I switch back to red. I look around for George Raft and spill my drink
against my chest. Hank, says my whore, let’s get out of here! well, at least,
I say, I ought to get a blow-job out of this. you needn’t get filthy, the whore
says. I say, baby, I was born filthy. I try #14.
DEATH COMES SLOWLY LIKE ANTS TO A FALLEN FIG.
mirrors enclose us, I say to the croupier, ignoring the scenery of our despair.
I slap away a filthy thing that runs across my mouth. the cat
leaps and snatches it up as it spins upon its back kicking its
thousand legs.
then George Raft walks in. hello kid, he says, back again? I place
my last few coins on the chest of a dead elephant.
the lightning flares, they are stabbing grapefruit in the backroom, some-
body drops a glove and the place, the whole place, goes up in smoke.
we walk back to the car and fall asleep.
no title
all theories
like clichés
shot to hell,
all these small faces
looking up
beautiful and believing;
I wish to weep
but sorrow is
stupid.
I wish to believe
but belief is a
graveyard.
we have narrowed it down to
the butcherknife and the
mockingbird.
wish us
luck.
too many blacks
my first wife was from Texas and we came back
to L.A. to live
she came from oil money and I came from
someplace else.
our 2nd day in town
we drove down Vermont Avenue
to get her some art supplies
and as I was tooling my eleven-year-old
Plymouth south
a black man rolled past in a nine-year-old
green Dodge:
“hey, baby,” he hollered out the window,
“what’s happening?”
“nothing much happenin’,” I hollered
back, “I’m just trying to make
it!”
as we stopped for a signal at
Beverly Blvd.
a black man on the corner saw me
he was standing in a broad-brimmed
Stetson pulled down in front
and wearing white leather boots
and lots of gold:
“Hank, baby, where’d you find the
blonde gash?”
“she’s my mark, man,” I replied,
“you know how it is.”
I put it into low and pulled
away.
“listen,” my first wife said
nasally,
“how come you know all these black
guys?”
“it’s easy, baby, I’ve worked with them
on all the gigs. like it’s
natural.”
she didn’t answer and when we got
to the art store
she was very upset
about the brushes
the quality of the paper
the paints weren’t what she
wanted
and the total selection was
unsatisfactory.
she was very unhappy
about everything.
I stood there and watched her
beautiful ass and her very long
blonde hair
then I walked over to the picture frame
section
picked up an 8-and-one-half by
eleven
stared through the space of
it
and let her
work it
out.
white dog
I went for a walk on Hollywood Boulevard.
I looked down and there was a large white dog
walking beside me.
his pace was exactly the same as mine.
we stopped at traffic signals together.
we crossed the side streets together.
a woman smiled at us.
he must have walked 8 blocks with me.
then I went into a grocery store and
when I came out he was gone.
or she was gone.
the wonderful white dog
with a trace of yellow in its fur.
the large blue eyes were gone.
the grinning mouth was gone.
the lolling tongue was gone.
things are so easily lost.
things just can’t be kept forever.
I got the blues.
I got the blues.
that dog loved and
trusted me and
I let it walk away.
blue beads and bones
as the orchid dies
and the grass goes
insane, let’s have one for the lost:
I met an old man
and a tired whore
in a bar
at 8:00 in the morning
across from MacArthur Park—
we were sitting over our beers
he and I and the old whore
who had slept in an unlocked car
the night before
and wore a blue necklace.
the old guy said to me:
“look at my arms. I’m all bone.
no meat on me.”
and he pulled back his sleeves
and he was right—
bone with just a layer of skin
hanging like paper.
he said, “I don’t eat
nothin’.”
I bought him a beer and the
whore a beer.
now there, I thought, is a man
who doesn’t eat
meat, he doesn’t eat
vegetables. kind of a saint.
it was like a church in there
as only the truly lost
sit in bars on Tuesday mornings
at 8:00 a.m.
then the whore said, “Jesus,
if I don’t score tonight I’m
finished. I’m scared, I’m really
scared. you guys can go to skid row
when things get bad. but where can a
woman go?”
we couldn’t answer her.
she picked up her beer with one hand
and played with her blue beads with the
other.
I finished my beer, went to the
corner and got a Racing Form from Teddy the
newsboy—age 61.
“you got a hot one today?”
“no, Teddy, I gotta see the board; money
makes them run.”
“I’ll give you 4 bucks. bet one for
me.”
I took his 4 bucks. that would buy a sandwich,
pay parking, plus 2
coffees. I got into my car, drove
off. too early for the
track. blue beads and bones. the
universe was
bent. a cop rode his bike right up
behind me. the day had really
begun.
ax and blade
arriving to applaus
e
through Spanish doorways
hardly ever
works. eating an apple
sometimes
works.
the ax misses by a hair’s breadth
and breaks the chimney of a
lady’s house.
then it swings back,
cleaves you
again, there it is,
yes, there it
is
again.
how to break clear?
a .44 magnum?
a can of ale?
the museum of pain
doesn’t charge admission,
it’s free as skunkshit.
from the brothels of Paris
to the hardware stores of Pasadena
from balloons
to diamond mines,
from screaming to singing
from blood to paint
from paint to miracle
from miracle to damnation.
the people walk and talk
cut to pieces
pieces of people sliced like
pie
knifed and forked and
gulped
away.
I sit in a small room
listening to classical piano on the radio.
each note bites,
nips; you fall into the mirror,
come through the other
side
staring at a lightbulb.
God sits in Munich
drinking green beer. we’ve got to find
Him and ask Him
why.
some notes on Bach and Haydn
it is quite something to turn your radio on
low
at 4:30 in the morning
in an apartment house
and hear Haydn
while through the blinds
you can see only the black night
as beautiful and quiet
as a flower.
and with that
something to drink,
of course,
a cigarette,
and the heater going,
and Haydn going.
maybe just 35 people
in a city of millions listening
as you are listening now,
looking at the walls,
smoking quietly,
not hating anything,
not wanting anything.
existing like mercury
you listen to a dead man’s music
at 4:30 in the morning,
only he is not really dead
as the smoke from your cigarette curls up,
is not really dead,
and all is magic,
this good sound
in Los Angeles.
but now a siren takes the air,
some trouble, murder, robbery, death…
but Haydn goes on
and you listen,
one of the finest mornings of your life
like some of those when you were very young
with stupid lunch pail
and sleepy eyes
riding the early bus to the railroad yards
to scrub the windows and sides of trains
with a brush and oakite
but knowing
all the while
you would take the longest gamble,
and now having taken it,
still alive,
poor but strong,
knowing Haydn at 4:30 a.m.,
the only way to know him,
the blinds down
and the black night
the cigarette
and in my hands this pen
writing in a notebook
(my typewriter at this hour would
scream like a raped bear)
and
now
somehow
knowing the way
warmly and gently
finally
as Haydn ends.
and then a voice tells me
where I can get bacon and eggs,
orange juice, toast, coffee
this very morning
for a pleasant price
and I like this man
for telling me this
after Haydn
and I want to get dressed
and go out and find the waitress
and eat bacon and eggs
and lift the coffee cup to my mouth,
but I am distracted:
the voice tells me that Bach
will be next: “Brandenburg Concerto No. 2
in F major,”
so I go into the kitchen for a
new can of beer.
may this night never see morning
as finally one night will not,
but I do suppose morning will come this day
asking its hard way—
the cars jammed on freeways,
faces as horrible as unflushed excreta,
trapped lives less than beautiful love,
and I walk out
knowing the way
cold beer can in hand
as Bach begins
and
this good night
is still everywhere.
born to lose
I was sitting in my cell
and all the guys were tattooed
BORN TO LOSE
BORN TO DIE
all of them were able to roll a cigarette
with one hand
if I mentioned Wallace Stevens or
even Pablo Neruda to them
they’d think me crazy.
I named my cellmates in my mind:
that one was Kafka
that one was Dostoevsky
that one was Blake
that one was Céline
and that one was
Mickey Spillane.
I didn’t like Mickey Spillane.
sure enough that night at lights out
Mickey and I had a fight over who got the
top bunk
the way it ended neither of us got the top bunk
we both got the hole.
after I got out of solitary I made
an appointment with the warden.
I told him I was a writer
a sensitive and gifted soul
and that I wanted to work in the library.
he gave me two more days in the hole.
when I got out I worked in the shoe factory.
I worked with Van Gogh, Schopenhauer, Dante, Robert Frost
and Karl Marx.
they put Spillane in license plates.
Phillipe’s 1950
Phillipe’s is an old time
cafe off Alameda street
just a little north and east of
the main post office.
Phillipe’s opens at 5 a.m.
and serves a cup of coffee
with cream and sugar
for a nickel.
in the early mornings
the bums come down off Bunker Hill,
as they say,
“with our butts wrapped
around our ears.”
Los Angeles nights have a way
of getting very
cold.
“Phillipe’s,” they say,
“is the only place that doesn’t
hassle us.”
the waitresses are old
and most of the bums are
too.
come down there some
early morning.
for a nickel
you can see the most beautiful faces
in town.
in the lobby
I saw him sitting in a lobby chair
in the Patrick Hotel
dreaming of flying fish
and he said “hello friend
you’re looking good.
me, I’m not so well,
they’ve plucked out my hair
taken my bowels
and the color in my eyes
>
has gone back into the sea.”
I sat down and listened
to him breathe
his last.
a bit later the clerk came over
with his green eyeshade on
and then the clerk saw what I knew
but neither of us knew
what the old man knew.
the clerk stood there
almost surprised,
taken,
wondering where the old man had gone.
he began to shake like an ape
who’d had a banana taken from his hand.
and then there was a crowd
and the crowd looked at the old man
as if he were a freak
as if there was something wrong with him.
I got up and walked out of the lobby
I went outside on the sidewalk
and I walked along with the rest of them
bellies, feet, hair, eyes
everything moving and going
getting ready to go back to the beginning
or light a cigar.
and then somebody stepped on
the back of my heel
and I was angry enough to swear.
he knows us all
hell crawls through the window
without a sound
enters my room
takes off his hat
and sits down on the couch across from me.
I laugh.
then my lamp drops off the table,
I catch it just before it hits the
floor, and in doing so,
I spill my
beer. “oh shit!” I say;
when I look up again
the son-of-a-bitch
is gone—
off looking for you,
my friend?
victory!
we struck in the middle of a
simple dawn
all their ships were in the harbor
and we torched them and created a giant
sunrise
we turned our cannon on the cathedral
cut the legs off the cavalry
found the army hung-over in the barracks
What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire Page 4