They Will Not
Understand Art
They Will Consider Their Failure
As Creators
Only As A Failure
Of The World
Not Being Able To Love Fully
They Will BELIEVE Your Love
Incomplete
AND THEN THEY WILL HATE
YOU
And Their Hatred Will Be Perfect
Like A Shining Diamond
Like A Knife
Like A Mountain
LIKE A TIGER
LIKE Hemlock
Their Finest
ART
4:30 A.M.
the fields rattle
with red birds;
it is 4:30 in
the morning,
it is always
4:30 in the morning,
and I listen for
my friends:
the garbagemen
and the thieves,
and cats dreaming
red birds
and red birds dreaming
worms,
and worms dreaming
along the bones of
my love,
and I cannot sleep,
and soon morning will come,
the workers will rise,
and they will look for me
at the docks,
and they will say,
“he is drunk again,”
but I will be asleep,
finally,
among the bottles and
sunlight,
all darkness gone,
my arms spread like
a cross,
the red birds
flying,
flying,
roses opening in the smoke,
and
like something stabbed and
healing,
like
40 pages through a bad novel,
a smile upon
my idiot’s face.
The Simplicity of Everything in Viet Nam
man shot through back while
holding robes of a young priest
who looks like a woman,
and here we hang:
moon-bright
neatly gloved,
motorcycles everywhere, bees asleep,
nozzles rusted,
climate awry,
and we shake our bones,
blind skin there,
and the soldier falls dead,
another dead soldier,
the black robe of a young priest
who looks like a woman
is now beautifully red,
and the tanks
come on through.
The Night They Took Whitey
bird-dream and peeling wallpaper
symptoms of grey sleep
and at 4 a.m. Whitey came out of his room
(the solace of the poor is in numbers
like Summer poppies)
and he began to scream help me! help me! help me!
(an old man with hair as white as any ivory tusk)
and he was vomiting blood
help me help me help me
and I helped him lie down in the hall
and I beat on the landlady’s door
(she is as French as the best wine but as tough as
an American steak) and
I hollered her name, Marcella! Marcella!
(the milkman would soon be coming with his
pure white bottles like chilled lilies)
Marcella! Marcella! help me help me help me,
and she screamed back through the door:
you polack bastard, are you drunk again? then
Promethean the eye at the door
and she
sized up the red river in her rectangular brain
(oh, I am nothing but a drunken polack
a bad pinch-hitter a writer of letters to the newspapers)
and she spoke into the phone like a lady ordering bread and
eggs,
and I held to the wall
dreaming bad poems and my own death
and the men came…one with a cigar, the other needing a
shave,
and they made him stand up and walk down the steps
his ivory head on fire (Whitey, my drinking pal—
all the songs, Sing Gypsy, Laugh Gypsy, talk about
the war, the fights, the good whores,
skid-row hotels floating in wine,
floating in crazy talk,
cheap cigars and anger)
and the siren took him away, except the red part
and I began to vomit and the French wolverine screamed
you’ll have to clean it up, all of it, you and Whitey!
and the steamers sailed and rich men on yachts
kissed girls young enough to be their daughters,
and the milkman came by and stared
and the neon lights blinked selling something
tires or oil or underwear
and she slammed her door and I was alone
ashamed
it was the war, the war forever, the war was never over,
and I cried against the peeling walls,
the weakness of our bones, our sotted half-brains,
and morning began to creep into the hall—
toilets flushed, there was bacon, there was coffee,
there were hangovers, and I too
went in and closed my door and sat down and waited for the
sun.
The Japanese Wife
O lord, he said, Japanese women,
real women, they have not forgotten,
bowing and smiling
closing the wounds men have made;
but American women will kill you like they
tear a lampshade,
American women care less than a dime,
they’ve gotten derailed,
they’re too nervous to make good:
always scowling, belly-aching,
disillusioned, overwrought;
but oh lord, say, the Japanese women:
there was this one,
I came home and the door was locked
and when I broke in she broke out the bread knife
and chased me under the bed
and her sister came
and they kept me under that bed for two days,
and when I came out, at last,
she didn’t mention attorneys,
just said, you will never wrong me again,
and I didn’t; but she died on me,
and dying, said, you can wrong me now,
and I did,
but you know, I felt worse then
than when she was living;
there was no voice, no knife,
nothing but little Japanese prints on the wall,
all those tiny people sitting by red rivers
with flying green birds,
and I took them down and put them face down
in a drawer with my shirts,
and it was the first time I realized
that she was dead, even though I buried her;
and some day I’ll take them all out again,
all the tan-faced little people
sitting happily by their bridges and huts
and mountains—
but not right now,
not just yet.
Sundays Kill More Men Than Bombs
due to weekend conditions, and although there’s
too much smog, everything’s jammed
and it’s worse than masts down in a storm
you can’t go anywhere
and if you do, they are all staring through glass windows
or waiting for dinner, and no matter how bad it is
(not the glass, the dinner)
they’ll spend more time talking about it
than eating it,
and that’s why my wife got rid of me:
I was a boor and didn’t know when to smile
&nbs
p; or rather (worse) I did,
but didn’t, and one afternoon
with people diving into pools
and playing cards
and watching carefully shaven T.V. comedians
in starched white shirts and fine neckties
kidding about what the world had done to them,
I pretended a headache
and they gave me the young lady’s bedroom
(she was about 17)
and hell, I crawled beneath her sheets
and pretended to sleep
but everybody knew I was a cornered fake,
but I tried all sorts of tricks—
I tried to think of Wilde behind bars,
but Wilde was dead;
I tried to think of Hem shooting a lion
or walking down Paris streets
medallioned with his wild buddies,
the whores swooning to their beautiful knees,
but all I did was twist within her young sheets,
and from the headboard, shaking in my nervous storm,
several trinkets fell upon me—
elephants, glass dogs with seductive stares,
a young boy and girl carrying a pail of water,
but nothing by Bach or conducted by Ormandy,
and I finally gave it up, went into the john
and tried to piss (I knew I would be constipated
for a week), and then I walked out,
and my wife, a reader of Plato and e.e. cummings
ran up and said, “ooooh, you should have seen
BooBoo at the pool! He turned backflips and sideflips
and it was the funniest thing you’ve
EVER seen!”
I think it was not much later that the man came
to our third floor apartment
about seven in the morning
and handed me a summons for divorce,
and I went back to bed with her and said,
don’t worry, it’s all right, and
she began to cry cry cry,
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,
and I said, please stop,
remember your heart.
but that morning when she left
about 8 o’clock she looked
the same as ever, maybe even better.
I didn’t even bother to shave;
I called in sick and went down
to the corner bar.
The Loser
and the next I remembered I’m on a table,
everybody’s gone: the head of bravery
under light, scowling, flailing me down…
and then some toad stood there, smoking a cigar:
“Kid you’re no fighter,” he told me,
and I got up and knocked him over a chair;
it was like a scene in a movie, and
he stayed there on his big rump and said
over and over: “Jesus, Jesus, whatsamatta wit
you?” and I got up and dressed,
the tape still on my hands, and when I got home
I tore the tape off my hands and
wrote my first poem,
and I’ve been fighting
ever since.
On a Night You Don’t Sleep
at the sea at the beach in the dark there was somebody
sitting in a car along the shore and playing this drum
as if in Africa and the cops rode by on the sidewalk
and I went down to the disappointing sea
and saw two blue lights in the water and a boat
and a man walked by in a white shirt and squatted by the
shore and got up and walked along the shore
and then another man came and followed him:
they both walked along the shore by the water
one 12 feet behind the other and I watched them until
they disappeared and then I got up and walked through
the sand to the cement and through a bar door I saw a
negro singing with a light on his face
he wailed a strange song and the sound of the song twisted
in the air and everything was empty and dry and easy
and I got into my car and drove back to the hot city
but I knew I would always remember the time
and the catch of it—the way the night hung undisturbed
with people walking on it like some quiet rug
and a small boat rocking bravely by bulldogging water
and the colored pier lights like a broken mind sick in the sea.
An Empire of Coins
the legs are gone and the hopes—the lava of outpouring,
and I haven’t shaved in sixteen days
but the mailman still makes his rounds and
water still comes out of the faucet and I have a photo of
myself with glazed and milky eyes full of simple music
in golden trunks and 12 oz. gloves when I made the semi-finals
only to be taken out by a German brute who should have been
locked in a cage for the insane and allowed to drink blood.
Now I am insane and stare at the wallpaper as one would stare
at a Cézanne or an early Picasso (he has lost it), and I sent out
the girls for beer, the old girls who barely bother to wipe
their asses and say, well, I guess I won’t comb my hair today:
it might bring me luck! well, anyway, they wash the dishes and
chop the wood, and the landlady keeps saying let me in, I can’t
get in, you’ve got the lock on, and what’s all that singing and
cussing in there? but she only wants a piece of ass, she pretends
she wants the rent
but she’s not gonna get either one of ’em.
meanwhile the skulls of the dead are full of beetles and
old football scores like S.C. 16, N.D. 14 on a John
Baker field goal.
I can see the fleet from my window, the sails and the guns,
always
the guns poking their eyes in the sky looking for trouble like
young
L.A. cops who haven’t yet shaved and the young sailors out
there sex-hungry, trying to act tough, trying to act like men
but really closer to their mother’s nipples than to a true evaluation
of existence. I say, god damn it, that
the legs are gone and the outpourings too. inside my brain
rats snip and snipe and
pour oil
to burn and fire out early dreams.
darling, says one of the girls, you’ve got to snap out of it,
we’re running out of MONEY. how do you want
your toast?
light or dark?
a woman’s a woman, I say, and I put my binoculars between
her
kneecaps and I can see where
empires have fallen.
I wish I had a brush, some paint, some paint and a brush, I say.
why? asks one of the
whores
BECAUSE RATS DON’T LIKE OIL! I scream.
(I can’t do it. I don’t belong here. I listen to radio programs
and people’s voices and I marvel that they can get excited
and interested over nothing) and I flick out the lights, I
crash out the lights, and I pull the shades down, I
tear the shades down as I light my last cigar
then dream jump from the Empire State Building
into the thickheaded bullbrained mob with the hard-on attitude;
already forgotten the dead of Normandy, Lincoln’s stringy
beard,
all the bulls that have died to flashing red capes,
all the love that has died in women and men
while fools have been elevated to the trumpet’s succulent sneer
and I have fought (red-handed and drunk
in slop-pitted alleys)
/>
the bartenders of this rotten land.
and I laugh, I can still laugh, who can’t laugh when the whole
thing
is so ridiculous
that only the insane, the clowns, the half-wits,
the cheaters, the whores, the horseplayers, the bankrobbers, the poets…are interesting?
in the dark I hear hands reaching for the last of my money
like mice nibbling at paper, automatic, while I slumber,
a false drunken God asleep at the wheel…
a quarter rolls across the floor, and I remember all the faces and
the football heroes, and everything has meaning, and an editor writes me, you are good
but
you are too emotional
the way to whip life is to quietly frame the agony,
study it and put it to sleep in the abstract.
is there anything less abstract
than dying everyday and
on the last day?
the door closes and the last of the great whores are gone
and they are all great, somehow no matter how they have
killed me, they are great, and I smoke quietly
thinking of Mexico, of the decaying horses and dead bulls,
of Havana and Spain and Normandy, of the jabbering insane,
of the Kamikaze
winning whether they lived or died,
of my dead friends, of no more friends
ever; and the voice of my Mexican buddy saying, you won’t die
you won’t die in this war, you’re too smart, you’ll take care
of yourself.
I keep thinking of the bulls. the rotting bulls, dying everyday.
the whores are gone. the shells have stopped for a minute.
fuck everybody.
All I Know
All I know is this: the ravens kiss my mouth,
the veins are tangled here,
the sea is made of blood.
All I know is this: the hands reaching out,
my eyes are closed, my ears are closed,
The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966 Page 3