the latest sleeping on my pillow catches
window lamplight through the mist of alcohol.
I was the whelp, the prude who shook when
the wind shook blades of grass the eye could see
and
you were a
convent girl watching the nuns shake loose
the Las Cruces sand from God’s robes
you are
yesterday’s
bouquet so sadly
raided, I kiss your poor
breasts as my hands reach for love
in this cheap Hollywood apartment smelling of
bread and gas and misery.
we move through remembered routes
the same old steps smooth with hundreds of
feet, 50 loves, 20 years.
and we are granted a very small summer, and
then it’s
winter again
and you are moving across the floor
some heavy awkward thing
and the toilet flushes, a dog barks
a car door slams…
it’s gotten inescapably away, everything,
it seems, and I light a cigarette and
await the oldest curse
of all.
Poem to a Most Affectionate Lady
Please keep your icecream hands
for the leopard,
please keep your knees
out of my nuts;
if women must love me
I ask them also
to cook me sauerkraut dinners
and leave me time
for games of gold
in the mind,
and time for sleep
or scratching
or rolling upon my side
like any tired bull
in any tired meadow.
love is not a candle
burning down—
life is,
and love and life are
not the same
or else
love having choice
nobody would ever die.
which means? which means:
let loose a moment
your hand upon my center—
I’ve done you well
like any scrabby plant
upon a mountain, so
please be kind enough
to die for an hour
or 2,
or at least
take time
to turn the
sauerkraut.
Parts of an Opera, Parts of a Guitar, Part of Nowhere
I don’t know, it was raining and I had fallen down
somewhere but I seemed to have money so it didn’t
matter, and I went into the opera to dry off, and it
was opening night and everybody was dressed and
trying
to act very polite and educated but I saw a lot of
guys there mean as hell, I don’t mean mean enough
to be
a Dillinger but mean enough to be successful in
business and their wives were all tone deaf
and even the people hollering in the opera
were not enjoying it but hollering because it was the
thing to do, like wearing bermudas in the summer, and
I thought, I’ll never write an opera because they’ll
walk all over it, and I walked out
and phoned a gal I knew from South Philly and she met
me on Olvera Street and we went into a fancy place
and ate and drank and this big female kept
whirling her fans and shaking her ass in my face
and the South Philly broad got mad and I laughed
and a little Mexican mean as a tarantula
kept asking us to keep quiet and I asked him out
in the alley and he went and I took him quite
easily and I felt like Hemingway and I took the
S. Philly broad to my room and I told her all about
the opera
how the people were so nicely dressed
and applauded all the time
whether it was good or bad
and we slept real good that night
the rain coming down on our heads
through the open window
but I kept thinking of the bigassed Mexican gal
with the fans who kept shaking it
and I don’t think she was kidding
because I am real handsome
and educated
and someday I’m going to give up
drinking and smoking and whoring
and kneel and pray in the Sunday sunshine
while they are killing the beautiful bulls
and selling their ears and tails in
Tiajuana, and I’m going to the opera,
I’m going to the opera and have 12 guys
working for me for
80 dollars a week, including half-days on
Saturdays and no
hangovers on
Monday.
Letter from the North
my friend writes of rejection and editors,
and how he has visited K. or R. or W.,
and am I in S.#12? he will have a poem in there,
and T. has written him from Florida
but rejected his poems; R. sleeps in the printshop
and T. chided him mercilessly…
met editor of the X. Review in the street,
and editor acted like he was kicked in the nuts
when he found out who he was
and pressed him for opinion of poems;
it does good to corner these guys sometime,
flush them outa the brush;
ad agencies have forgotten him, and W. is taking
too long to read his book; only got $5
for reading at the Unicorn,
phoned K. of the W. Review, sounds like a sharp guy;
and he thinks he is done with R.;
encloses some clippings for my amusement:
his name in a newspaper column;
he’ll have to call R. again: S. is lecturing at
the university
and he can’t bear to go; M. is a homo,
C. can’t make up his mind and P. is mad at him
because he drank beer in front of N.
nothing but rejects but he knows his stuff is good.
L. was there to borrow a pack of Pall Malls, bastard makes
him sick, always whining…
B. writes that P. is in trouble, they must organize
a benefit;
awful discouraged. not even money for stamps.
dead without stamps. write me, he says,
I got the blues.
write you? about what, my friend?
I’m only interested in
poetry.
The Best Way to Get Famous Is to Run Away
I found a loose cement slab outside the icecream store,
tossed it aside and began to dig; the earth was
soft and full of worms and soon I was in to my
waist, size 36;
a crowd gathered but stepped back before my shots
of mud,
and by the time the police came, I was in below
my head,
frightening gophers, eels and finding bits of golden
inlaid skull,
and they asked me, are you looking for oil, treasure,
gold, the end of China? are you looking for love, God,
a lost key chain? and little girls dripping icecream
peered into my darkness, and a psychiatrist came
and a
college professor and a movie actress in a bikini, and
a Russian spy and a French spy and an English spy,
and a drama critic and a bill collector and an old
girl friend, and they all asked me, what are you
looking
for? and soon it began to rain…atomic submarines
; changed course, Tuesday Weld hid behind a newspaper,
Jean-Paul Sartre rolled in his sleep, and my hole
filled
with water; I came out black as Africa, shooting
stars
and epitaphs, my pockets full of lovely worms,
and they took me to their jail and gave me a shower
and a nice cell, rent-free, and even now the people
are picketing in my cause, and I have signed
contracts to appear on the stage and television,
to write a guest column for the local paper and
write a book and endorse some products, I have
enough money to last me several years at the best
hotels, but as soon as I get out of here, I’m gonna
find me another loose slab and begin to dig, dig,
dig, and this time I’m not coming back…rain, shine,
or bikini, and the reporters keep asking, why did you
do it? but I just light my cigarette and smile…
The Kings Are Gone
to say great words of kings and life
to give equations like a math genius;
I sat in on a play by Shakespeare,
but the grandeur did not come through;
I do not claim to have a good ear
or a good soul, but most of Shakespeare
laid me dry, I confess,
and I went me into a bar
where a man with hands like red crabs
laid his sick life before me through the fumes,
and I grew drunk,
mirror upon myself,
the age of life like a spider
taking last blood from us all,
and I knew I had misjudged Shakey,
his voice speaking out of the tube of the grave,
and the traffic went past
I could see it out the door,
pieces of things that moved
and the red crab hands moved before my face
and I took my drink then knocked it over
with the back of my hand;
and I walked out on the street
but nothing got better.
Reprieve and Admixture
exposed to grief too long
I become in time
surfeited with suffering,
decide that I owe myself
survival; this is not easy:
telling yourself that you
deserve better days
after the history of your past;
but I have seen complete fools
go on (of course)
without ever
considering their shortcomings;
then too turtles crawl the
land, dirty words scratched
on their backs…
but they hardly
improve the horizon.
The Swans Walk My Brain in April It Rains
would you have me peel an orange and
talk of Saavedra (Miguel de) Cervantes?
get out! you are like that fly on the
curtain.
I am not liked in the marketplace.
I do not smile at the children.
I am not interested in the doings of
armies.
I drink at fountains until my eyes
stick out like ripe berries.
I stink under the armpits and do not
shine my shoes.
I do not own
anything.
I understand little but my
misuse.
I understand only horror and
more horror.
I cannot rhyme.
I am too tired to
steal.
I listen to Segovia
smile.
I look at a hog’s head and
am in
love.
I walk I walk a
hymenotomy of a
man—o
sweet things of this time
where are you?
you must find me now for I am
terrified with what I
see!
the dungeons sweep past lit with
eyes. eyes? magma!
I enter a shop and buy wine from a
dead man
then walk away under a sky overflowing
with pus. the hunters cough
on the benches.
I walk…
The End
here they come
grey and beastly
rubbing out the night
with their bloodred torches,
Numbo! they scream,
Hail Numbo!
and grocer John gets down
on the floor and hugs
his precious eggs
and sausage,
and the bats of
Babe Ruth get up and
strut their
averages
around a dark bar,
and the grey blonde in bed
with me asks
“what’s all the noise?”
and I say,
“the world is coming
to an end.”
and we sit in the window
and watch, strangely
happy. we have 14 cigarettes
and a bottle of wine.
enough to last
until they
find us.
A Farewell Thing While Breathing
a farewell thing while breathing
was walking down the hall
in underwear
with painted face like clown
a bomb from Cologne in right pocket
a Season in Hell
in the left,
stripes of sunset
like
bass
running
down
his
arms,
and they found him in the morning
dangling in the fire escape
window,
face frosted and gone as an electric bulb,
and the sparrows
were in the brush downstairs,
and
friend,
sparrows do not sing
and they
(the people, not the sparrows)
carried him down the steps
like a wasted owl.
Sad-Eyed Mules of Men
daily the
sledgehammers and the
sad-eyed mules of men, &
there was Christ hung like
dried bacon, and now
the con-men raking it in:
the young girls
the mansions
the trips to
Paris, and look:
even the great artists
the great writers
raking it in.
but where do we go
while the great writers are
saving their own
souls?
where do we go?
…to hell, of course, juggling their
collected works
under our
collective
arms.
Dear Friend
this
is what happens when the
drink and the life
catch up with what is left of
one.
I still hope to send you the
paperback although it is all
swollen.
I read
most of it in the bathroom where the
faucets drip hot water and make
steam
and that is what happened to the pages and
the binding is about to
pop
but I still thought I’d mail it to
you but
something always interferes—
there is a mirror
here and
I see myself in the mirror
and I stagger like a deer taking a
slug in the neck
the face is not what it should
be and I tell myself that it does not
matter
that I
am tired of factual and recognized
good
that we need new goodness new
truth for
ourselves and
let the others wear that
out.
but anyhow
I still hope to mail you the
paperback
I am sure I will mail it to you
sometime I think I will
just walk into the room and brush by
knock it to the floor with my
hand and pick it up
without looking at anything
and I will find an envelope and
mail it to
you.
I want to get it out
of here.
A Conversation on Morality, Eternity and Copulation
all up and down the street they came back
without arms or legs or eyes or
lungs or minds or
lives, although
the war had been
won
and the madam stood in the doorway
and told me,
it won’t matter, it’ll be
business as
usual
because if they haven’t shot off
the other parts
they’ll still want to
fuck.
and the dead? I
asked.
the dead are without money or
sense.
many of the living are the same
way? I suggested.
yeah, but those we don’t
serve.
God will love
you.
I’m sure He
will.
will you serve
Him?
I have been serving Him, you know
that: men are men and
soldiers are soldiers and
they love to
The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966 Page 8