going on—
I’d rather watch a beetle crawl the sick
powdered dust of
earth—
while you are aware of my
cold handshake and
my cigar more alive than my
eyes, my
wit dimmer than
last Fall’s sunlight.
but, Christ, friends—
the luger, the mortar, the patchwork
as I gape out at you from a
porkchop mouth—
take me as Caesar was taken
or
Joan of Arc
or
the man who fell off the fire escape drunk
or
the suicide at Bellevue
or Van Gogh confused with
ravens
and the atomic yellow.
I hold everything away from myself
so that you may become
real and shaking and stemmed
and ascending and blue and buttermilk
as the chorus girls kick out,
flags wave,
the eagle sinks into the sea,
as
our dirty time is just about
served and done.
I Write This Upon the Last Drink’s Hammer
grief-tailed fish,
Sunday-eye in walking shorts
with staff,
motorcades in honor of the roots
of trees,
the rain like a young girl
walking toward me,
the houses waving like flags
filled with drunken hymns,
the bulls of Spain
the bulls of Spain
winning
unpracticed as leaves
as alone as shrimp upon a sea-bottom
or if this is wrong
as alone as what is there,
as my love
an old woman with rouged cheeks
skips rope again
as Hemingway’s fingers live again
tough and terrible and good,
as Kid Gavilan once again flurries
like hyacinths into Spring,
I am sad I am sad I am sad
that the tongue and teeth will eat us
must choose so many good
like these fingers of lilies into the brain
sock out light
to those of us who sit in dark rooms alone
on Monday mornings
while presidents speak of honor and culture
and dedication;
or orange moon of moaning
that my voice speaks like slivers through a broken
face,
all this time I’ve seen through the bottoms of bottles
and black oil wells pumping their stinking arms
ramming home to the core of a rose
split into shares split into dividends
that tinkle less than the grunt of a frog,
I am hammered home not upon wisdom
but upon defamation:
old cars in junk yards,
old men playing checkers in the park,
women putting a price upon the curve of leg and breast,
men going to education like a bank account
or a high-priced whore to accompany them to a symphony,
one-third of the world starving while
I am indecent enough to worry about my own death
like some monkey engrossed with his flea,
I am sad because my manliness chokes me down
to the nakedness of revulsion
when there is so little time to understand,
I am sad because my drink is running low
and I must either visit people who drink
or go to storekeepers
with a poem they will never print,
strings of an avant-garde symphony
upon my radio,
somebody driving a knife through the everywhere cotton
but only meaning
that he protests dying,
and I have seen the dead
like figs upon a board
and my heart gone bad
breaking from the brain and reason
left with only
the season of
love
and
the question:
why?
that Wagner is dead say
is bad enough
to me
only
or that Van Gogh
does not see the strings and puddles
of this day,
this is not so good,
or the fact that
those I have known to touch
I am no longer able to touch;
I am a madman who sits in the front row
of burlesque shows and musical comedies
sucking up the light and song and dance
like a child
upon the straw of an icecream soda,
but I walk outside
and the heinous men
the steel men
who believe in the privacy of a wallet
and cement
and chosen occasions only
Christmas New Year’s the 4th of July
to attempt to manifest a life
that has lain in a drawer like a single glove
that is brought out like a fist:
too much and too late.
I have seen men in North Carolina mountains
posing as priests when they had not even
become men yet
and I have seen men in odd places
like bars and jails
good men who posed nothing
because they knew that posing was false
that the blackbird the carnation the dollar bill in the palm
the poem for rested people with 30 dollar curtains plus
time for flat and meaningless puzzles,
they knew the poem the knife
the curving blueing cock of Summer
that all the love that hands could hold
would go would go
and that the needs for knicknacks and gestures
was done
o fire hold me in these rooms
o copper kettle boil,
the small dogs run the streets,
carpenters sneeze,
the barber’s pole itches
to melt in the sun,
come o kind wind of black car
as I cross Normandy Avenue
in a sun gone blue
like ruptured filaments of a battered suitcase,
to see where you are to see where you have gone
I enter the store of a knowing Jew, my friend,
and argue for another bottle
for him
and
for me
for
all
of
us.
Poem for Liz
the bumblebee
is less than a stack of
potato chips,
and growling and groaning
through barbs
searchlight shining into eyes,
I think of the good whore
who wouldn’t even
take god damn easy money
and when you slipped it into her purse
she’d find it
and slap it back
like the worst of insults,
but she saved you from the law
and your own razor
only meant to shave with
to find her dead later
in a three-dollar-and-fifty-cent-a-week room,
stiff as anything can stiffen,
never having complained
starved and laughing
only wanting one more drink
and one less man
only wanting one small child
as any woman would
coming across the kitchen floor toward her,
everything done up in ribbons and sunshine,
and when the man next to the barstool
that stood next to mine
heard about Liz
he said,
“Too bad, god damn, she was a fine piece.”
No wonder a whore is a whore.
Liz, I know, and although I’d like to see you
now
I’m glad
you’re dead.
A Nice Place
It isn’t easy running through the halls
lights out trying to find a door
with the jelly law
pounding behind you like the dead,
then #303 and in, chain on,
and now they rattle and roar,
then argue gently,
then plead,
but fortunately
the landlord would rather have his door
up than me down
in jail…
“…he’s drunk in there
with some woman. I’ve warned him,
I don’t allow such things,
this is a nice place, this is…”
soon they go away;
you’d think I never paid the rent;
you’d think they’d allow a man to drink
and sit with a woman and watch the sun
come up.
I uncap the new bottle
from the bag and she sits in the corner
smoking and coughing
like an old Aunt from New Jersey.
Insomnia
have you ever been in a room
on top of 32 people sleeping
on the floors below,
only you are not sleeping,
you are listening to the engines
and horns that never stop,
you are thinking of minotaurs,
you are thinking of Segovia
who practices 5 hours a day
or the graves
that need no practice,
and your feet twist in the sheets
and you look down at a hand
that could easily belong to a man
of 80, and you
are on top of 32 people sleeping
and you know that most of them
will awaken
to yawn and eat and empty trash,
perhaps defecate,
but right now they are yours,
riding your minotaurs
breathing fiery hailstones of song,
or mushroom breathing:
skulls flat as coffins,
all lovers parted,
and you rise and light a cigarette,
evidently,
still alive.
Wrong Number
the foreign hands and feet that tear my window shades,
the masses that shape before my face and ogle
and picture me relegated to their damned cage
failed and locked
quite finally in;…
the fires are preparing the burnt flowers of my hills,
the wall-eyed butcher spits
and flaunts his blade
backed by law, dullness and admiration—
how the girls rejoice in him: he has no doubts,
he has nothing
and it gives him strength
like a bell clanging against the defenseless air…
there is no church for me,
no sanctuary; no God, no love, no roses to rust;
towers are only skeletons of misfit reason,
and the sea waits
as the land waits,
amused and perfect;
carefully, I call voices on the phone,
measuring their sounds for humanity and laughter;
somewhere I am cut off, contact fails;
I return the receiver
and return also
to the hell of my undoing, to the looming
larks eating my wallpaper
and curving fat and fancy in the bridgework
of my tub,
and waiting against my will
against music and rest and color
against the god of my heart
where I can feel the undoing of my soul
spinning away like a thread
on a quickly revolving spool.
When the Berry Bush Dies I’ll Swim Down the Green River with My Hair on Fire
the insistent resolution like
the rosebud or the anarchist
is eventually
wasted
like moths in towers
or bathing beauties in
New Jersey.
the buses sotted with people
take them through the streets of
evening where Christ
forgot to weep
as I move down move down
to dying
behind pulled windowshades
like a man who has been gassed or stoned
or insulted by the days.
there goes a rat stuck with love,
there goes a man in dirty underwear,
there go bowels like a steam roller,
there goes the left guard for Notre Dame in
1932, and like Whitman
I have these things:
I am a face behind a window
a toothache
an eater of parsley
a parallel man staring at ceilings of night
a heaver of gas
an expeller of poisons
smaller than God and not nearly as sure
a bleeder when cut
a lover when lucky
a man when born.
there’s much more and much less.
at 6 o’clock they start coming in like the
sea or the evening paper, and like the leaves of the
berry bush outside they are a little sadder now,
inch by inch now it’s speckled with brown and falling leaves,
day by day it gets worse like a wart haggled with a pin;
my shades are down as the scientists decide how
to get to Mars,
how to get out of
here. it is evening, it is time to eat a pie, it is time for
music.
Whitman lies there like a sandcrab like a frozen
turtle and I get up and walk across
the room.
Face While Shaving
So what is a body but a man
caught inside
for a little while?
staring into a mirror,
recognizing the vegetable clerk
or a design on wallpaper;
it is not vanity that seeks reflection
but dumb ape wonder;
but still the reflection…
movement of arm and muscle, shell-head,
a face staring down through the
stale dimension of dreams
as a Mississippi coed powders her nose
and paints a lavender kiss;
the phone rings like a plea
and the razor breaks through the snow,
the dead roses, the dead moths,
sunset after sunset,
steam and Christ and darkness,
one tiny inch of light.
9 Rings
the simple misery of survival
the tyranny of ancient rules
and new deaths,
the coming of the beetle-winged
enemy
chanting, cursing
bits of blood and grit;
I slam my fingers
in the window
as the phone rings.
I count 9 rings
and then it stops;
some voice it was
to test my reality
when I have no reality,
when I am water
walking around bone
in a green room.
I would burn the swans
in their lake,
I would send messengers
to the mountaintop
to razz the clouds.
&nb
sp; she was getting to be a
dull lay
anyway.
Somebody Always Breaking My Dainty Solitude…
hey man! somebody yells down to me through my broken
window,
ya wanna go down to the taco stand?
hell, no!
I scream from down on the floor.
why not? he asks.
I yell back, who are you?
none of us knows who we are, he states, I just thot maybe you
wanted to go down to the taco
stand.
please go away.
no, I’m comin’ in.
listen, friend, I’ve got a foot of salami
here and the first fink that walks in,
he’s gonna get it in the side of his
head!
don’t mess with me, he answers, my mother played halfback for
St. Purdy High for half-a-year before somebody found her
squatting over one of the
urinals.
oh yeah, well, I’ve got bugs in my hair, mice and fish in
my pockets and Charles Atlas is in my bathroom
shining my mirror.
with that, he leaves.
I get up, brush the beercans off my chest
and yell at Atlas to get the humping hell out of there,
I’ve got
business.
Thank God for Alleys
hummingbird make yr mark he said and then something about
an arab and a son of a bitch and I hit him in the mouth and
we fought in the snow for ten minutes spotting it with red
blossoms—breathing is a blade—and I kept thinking of astronauts
up there circling the earth like a rowboat around a pond
all out of trouble and in trouble, and we finally stopped
or somebody or something stopped us and we went into Harry’s
for a drink and the place was empty and Harry kept looking
The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966 Page 12