IL DUCE
More than one woman at a time
Is the policy that got the trains running on time.
More than one at a time in those fascist days, and I climb
Into the clouds and then above—the sublime!—
And wag my wings and make it rhyme.
More than one woman at a time was enough.
On time because there were enough.
Mussolini in riding boots stood at his desk to stuff
Himself into the new secretary who was spread out on the desk. He goes uff.
He goes uff wuff, uff wuff, and even—briefly—falls in luff.
It’s getting worse, and I don’t like the way it sounds.
Down in the subway, while you are waiting, all those humming sounds.
In New York City, all the Lost-and-Founds.
All the towed-away-car pounds.
While you are waiting on the subway platform—God’s wounds! Zounds!
Mussolini is standing on the little balcony
Above Italy, and Italy is looking up at Mussolini on the balcony,
Who is looking over at Ethiopia across a deep blue sea.
I never have enough for me.
I am getting on a girl motorcycle to go across the sea to see.
I AM SIAM
I saw the moon in the sky at sunset over a river pink as a ham.
I am the governess imported from England by me,
The widowed King of Siam.
I drop down on one knee.
I want to marry me.
Where you are I am.
Là où tu es je suis. Où tu es je suis.
I drop down on one knee.
I want to marry me.
I do a saut de chat at sunset over a silver spoon of jam.
Jam for the royal children, Felicity
And Sam.
I am the English governess imported from England by me.
I am the widowed King of Siam! The widowed King of Siam!
THE BIG JET
The big jet screamed and was hysterical and begged to take off,
But the brakes held it in place to force it to flower.
The runway was too short, that’s why, kiddo.
Till the engines powered up to full power.
In a little school in what was then still called Burma, not yet cancered,
Carolyn was teaching English to the lovely brownish children.
The assignment was to use the word “often” in a sentence.
“Birds fly more often than airplanes,” the boy answered.
Little sudden flowers in the desert after it rains,
Bearing gifts of frankincense and myrrh …
What thou lovest well remains.
Birds fly more often than airplanes.
Meat-eating seagulls shout their little cries myanmar myanmar above the airport,
Dropping razor clams on the runway to break them open.
Hard is soft inside.
The big jet has soft people inside for the ride.
THE BLACK-EYED VIRGINS
A terrorist rides the rails underwater
From one language to another in a packed train of London
Rugby fans on their way to the big match in Paris
And a flock of Japanese schoolgirls ready to be fucked
In their school uniforms in paradise.
This is all just after Madrid in the reign of terror.
This is the girls’ first trip outside Japan.
The terrorist swings in the hammock of their small skirts and black socks.
The chunnel train stops in the tunnel with an announcement
That everyone now alive is already human remains.
The terrorists have seen to it that trains
Swap human body parts around with bombs.
The Japanese schoolgirls say so sorry.
Their new pubic hair is made of light.
EUROSTAR
Japanese schoolgirls in their school uniforms with their school chaperones
Ride underwater on a train
Every terrorist in the world would dearly love to bomb
For the publicity and to drown everybody.
The Eurostar dashes into the waves.
The other passengers are watching the Japanese girls eat
Little sweeties they bought with their own money
In London. President Bush the younger is making ice cream.
Ice cream for dessert
Is what Iraq is, without the courses that normally come before.
You eat dessert to start and then you have dessert.
One of them is a Balthus in her short school skirt standing on the seat.
She reaches up too high to get something out of her bag.
She turns around smiling because she knows where you are looking.
SONG: “THE SWOLLEN RIVER OVERTHROWS ITS BANKS”
The terrorists are out of breath with success.
And cancer is eating American women’s breasts.
The terrorists are bombing Madrid
And everywhere serious and nice.
They put the backpacks on
Without a word and leave
The Italian premier talking to an empty room because
They leave the TV on and leave.
One of the many networks Mr. Berlusconi owns
Carries him live denouncing terror. The man
By now has reached Milan
Who has the man in London for Miami.
Both will board the train,
As in the swollen river overthrows its banks.
DRINKING IN THE DAYTIME
Anything is better than this
Bliss.
Nursing on a long-stemmed bubble made of crystal.
I’m sucking on the barrel of a crystal pistol
To get a bullet to my brain.
I’m gobbling a breast, drinking myself down the drain.
I’m in such a state of Haut-Brion I can’t resist.
A fist-fucking anus swallowing a fist.
You’re wondering why I talk this way, so daintily!
I’ll tell you after I take a pee.
Now I’m back.
Oilcoholics love the breast they attack.
I’m talking about the way poetry made me free.
It’s treated me very well, you see.
I climbed up inside the Statue of Liberty
In the days when you could still go up in the torch, and that was me.
I mean every part I play.
I’m drinking my lunch at Montrachet.
I’m a case of Haut-Brion turning into tar.
I’m talking about the recent war.
It’s a case of having to raise your hand in life to be
Recognized so you can ask your question. Mr. Secretary! Mr. Secretary!
To the secretary of defense, I say:
I lift my tar to you at Montrachet!
I lift my lamp beside the golden door to pee,
And make a vow to make men free, and we will find their WMD.
Sir, I supported the war.
I believe in who we are.
I dedicate red wine to that today.
At Montrachet, near the Franklin Street stop, on West Broadway.
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION
I
The darkness coming from the mouth
Must be the entrance to a cave.
The heart of darkness took another form
And inside is the Congo in the man.
I think the Bush administration is as crazy as Sparta was.
Sparta has swallowed Congo and is famished.
The steel Spartan abs turn to fevered slush
While it digests the good that it is doing
In the desert heat. I felt a drop of rain,
Which is the next Ice Age being born.
II
I stood on Madison. The sun was shining.
I felt large drops of rain as warm as tears.
I h
eld my hand out, palm up, the way one does.
The sun was shining and the rain really started.
Maybe there must have been a rainbow somewhere.
I hailed a cab and as I hopped in
That was the first thing
The radio said:
They had beheaded an American.
There was a thunderclap and it poured.
III
The downpour drumming on my taxi gets the Hutu in me dancing.
Il rombo della Desmosedici makes machete music.
I crawl into a crocodile
And I go native.
The white cannibals in cowboy boots
Return to the bush
And the darkness of the brutes.
I am on all fours eating grass
So I can throw up because I like the feeling.
I crouch over a carcass and practice my eating.
IV
The United States of America preemptively eats the world.
The doctrine of eat lest you be eaten
Is famished, roars
And tears their heads off before its own is sawed off.
The human being sawing screams God is Great!
God is—and pours cicadas
By the tens of millions through the air.
They have risen from underground.
The voices of the risen make a summer sound.
It is pouring cicadas on Madison Avenue, making the street thick.
V
Every human being who has ever lived has died,
Except the living. The sun is shining and
The countless generations rise from underground this afternoon
And fall like rain.
I never thought that I would see your face again.
The savage wore a necklace made of beads,
And then I saw the beads were tiny human faces talking.
He started crying and the tears were raindrops.
The raindrops were more faces.
Everybody dies, but they come back as salt and water.
VI
I am charmed by my taxi’s sunny yellow reflection
Keeping abreast of the speeding taxi I’m in,
Playful and happy as a dolphin,
All the way down York Avenue to the hospital,
Right up to the bank of elevators to heaven.
I take an elevator to the floor.
Outside the picture window, rain is falling on the sunshine.
In the squeeze-hush silence, the ventilator keeps breathing.
A special ops comes in to check the hoses and the flow.
A visitor holds out his palm to taste the radiant rain.
VII
The Bush administration likes its rain sunny-side up.
I feel a mania of happiness at being alive
As I write you this suicide note.
I have never been so cheerily suicidal, so sui-Seidel.
I am too cheery to be well.
George Bush is cheery as well.
I am cheeriest
Crawling around on all fours eating gentle grass
And pretending I am eating broken glass.
Then I throw up the pasture.
VIII
CENTCOM is drawing up war plans.
They will drop snow on Congo.
It will melt without leaving a trace, at great expense.
America will pay any price to whiten darkness.
My fellow citizen cicadas rise to the tops of the vanished Twin Towers
And float back down white as ashes
To introduce a new Ice Age.
The countless generations rise from underground this afternoon
And fall like rain.
I never thought that I would live to see the towers fall again.
THE DEATH OF THE SHAH
Here I am, not a practical man,
But clear-eyed in my contact lenses,
Following no doubt a slightly different line than the others,
Seeking sexual pleasure above all else,
Despairing of art and of life,
Seeking protection from death by seeking it
On a racebike, finding release and belief on two wheels,
Having read a book or two,
Having eaten well,
Having traveled not everywhere in sixty-seven years but far,
Up the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa
And the World Trade Center Twin Towers
Before they fell,
Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, Accra,
Tokyo, Berlin, Teheran under the Shah,
Cairo, Bombay, L.A., London,
Into the jungles and the deserts and the cities on the rivers
Scouting locations for the movie,
A blue-eyed white man with brown hair,
Here I am, a worldly man,
Looking around the room.
Any foal in the kingdom
The Shah of Iran wanted
He had brought to him in a military helicopter
To the palace.
This one was the daughter of one of his ministers, all legs, a goddess.
She waited in a room.
It was in the afternoon.
I remember mounds of caviar before dinner
In a magnificent torchlit tent,
An old woman’s beautiful house, a princess,
Three footmen for every guest,
And a man who pretended to get falling-down drunk
And began denouncing the Shah,
And everyone knew was a spy for the Shah.
A team of New York doctors (mine among them)
Was flown to Mexico City to consult.
They were not allowed to examine the Shah.
They could ask him how he felt.
The future of psychoanalysis
Is a psychology of surface.
Stay on the outside side.
My poor analyst
Suffered a stroke and became a needy child.
As to the inner life: let the maid.
How pathetic is a king who died of cancer
Rushing back after all these years to consult more doctors.
Escaped from the urn of his ashes in his pajamas.
Except in Islam you are buried in your body.
The Shah mounts the foal.
It is an honor.
He is in and out in a minute.
She later became my friend
And married a Texan.
I hurry to the gallery on the last day of the show
To a line stretching around the block in the rain—
For the Shah of sculptors, sculpture’s virile king,
And his cold-rolled steel heartless tons.
The blunt magnificence stuns.
Cruelty has a huge following.
The cold-rolled steel mounts the foal.
The future of psychoanalysis is it has none.
I carry a swagger stick.
I eat a chocolate.
I eat brown blood.
When we drove with our driver on the highways of Ghana
To see for ourselves what the slave trade was,
Elmina was Auschwitz.
The slaves from the bush were marched to the coast
And warehoused in dungeons under St. George’s Castle,
Then FedExed to their new jobs far away.
One hotel kept a racehorse as a pet.
The owner allowed it the run of the property.
Very shy, it walked standoffishly
Among the hotel guests on the walkways and under the palms.
The Shah had returned as a racehorse dropping mounds of caviar
Between a coconut grove and the Gulf of Guinea.
An English royal is taught to strut
With his hands clasped behind his back.
A racehorse in West Africa kept as a pet
Struts the same way the useless royals do,
Nodding occasionally to indicate he is listening.
/> His coat has been curried until he is glistening.
Would you rather be a horse without a halter
Than one winning races being whipped?
The finish line is at the starting gate, at St. George’s Castle.
The starting gate is at the finish line for the eternal life.
God rears and whinnies and gives a little wave.
He would rather be an owner than a slave.
Someone fancy says
How marvelous money is.
Here I am, an admirer of Mahatma Gandhi,
Ready to praise making pots of money
And own a slave.
I am looking in the mirror as I shave the slave.
I shave the Shah.
I walk into the evening and start being charming.
A counterfeiter prints me.
(The counterfeiter is me.)
He prints Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.
I call him Nancy.
He is so fancy.
It is alarming
He is so charming.
It is the thing he does and knows.
It is the fragrance of a rose.
It is the nostrils of his nose.
It is the poetry and prose.
It is the poetry.
It is a horse cab ride through Central Park when it snows.
It is Jackie Kennedy’s hairpiece that came loose,
That a large Secret Service agent helped reattach.
I remember the Duck and Duckess of Windsor.
You could entertain them in your house.
Here I am, looking around the room
At everyone getting old except the young,
Discovering that I am lacking in vanity,
Not that I care, being debonair,
Delighted by an impairment of feeling
That keeps everything away,
People standing around in a display case
Even when they are in bed with you,
And laser-guided bombs destroy the buildings
Inside the TV, not that I care,
Not that I do not like it all,
Not that I am short or tall,
Not that I do not like to be alive,
And I appeal to you for pity,
Having in mind that you will read this
Under circumstances I cannot imagine
A thousand years from now.
Have pity on a girl, perdurable, playful,
And delicate as a foal, dutiful, available,
Poems 1959-2009 Page 9