steadying the old boy
as I handed him his cane.
he didn’t speak,
he just smiled at me.
then he turned
forward.
I stood behind him waiting
my turn.
bad times at the 3rd and Vermont hotel
Alabam was a sneak and a thief and he came to my
room when I was drunk and
each time I got up he shoved me back
down.
you prick, I told him, you know I can
take you!
he just shoved me down
again.
when I sober up, I said, I’m going to kick you
all the way to hell!
he just kept pushing me
around.
I finally caught him a good one, right over the
temple
and he backed off and
left.
it was a couple of days later
I got even: I fucked his
girl.
then I went down and knocked on his
door.
well, Alabam, I fucked your woman and now I’m going to
kick you all the way to
hell!
the poor guy started crying, he put his hands over his
face and just cried
I stood there and watched
him.
I said, I’m sorry,
Alabam.
then I left him there, I went back to
my room.
we were all alkies and none of us had jobs, all we had
was each other.
even then, my so-called woman was in some bar or
somewhere, I hadn’t seen her in a couple of
days.
I had a bottle of port
left.
I uncorked it and took it down to Alabam’s
room.
said, how about a drink,
Rebel?
he looked up, stood up, went for two
glasses.
the Master Plan
starving in a Philadelphia winter
trying to be a writer
I wrote and wrote and drank and drank and
drank
and then stopped writing and concentrated on
the drinking.
it was another
art-form.
if you can’t have any luck with one thing you
try another.
of course, I had been practicing on the
drinking-form
since the age of
15.
and there was much competition
in that field
also.
it was a world full of drunks and writers and
drunk writers.
and so
I became a starving drunk instead of a starving
writer.
the best thing was the instant
result.
and I soon became the biggest and
best drunk in the neighborhood and
maybe the whole
city.
it sure as hell beat sitting around waiting for
those rejection slips from The New Yorker and The
Atlantic Monthly.
of course, I never really considered quitting the
writing game, I just wanted to give it a
ten year rest
figuring if I got famous too early
I wouldn’t have anything left for the stretch run
like I have now, thank
you,
with the drinking still thrown
in.
garbage
I had taken a tremendous beating,
I had chosen a real bull, and because of
the girls and for himself and just because of his
brutal escaping energy
he had almost murdered me:
I learned later
that even after I was out
he had kicked my head again and
again
and then had emptied several garbage cans
over me
and then they had left me there
in that alley.
I was the guy from out of town.
it was around 6 a.m. on a Sunday
morning when I came
around.
my face was a mass of
bruises, scabs, clots, bumps, lumps, my lips
thick and numb, my eyes almost swollen
shut
but I got to my feet and began
walking;
I could see traces of the sun, houses, the shaking
sidewalk as I
moved toward my room
then I heard shuffling sounds from the
center of the street
and I forced my eyes to
focus and saw this
man staggering
his clothing ripped and bloody
he smelled of death and darkness
but he kept moving forward
down the middle of the street
as if he had been walking for
miles
from some event so ugly that
the mind itself might refuse to accept it
as part of life.
my impulse was to help him
and I stepped off the
curbing
and moved toward him.
he couldn’t see me, he moved forward
looking for somewhere to go,
anywhere, and
I saw one of his eyes hanging
out of the socket,
dangling.
I backed away.
he was like a creature not of the
earth.
I let him go
by.
I heard him moving away
behind me
those blind steps
lurching, in
agony,
senselessly
alone.
I got back on the
sidewalk.
I got back to my
room.
I got myself to the
bed.
fell face up
the ceiling up there above me,
I waited.
my vanishing act
when I got sick of the bar
and I sometimes did
I had a place to go:
it was a tall field of grass
an abandoned
graveyard.
I didn’t consider this to be a
morbid pastime.
it just seemed to be the best
place to be.
it offered a generous cure to
the vicious hangover.
through the grass I could see
the stones,
many were tilted
at strange angles
against gravity
as though they must
fall
but I never saw one
fall
although there were many of those
in the yard.
it was cool and dark
with a breeze
and I often slept
there.
I was never
bothered.
each time I returned to the bar
after an absence
it was always the same with
them:
“where the hell you
been? we thought you
died!”
I was their bar freak, they needed me
to make themselves feel
better.
just like, at times, I needed that
graveyard.
let’s make a deal
in conjunction with
these rivers of shit
that keep rolling through my brain, Captain
Walrus, I can only say that I hardly understand
it and would say
any number of HAIL MARYS
to put a stop to it—
I’d even go back to living with that whore with the
heart of brass just
to keep these rivers of shit from rolling through my
brain, Captain Walrus, but
of course
I would never stop playing the horses or
drinking
but
Captain
to keep these rivers from flowing
I’d promise to never
eat eggs again and
I’d shave my head and my balls, I’d live in
the state of Delaware and I’d even
force myself to sit through any movie acted in by
any member of the Fonda
family.
think about it, Captain Walrus, the
plum is in the pudding and the parasol bends to
the West wind
I’ve got to do something about all
this…
it seems like it never
stops.
each man’s hell is in a different
place: mine is just up and
behind
my ruined
face.
16-bit Intel 8088 chip
with an Apple Macintosh
you can’t run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can’t read each other’s
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can’t use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.
zero
sitting here watching the second hand on the TIMEX go around and
around…
this will hardly be a night to remember
sitting here searching for blackheads on the back of my neck
as other men enter the sheets with dolls of flame
I look into myself and find perfect emptiness.
I am out of cigarettes and don’t even have a gun to point.
this writer’s block is my only possession.
the second hand on the TIMEX still goes around and
around…
I always wanted to be a writer
now I’m one who can’t.
might as well go downstairs and watch late night tv with the wife
she’ll ask me how it went
I’ll wave a hand nonchalantly
settle down next to her
and watch the glass people fail
as I have failed.
I’m going to walk down the stairway now
what a sight:
an empty man being careful not to trip and bang his empty
head.
putrefaction
of late
I’ve had this thought
that this country
has gone backwards
4 or 5 decades
and that all the
social advancement
the good feeling of
person toward
person
has been washed
away
and replaced by the same
old
bigotries.
we have
more than ever
the selfish wants of power
the disregard for the
weak
the old
the impoverished
the
helpless.
we are replacing want with
war
salvation with
slavery.
we have wasted the
gains
we have become
rapidly
less.
we have our Bomb
it is our fear
our damnation
and our
shame.
now
something so sad
has hold of us
that
the breath
leaves
and we can’t even
cry.
I’ll take it…
maybe I’m going crazy, that’s all right
but these poems keep rising to the top of my
head with more and more
force. now
after the oceans of booze that I have
consumed
it would only seem that attrition would
be my rightful reward as I continue to
consume—while
the madhouses, skidrows and graveyards are
filled with the likes of
me—
yet each night as I sit down to this machine
with my bottle
the poems flare and jump out, on and
on—roaring in the glee of
easy power: 65 years
dancing—my mouth curling into a
tiny grin
as these keys keep meting out a
substantial energy of cock-
eyed miracle.
the gods have been kind to me through this
life-style that would have killed
an ox of a man
and I’m no ox of a
man.
I sensed from the beginning, of
course, that there was a strange gnawing
inside of me
but I never dreamed this
luck
this absolute shot of
grace
my death will at most seem
an
afterthought.
supposedly famous
not much to hang onto in this early morning growling,
my wife, poor dear, downstairs,
I am at the racetrack all day and
up here all night with the bottle and
this machine.
my wife, poor dear, may she find her place
in heaven.
then too
the few people that I have
known, the people I thought had that
little extra flare
that inventive humanity, well, they
dissolved
but
being a natural loner
I am not over-
distraught—
there are still my 5
cats: Ting, Ding, Beeker, Bleeker and
Blob.
not much to hang on to in this early morning growling.
I am now a
supposedly famous
writer
influencing hordes of
typists.
would
that I could
laugh
at all
this.
Fame is the last whore, all the others are
gone.
well, the competition ain’t been
much
but that’s no hair off my
wrists: I realized all that
long ago while
starving and
pissing out the
window
while smashing waterglasses of
booze against the behind-in-the-
rent
walls.
Ting, Ding, Beeker, Bleeker and
Blob.
now Death is a plant growing in my
mind
not much to hang on to in this early morning growling.
I am sad for the dead and I am sad for the living
but not for my 5 cats or
for my wife, my wife who will<
br />
find her place in
heaven.
and as for the people
dissolved
I didn’t dissolve them, they dissolved
themselves.
and that the sidewalks are empty while
full of feet
passing—
this is the working of the
way.
not much to hang on to
as
a man plays a piano
through my radio and
the walls
stand up and
down
as the courage of everything
even the fleas
the lice
the tarantula
astounds me
in this early morning
growling.
the last shot
here we are, once again, the last drink, the last
poem—decades of this splendid luck—another drunken
a.m., and not on the drunktank floor tonight waiting for
the black pimp to get off the phone so I can put through my one
allowed call (so many of those a.m.s too) it took
me a long time to find the most interesting person to
drink with: myself, like this, now reaching to my left
for the last glass of the Blood of the
Lamb.
whorehouse
my first experience in a whorehouse
was in Tijuana.
it was a large place on the edge of
the city.
I was 17, with two friends.
we got drunk to get our guts
up
then went on
in.
the place was packed with
servicemen
mostly
sailors.
the sailors stood in long
lines
hollering, and beating on
the doors.
Lance got in a short
line (the lines indicated the
age of the whore: the shorter the
line the older the
whore)
and got it over
with, came out bold and
You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense Page 5