knocked out his brains.”
“you saw it?”
“I saw it. the next time the train stopped
they dumped him out, they dumped him in some
high grass. then the train started up
again.”
I gave the kid another beer.
“when the police find those guys in rags, no
identification, wine-faced, they say ‘just another wino,’
they don’t even follow up, they just
forget it.”
we talked most of the night
about the road. I told him a few stories of my
own. then I went to bed. he slept on the
couch. I went into the bedroom with the woman and
kid. slept.
when I got up to piss in the morning
Red was sitting in a chair
reading yesterday’s paper.
“I gotta go,” he said, “I can’t sleep
anymore, but I had a good night, some good
talk. thanks.”
“me too, Red. easy now.”
“sure.”
then he was out the door and down the street,
gone.
back in the bedroom she asked, “is Red gone?”
“yeah.”
“where’d he go?”
“I don’t know. Texas. Hell. Boston. anywhere.”
the little girl woke
up: “I wanna bottle!”
“can you get her a bottle? you’re up.”
“sure.”
I went into the kitchen and mixed some
milk. and everywhere things were working out there,
cruel and not cruel, spiders and bums
and soldiers and gamblers and madmen and
factotums and fags and firemen, like that,
and I went back in and handed the girl the bottle
got back into bed
and listened to the kid sucking on the thing—
suck suck suck,
and soon we’d have our own
breakfast.
it is not much
I suppose like others
I have come through fire and sword,
love gone wrong,
head-on crashes, drunk at sea,
and I have listened to the simple sound of water running
in tubs
and wished to drown
but simply couldn’t bear the others
carrying my body down three flights of stairs
to the round mouths of curious biddies;
the psyche has been burned
and left us senseless,
the world has been darker than lights-out
in a closet full of hungry bats,
and the whiskey and wine entered our veins
when blood was too weak to carry on;
and it will happen to others,
and our few good times will be rare
because we have a critical sense
and are not easy to fool with laughter;
small gnats crawl our screen
but we see through
to a wasted landscape
and let them have their moment;
we only asked for leopards to guard
our thinning dreams.
I once lay in a
white hospital
for the dying and the dying
self, where some god pissed a rain of
reason to make things grow
only to die, where on my knees
I prayed for LIGHT,
I prayed for l*i*g*h*t,
and praying
crawled like a blind slug into the
web
where threads of wind stuck against my mind
and I died of pity
for Man, for myself,
on a cross without nails,
watching in fear as
the pig belches in his sty, farts,
blinks and eats.
the bull
I did not know
that the Mexicans
did this:
the bull
had been brave
and now
they dragged him
dead
around the ring
by his
tail,
a brave bull
dead,
but not just any bull,
this was a special
bull,
and to me
a special
lesson learned…
and although Brahms
stole his First from Beethoven’s
9th
and although
the bull
was dead,
his head and his horns and
his intestines dead,
he had been better than
Brahms,
as good as
Beethoven,
and
as we walked out
the sound and meaning
of him
kept crawling up my arms
and although people jostled me and
stepped on my toes
the bull burned within me
my candle of
light;
dragged by his tail
he had nothing to do with anything
now having escaped it all,
and down through the long tunnel, surrounded by
elbows and feet and eyes, I prayed for Tijuana
and for the dead bull
and man
and me,
the blue kissing waters
enjoying the knot of pain,
and I clenched my hands
deep within my
pockets, seized darkness
and moved on.
the people, no
startling! such determination in the
dull and uninspired
and the copyists.
they never lose the fierce gratitude
for their uneventfulness,
nor do they forget to laugh
at the wit of slugs;
as a study in diluted senses
they’d make any pharaoh
cough up his beans;
in music they prefer the monotony of
dripping faucets;
in love and sex they prefer each other
and therefore compound the
problem;
the energy with which they propel their
uselessness
(without any self-doubt)
toward worthless goals
is as magnificent as
cow shit.
they produce novels, children, death,
freeways, cities, wars, wealth, poverty, politicians
and total areas of grandiose waste;
it’s as if the whole world is wrapped in dirty
bandages.
it’s best to take walks late at
night.
it’s best to do your business only on
Mondays and
Tuesdays.
it’s best to sit in a small room
with the shades down
and
wait.
the strongest men are the fewest
and the strongest women die alone
too.
you might as well kiss your ass goodbye
I finally met him. he sat in an old robe
an
d bitched for 5 hours.
“look,” he said, “don’t trust Krause,
Krause will rob you. he owes me 10,000 dollars
and there’s no way I can get it out
of him. a real bastard.”
“Sir,” I said, “when you wrote that first novel,
it was so humorous, the truth is always so funny,
you know, the way people act, like blind mechanical things,
killing without reason, marvelous how you got it all
down.”
an old woman came in and set a pot of tea in front of
him. “they smashed my motorcycle, stole my manuscripts,
cleaned me out. they would have killed me but I wasn’t
here. they called me a fascist, claimed I sold the plans
to the Maginot Line to the Krauts. now where the hell would I ever
get the plans to the Maginot
Line?”
he poured his tea. lifted the cup. it was too hot
or something. he spit it out on the rug, some of it
on my shoes and pants.
“Sir,” I asked, “that first novel, did you really eat your own
flesh as a young writer? were you that
hungry? by god, that was some novel, I’ll never
forget it!”
“Martha!” he called. “Martha!”
the old woman came in.
“you forgot the lemon and sugar, you old hag!”
the old woman ran out
for the lemon and sugar.
“the government claims I owe them 70,000 dollars! they don’t bother Krause. the son-of
a-bitch rides around in a Cadillac and owns a twelve
acre estate. don’t ever trust Krause. he’s a bloodsucker. he’s sucked
the bodies and talents of at least 3 dozen writers dry. he’s like a giant
spider, a tarantula!”
“Krause has never asked me for anything…”
“if he does, you might as well kiss your ass
goodbye!”
Martha ran in with the lemon and sugar.
“you damned washed-up whore! I oughta whip your ass!”
“Sir,” I said, “you’re looked up to
as one of the strongest writers since 1900.”
“don’t trust Krause! a bloodsucker!”
he bitched for 5 hours. and I listened. then his head fell back,
across the top of his rocker, and I saw that
famous hawk profile. then he began
to snore.
he was just an old man in an old
bathrobe.
I stood up. Martha came in.
“I’m glad I had a chance to meet him,”
I told her.
“I try to remember he was once a great writer,”
she told me.
“he’s still kind of humorous,”
I told her.
“I don’t think so,” she said,
“you see, I’m his
wife.”
“goodnight,” I
said.
“goodnight,” she
replied.
purple glow
I see the high-heeled
shoes and a dried white rose
lying on the bar
like a clenched
fist.
whiskey makes the heart beat faster
but it sure doesn’t help the
mind and isn’t it funny how you can ache just
from the deadly drone of
existence?
I see this
nudie dancer running along the top of
the bar
shaking what she thinks is
magic
with all those faces staring
up from overpriced
drinks.
and me? being there? no shit,
I really didn’t care about
her but I love the pulse of
the loud flat music thumping
in the purple glow, something
about it all: I hardly
ever felt better.
I watch her, the purple
doll so
sad so cheap so
sad, you would never want to
bed down with her or even hear her
speak, yet in that drunken place
you would
like to hand your heart to her
and say
touch it
but then
give it back.
she dances so fiercely now in
the purple glow,
purple does something strange to me:
there was a night
30 years ago
I was drunk, true, and there was
a purple Christ in a glass box
outside a little church and I
smashed the glass, I broke
the glass, and then I reached in and touched
Christ but
He was only a dummy and I heard the
sirens then and started
running.
well, my mind has never been the same
since and the typing helps but you can’t
type all the time, so the nudie dancer now
breaks what heart I have left and I
don’t know why but I start giving money
to everybody in the bar, I give a five to this
guy, a ten to that, I think maybe it might
wake them to the wisdom
of it all
but they don’t even say
“thanks,” they just think I’m a
fool.
the manager comes up and tells me
I’m 86’d, I hand him a
twenty, he takes
it.
two friends
have been sitting at a back
table, they help me up and out of the
bar.
I think the situation is very
funny but they are
angry:
where’s your car?
where’s your fucking
car?
I say, I
dunno.
too fucking bad, they
say and
leave me sitting alone on an
apartment house
step.
I light up and smoke a cigarette,
then get up and begin the long
walk, a walk I know will
entail at least a couple of
hours
to find my car (past experience)
but I know that when I
find it, the rush of
happiness will be
all I need
and that I will then be able to
begin my life all over
again.
one thousand dollars
all of my knowledge about horse racing
told me that this was a sure bet.
I bet one thousand to win.
the horse had post one
at 6 furlongs.
the bell rang and they came
out of the gate.
my horse turned left
ran through the fence
fell down and
died
right there
at 7/5.
when I tell people this story
they don’t say
anything.
sometimes there’s nothing to say
about
death.
grip the dark
I sit here
drunk now
listening to the
same symphonies
that gave me
the will to go on
when I was 22.
40 years later
they and I are not quite so
magical.
you should have
seen me then
so
lean
no
gut
I was
a gaunt string of a
man:
blazing, strong,
insane.
say one wrong
word
to me
and I’d crack you right
there.
I didn’t want to be
bothered with
anything or
anyone.
I seemed to be
always on my way to some
cell
after being booked for
doing things
on or off the
avenue.
I sit here
drunk now.
I am
a series of
small victories
and large defeats
and I am as
amazed
as any other
that
I have gotten
from there to
here
without committing murder
or being
murdered;
without
having ended up in the
madhouse.
as I drink alone
again tonight
my soul despite all the past
agony
thanks all the gods
who were not
there
for me
then.
the dwarf with a punch
this is many years later
The People Look Like Flowers At Last Page 3