to most folks
but which is good enough
especially when you can
watch someone like Morry
walk away with the seat of his pants
jammed up in the crack of his
ass.
APPARITIONS
I thought I saw the one with long
brown hair standing by the coffee stand.
she had on dark shades.
I ducked and got on the escalator
and went down to the first
floor and mingled with the
crowd.
a few days later
I thought I saw the redhead.
it looked like her ass from behind
and when her head turned I’m
almost sure it was her
face.
I quickly changed floors,
went all the way over to the
clubhouse.
it might all be my imagination
that I saw 2 of the women
that I once thought I couldn’t
live
without.
but
at least
I haven’t run into
the other
5.
SPEED
every day on the freeway I get into a race with some
fool.
I win most of them.
but now and then I hook up with some fellow who is
totally insane
and then I
lose.
each day as I drive the freeway I think, not today, today
I am going to have an
easy pleasant
ride.
but somehow it happens and it’s always on the
Pasadena Freeway
with its snake-like curves which enhance the
danger and exhilaration.
these same curves make it almost impossible for the
police to
check your rate of speed
so they seldom cruise the
Pasadena Freeway.
here I am 65 years old
dueling with young boys
making reckless lane changes
charging into the tiniest gaps between moving
steel
the landscape roaring past in the
rain
sun
fog.
it takes an eye for split-second
timing
but there’s only so far
any of us
can go.
IT’S DIFFICULT TO SEE YOUR OWN DEATH APPROACHING
saw two writers sitting at a table in a café
the other day—not bad fellows really, either with
the word or the way.
it had been several years since I had last
seen them and as I walked over I noticed that they both
looked old—their faces sagged and one’s
hair was white:
it would appear that the gentle art of poetry
had not treated them any better than working the
tomato fields, and oddly, when I greeted them,
they stammered and could barely respond,
they just sat there at the table like a
pair of old coots on a hot summer
afternoon.
I took my leave, went back to my table,
smiled at my wife, pleased that I hadn’t
grown old like that, no,
not at all.
I enjoyed the view of the harbor as I looked out at the
brightly painted ships docked there, rising and falling
gently with the tide
and as I raised my glass to toast my eternal
youth
the voice across from me said, “Hank, you
better take it easy, in just another week
you’re going to be
65.”
MADE IN THE SHADE (HAPPY NEW YEAR)
Popcorn Man, he don’t give a damn,
hates his brother, beats his mother,
he don’t give a damn,
Popcorn Man.
Popcorn Man, he don’t have a
conscience, he don’t wear a rubber,
hates his mother, beats his brother,
Popcorn Man.
Popcorn Man,
he’ll wipe your ass with a frying pan,
Popcorn Man,
he’ll steal your arms, burn your
meat, suck out your eyeballs as a
Popcorn treat,
Popcorn Man.
he don’t give a damn,
he don’t give a damn,
that Popcorn Man,
he really don’t give a damn,
that Popcorn Man.
ONE FOR WOLFGANG
today was Mozart’s 237th birthday
as tonight the sounds from the harbor
drift in over my little
balcony.
I suck the world in through this cigar,
then blow it out.
I’m calm, I’m tired, I’m calm and
tired.
Mozart, what do you think?
why do the gods tease us as
we approach the final
darkness?
yet, who’d want to stay here
FOREVER?
a day at a time is difficult
enough.
so I guess everything is all right.
anyway, happy
237th birthday.
and many more.
I’d like to treat you to
a fine dinner tonight
but the other people
at all the other tables
wouldn’t
understand.
they never
have.
NIGHT UNTO NIGHT
Barney, you knew right away
when they halved the
apple
that your part would contain the
worm.
you knew you’d never dream of conquistadors or
swans.
each man has his designated place and yours is at
the end of the line,
a long long line,
an almost endless line
in the worst possible weather.
you’ll never be embraced by a lovely lady
and your place in the scheme of things
will go unrecorded.
there are men put on earth not to live but to die
slowly and badly or
quickly and
uselessly.
the latter are the lucky ones.
Barney, I don’t know what to say.
it’s the way
things work.
it’s pure chance.
you were born unlucky and unloved,
tossed into a boiling cauldron.
you will be as soon
forgotten as last week’s dream.
Barney, fair doesn’t matter.
every heroic effort fails.
Barney, you have a billion names
and as many faces.
you’re not alone.
just look
around.
NOTES ON SOME POETRY
to feign real emotion, yours or the world’s,
is, of course, unforgivable
yet many poets
past and present
are adept at
this.
these are poets
who write what I call the
“comfortable, clever poem.”
these poems are sometimes written by professors
of literature who have been on the job for too
long,
by the overly ambitious,
by young students of the game
or the like.
but I too am guilty:
last night I wrote 5 comfortable, clever
poems.
and if you aren’t a professor of literature,
overly ambitious,
a you
ng student of the game
or the like,
this can also be caused by too much
success with your writing,
or even be the result of a life gone
cozy.
to make matters worse, I mailed out
those 5 comfortable, clever poems
and I wouldn’t be surprised if
3 or 4 of them were accepted for
publication.
none of this has anything to do with
real emotion and guts,
it’s just word-slinging for the sake of
it
and it’s done almost everywhere by
almost
everybody
we forget what we are really about
and the more we forget this
the less we are able to write a
poem that
stands and screams and laughs on
the page.
we just become like the many writers who make
poetry magazines so dull and
unreadable and
pretentious.
we might just as well not write at all
because we’ve become
fakes, cheaters, poem-hustlers.
so look for us in the next issue of
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse,
look for us in the table of contents,
turn to any of our precious poems
and yawn your life
away.
THE BUZZ
very few go there every day,
it’s hard to beat the 18% take here in California.
I’ve not only been there every day, I’ve been
there every day for decades.
I’ve been there for so long that I know
many jocks’ agents and trainers.
we talk
at the track or on the phone.
and they’ve been over to my place.
none of them are very good horseplayers
compared to me.
there are some other sad players out there.
they come day after day and lose and lose.
where they get their money, I don’t know.
their clothing is old, dirty, ill-fitting, their shoes
run down.
they lose and lose and lose
and finally vanish
to be replaced by a host of new losers.
but I am a fixture.
I will come in the worst weather, the rain
falling in one gray sheet of water,
I will pull into the parking lot, my wipers working hard.
the attendants know me.
“another lousy fucking day, huh Hank?”
it’s a bore between races, they
make you wait too long, they suck the life
out of you.
you lose 25 or 30 minutes between
races, time you’ll never get back,
it’s gone, it’s gone, it’s gone.
most races are 6 furlongs, which means
the real action lasts somewhere between
a minute and 9 or ten seconds.
but when your horse is closing on the
wire, that’s a feeling hard to
compare.
people need a continual war of sorts, some action, the
buzz.
that’s when
you come alive for a moment!
some get it at the track.
some get it in other ways.
many others seldom get it.
you’ve got to have it now and then,
you’ve got to.
a shot of fire!
an explosion!
after a photo finish
your horse’s number going up
first
on the tote board!
it’s the roar of the impossible.
it’s as stunning as the opening of a flower.
and you standing there, feeling
that.
A SIMPLE KINDNESS
every now and then
towards 3 a.m.
and well into the second
bottle
a poem will arrive
and I’ll read it
and immediately attach to it
that dirty word—
immortal.
well, we all know that
in this world now
that
immortality can be a very
brief experience
or
in the long run:
non-existent.
still, it’s nice to play with
dreams of
immortality
and I set the poem aside in a
special place
and
go on with the
others
—to find that poem again
in the morning
read it
and
without hesitation
tear it
up.
it
was nowhere near
immortal
then
or
now
—just a drunken piece
of
sentimental
trash.
the best thing about self-rejection
is that it
saves that obnoxious duty
from being
somebody else’s
problem.
GOOD TRY, ALL
did I fail those fragile tulips?
I think back over my checkered past
remembering all the ladies I’ve known who
at the beginning of the affair
were already discouraged and unhappy
because of their miserable
previous experiences with other
men.
I was considered just another
stop along the way
and maybe I
was and maybe I wasn’t.
the ladies had long been used and misused
while undoubtedly adding their share of
abuse to the
mix.
they were always
chary at first
and the affairs were much like reading an
old newspaper over and over
again (the obituary or help-wanted
sections)
or it was like listening to a familiar
song
too often recalled and sung again
until the melody and words became
blurred.
their real needs were obscured by their
and I always arrived too late with too
little.
yet sometimes there were moments
however brief
when kindness and laughter
came breaking
through
only to quickly dissolve into the
same inevitable dark
despair.
did I fail those fragile tulips?
I can’t think of any one of those ladies
I’d rather not have known
no matter what stories they tell of me
now
as they edge again into
the lives of new-found
lovers.
PROPER CREDENTIALS ARE NEEDED TO JOIN
I keep meeting people, I am introduced to
them at various gatherings
and
either sooner or later
I am told smugly that
this lady or
that gentleman
(all of them young and fresh of face,
essentially untouched by life)
has given up drinking;
that
they all have
had a very difficult time
of late
but
NOW
(and
the NOW
is what irritates me)
all of them are pleased and proud
to have finally
overcome all that alcoholic
nonsense.
I could puke on their feeble
victory. I started drinking at the age of
eleven
after I discovered a wine cellar
in the basement of a boyhood
friend
and
since then
I have done jail time on 15 or
20 occasions,
had 4 D.U.I.’s,
have lost 20 or 30 terrible
jobs,
have been battered and left for
dead in several skid row
alleys, have been twice
hospitalized and
have experienced numberless wild and
suicidal
adventures.
I have been drinking, with
gusto, for 54 years and intend to
continue to
do so.
and now I am introduced
to these young,
blithe, slender, unscathed,
delicate creatures
who
claim to have vanquished the
dreaded evil of
drink!
what is true, of course, is
that they have never really experienced
anything—they have just
dabbled and they have just
dipped in a toe, they have only
pretended to really drink.
with them, it’s like saying that
they have escaped hell-fire by blowing out
a candle.
it takes real effort
and many years to get damn good
at anything
even being a drunk,
and once more
I’ve never met one of these reformed young drunks
yet
who was any better for being
sober.
SILLY DAMNED THING ANYHOW
we tried to hide it in the house so that the
neighbors wouldn’t see.
it was difficult, sometimes we both had to
be gone at once and when we returned
there would be excreta and urine all
about.
it wouldn’t toilet train
but it had the bluest eyes you ever
saw
and it ate everything we did
and we often watched tv together.
one evening we came home and it was
gone.
there was blood on the floor,
there was a trail of blood.
I followed it outside and into the garden
and there in the brush it was,
mutilated.
there was a sign hung about its severed
throat:
“we don’t want things like this in our
neighborhood.”
I walked to the garage for the shovel.
I told my wife, “don’t come out here.”
then I walked back with the shovel and
began digging.
I sensed
the faces watching me from behind
drawn blinds.
they had their neighborhood back,