a nice quiet neighborhood with green
lawns, palm trees, circular driveways, children,
churches, a supermarket, etc.
I dug into the earth.
MOTH TO THE FLAME
Dylan Thomas, of course, loved it all: the applause, the
free booze, the receptive ladies, but it was
all too much for him
and he finally wrote less than
one hundred poems—
but he could recite almost every one
of them
beautifully
from memory
and whether to recite or drink or copulate
soon became his only
concern.
sucker-punched by his own vanity
and the accolades of fools,
he pissed on the centuries
and they
pissed
back
all over
him.
7 COME 11
things never get so bad
that we can’t remember
that maybe they were
never so good.
we swam upstream
through all those rivers of
shit—
no use drowning
now
and
wasting all that
gallant and stupid
fight.
upstream through it all
to end up
sitting here
in front of this machine
with
cigarette dangling
and
drink at hand.
no glory more than this
doing what has to be done
in this small
room
just to stay alive and to
type these words with
no net below
3 million readers holding their breath
as I stop
reach around
and scratch my
right
ear.
PUT OUT THE LIGHT
some individuals have an excessive
fear of death they say that Tolstoy was
one such
but that he worked it out
by finding Christ.
whatever works,
works.
it’s not really necessary
to tremble in the gloom among
flickering wax candles.
in general, most people don’t
think too much about
death,
they are too busy fighting
day to day
for
survival.
when death comes
it’s not so hard for them—
weary and worn as they are—
so they just toss it in,
leave
almost as if on a
vacation.
to go on
living is so much
harder.
most, given a choice
between eternal life or
death,
will always choose
the latter.
which proves
that
most people are
much wiser
than we
know.
FOXHOLES
yes, 1 know there should be a
God.
I remember that
during World War II there was a
saying: “there are no atheists in
foxholes.”
of course, there were, but I
suppose not very
many.
yet
the fear of death
does not always
compel everyone into accepting a blind
commonly-held
belief.
for those few atheists
in foxholes perhaps god and
the war both
meaning
no matter what
the majority
demanded.
CALM ELATION, 1993
sitting here looking at the small wooden gargoyle sitting on my
desk, it’s a chilly night but the endless rains have stopped
and I am suspended somewhere between Nirvana
and nowhere, realizing that I’ve thought too much
about fate and death and not enough about something sensible,
like putting some polish on my old shoes. I need more
sleep but I have this horrible habit of sitting
up here until dawn, listening to the sirens and the other
sounds of the night; I should have been one of
those old guys sitting in a watchtower looking out
to sea.
the gargoyle, which looks something like myself, seems
to say, “you got that right, Henry.”
this town is drying out, the drunks in
the bars are talking about the endless rain, about what
happened to them in the rain, they are full of
rain stories.
and now the new president is going to be
inaugurated and he’s so damn young I could
be his grandfather, still, he doesn’t seem a bad
chap but he’s sure inherited a fucking mess.
well, we’ll see about him and about me and finally
about you.
and what about you, little gargoyle, looking at me.
it’s only January but you’ll be surprised at
the hells and joys that await us,
how we are both going to have to
endure the bad parts and the galling but
necessary trivial things: a man can
damn near perish for failure to pay a gas
bill, get a tooth pulled or replace a leaking
valve stem on a tire.
there’s so much crap to be attended to, like it
or not.
some just give it all up and go wild
in some corner;
I don’t have the guts for that—yet.
ah, gargoyle, it’s such a puzzle, you’d think
there’d be more flash, more lightning, more
miracle but if there is, we are going to have
to create it ourselves, me, you, others.
meanwhile, as I said, the whole town is
drying out and that’s about all we can hope for
at the moment.
but we are girding up, pumping our spiritual
muscles, waiting here in the dream.
that’s better than not waiting at all, that’s better
than tossing it in.
“you got that right, Henry,” the gargoyle seems to say.
I get a chill, put on a large black sweater,
sit here, wiggle my toes.
there is something beautiful about this room.
sometimes it’s just so perfect, being
alive,
sometimes,
especially while watching a small wooden gargoyle hold
up its oversized head and stick out its tongue while
half
laughing
now.
PART 4.
why do we kill all those christmas trees just
to celebrate one birthday?
I HAVE THIS NEW ROOM
I have this new room where I sit alone and it’s much like all
the rooms of my past—old mail and papers, candy wrappers, combs, magazines,
old newspapers and other accumulated trash is scattered about.
my disorder was never chosen, it just arrived and then it
stayed.
there’s never enough time to get things
right—there are always breakdowns, losses, the hard mathematics of
confusion and
disarray.
we are harrangued by these trivial tasks
and then there are those other days when it becomes
impossible even to pay a gas bill, to answer threats from
the IRS or call the termite man.
I have this new room up here but my problem is the same as always: my
lifelong failure to live peacefully with either the female or the
universe, it all gets so painful, all so raw with self-abuse,
attrition, re-
morse.
I have this new room up here but I’ve lived in similar rooms in many
cities. now with the years shot suddenly away, I still sit as determined as ever,
feeling no different than I did in my youth.
the rooms always were—still are—best at night: the yellow glow of
the electric light while thinking and writing. all I’ve ever needed
was a simple retreat from the galling nonsense of the world.
I could always handle the worst if I was sometimes allowed
the briefest respite from the nightmare,
and the gods, so far, have allowed me
that.
I have this new room up here and I sit alone in this floating, smoky, crazy
space, I am content in this killing field, and my friends, the walls
embrace me anew.
my heart can’t laugh but sometimes it smiles
in the yellow light: to have come this far to
sit alone
again
in this new room up here.
WRITING
you begin to smile
all up and down
inside
as the words jump
from your fingers
and onto the keys
and it’s like a
circus dream:
you’re the clown, the lion tamer,
you’re the tiger,
as
the words leap
through hoops of fire,
do triple somersaults
from trapeze to
trapeze, then
embrace the
Elephant Man
as
the poems keep coming,
one by one
they slip to
the floor,
it’s going hot and good;
the hours rush past
and then
you’re finished,
move toward the bedroom,
throw yourself upon the bed
and sleep your righteous sleep
here on earth,
life perfect at last.
poetry is what happens
when nothing else
can.
HUMAN NATURE
it has been going on for some time.
there is this young waitress where I get my coffee
at the racetrack.
“how are you doing today?” she asks.
“winning pretty good,” I reply.
“you won yesterday, didn’t you?” she
asks.
“yes,” I say, “and the day before.”
I don’t know exactly what it is but I
believe we must have incompatible
personalities. there is often a hostile
undertone to our conversations.
“you seem to be the only person
around here who keeps winning,”
she says, not looking at me,
not pleased.
“is that so?” I answer.
there is something very strange about all
this: whenever I do lose
she never seems to be
there.
perhaps it’s her day off or sometimes she works
another counter?
she bets too and loses.
she always loses.
and even though we might have
incompatible personalities I am sorry for
her.
I decide the next time I see her
I will tell her that I am
losing.
so I do.
when she asks, “how are you doing?”
I say, “god, I don’t understand it,
I’m losing, I can’t hit anything, every horse
I bet runs last!”
“really?” she asks.
“really” I say.
it works.
she lowers her gaze
and here comes one of the largest smiles
I have ever seen, it damn near cracks
her face wide open.
I get my coffee, tip her well, walk
out to check the
toteboard.
if I died in a flaming crash on the freeway
she’d surely be happy for a
week!
I take a sip of coffee.
what’s this?
she’s put in a large shot of cream!
she knows I like it black!
in her excitement,
she’d forgotten.
the bitch.
and that’s what I get for lying.
NOTATIONS
words like wine, words like blood, words
out of the mouths of past loves dead.
words like bullets, words like bees, words for the
way the good die and the bad live on.
words like putting on a shirt.
words like flowers and words like wolves and
words like spiders and words like hungry
dogs.
words like mine
gripping the page
like fingers trying to climb
an impossible mountain.
words like a tiger raging in the
belly.
words like putting on my shoes.
words shaking the walls like fire and
earthquake.
the early days were good, the middle days
were better, now is
best.
words love me.
they have chosen me,
separated me from the
pack.
I weep like Li Po
laugh like Artaud
write like Chinaski.
DEMOCRACY
the problem, of course, isn’t the Democratic System,
it’s the
living parts which make up the Democratic System.
the next person you pass on the street,
multiply
him or
her by
3 or 4 or 30 or 40 million
and you will know
immediately
why things remain non-functional
for most of
us.
I wish I had a cure for the chess pieces
we call Humanity …
we’ve undergone any number of political
cures
and we all remain
foolish enough to hope
that the one on the way
NOW
will cure almost
everything.
fellow citizens,
the problem never was the Democratic
System, the problem is
you.
KRAZNICK
I met Kraznick in the post office
and like in any place of dull
toil and human suffering it was
the weird and the deformed
and the witless who always
buddied-up to me.
Kraznick talked continually about
how great he was. he was, apparently, great
at everything his mind was great.
his spirit was noble, he would surely write
the great American novel
or play, he loved
Beethoven, hated fags, he was good
with his fists, he said, but what he
was really best at, greatest at, was
sex. he could handle the women!
actually, Kraznick didn’t look too bad
from a distance. but I seldom saw him from
a distance, or if I did he wou
ld be
rushing toward me (he punched in an
hour later). we clerks would be
sitting on our stools sticking the
letters and here he would come:
“hey, man! I really caught some great head
today! she was a real pro! I was
sitting at Schwab’s having a coffee
and a doughnut and …”
Kraznick would then talk to me for hours.
when I got off work my whole body would be
stiff with the pain of listening. I
could barely walk or steer my car.
I’ll keep this short. I got out of
the post office. Kraznick stayed
on.
I’m not certain it was Kraznick but one day
I was at the racetrack and it looked like
him. he was leaning against a girder and
every now and then he would shudder, the
Racing Form rattled in his hands. I moved
off quickly. a guy like that could go off at
3 to 5 and still fall over the
rail.
HUNGARIA, SYMPHONIA POEM #9
by Franz Liszt
yes, I know that I write many poems but it’s not
because of ambition, it’s more or less just something
to do
while I live out my life
and
if I have to write one hundred bad poems to get one good
one
I don’t feel that I’m wasting my time
besides
I like the rattle of the typewriter, it sounds so professional
even when
nothing
is really happening.
writing is all I know how to do and
I much prefer the music of great classical
composers so
I always listen to them while I’m typing
(and when I finally write a good poem
I’m sure they have much to do with
it).
I am listening to a composer now who is taking me completely
out of this world and suddenly
I don’t give a damn if I live or die or pay the
gas bill on time, I
just want to listen,
I feel like hugging the radio to my chest so
that I can be part of the
music, I mean,
this actually occurs to me and I wish I could capture
what I am hearing
and write it
into this poem
now
but I can’t,
all I can do is sit and listen and type small
words as he makes his grand
immortal
statement.
now the music is finished and I stare
at my hands
and the typewriter is
silent
and suddenly I feel both
much better
and far
worse.
CLUB HELL, 1942