neither does this mean
the dead are
at the door
begging bread
before
the stockpiles
blow
like all the
storms and hell
in one big love,
but anyhow
I rented a 6 dollar a week
room
in Chinatown
with a window as large as the
side of the world
filled with night flies and neon,
lighted like Broadway
to frighten away rats,
and I walked into a bar and sat down,
and the Chinaman looked at my rags
and said
no credit
and I pulled out a hundred-dollar bill
and asked for a cup of Confucius juice
and 2 China dolls with slits of eyes
just about the size of the rest of them
slid closer
and we sat
and we
waited.
the world’s greatest loser
he used to sell papers in front:
“Get your winners! Get rich on a dime!”
and about the 3rd or 4th race
you’d see him rolling in on his rotten board
with roller skates underneath.
he’d propel himself along on his hands;
he just had small stumps for legs
and the rims of the skate wheels were worn off.
you could see inside the wheels and they would wobble
something awful
shooting and flashing
imperialistic sparks!
he moved faster than anybody, rolled cigarette dangling,
you could hear him coming
“god o mighty, what was that?” the new ones asked.
he was the world’s greatest loser
but he never gave up
wheeling toward the 2-dollar window screaming:
“IT’S THE 4 HORSE, YOU FOOLS! HOW THE HELL YA
GONNA BEAT THE
4?”
up on the board the 4 would be reading
60 to 1.
I never heard him pick a winner.
they say he slept in the bushes. I guess that’s where he
died. he’s not around any
more.
there was the big fat blonde whore
who kept touching him for luck, and
laughing.
nobody had any luck. the whore is gone
too.
I guess nothing ever works for us. we’re fools, of course—
bucking the inside plus a 15 percent take,
but how are you going to tell a dreamer
there’s a 15 percent take on the
dream? he’ll just laugh and say,
is that all?
I miss those
sparks.
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’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.
the trash men
here they come
these guys
gray truck
radio playing
they are in a hurry
it’s quite exciting:
shirt open
bellies hanging out
they run out the trash bins
roll them out to the fork lift
and then the truck grinds it upward
with far too much sound…
they had to fill out application forms
to get these jobs
they are paying for homes and
drive late model cars
they get drunk on Saturday night
now in the Los Angeles sunshine
they run back and forth with their trash bins
all that trash goes somewhere
and they shout to each other
then they are all up in the truck
driving west toward the sea
none of them know
that I am alive
REX DISPOSAL CO.
a gold pocket watch
my grandfather was a tall German
with a strange smell on his breath.
he stood very straight
in front of his small house
and his wife hated him
and his children thought him odd.
I was six the first time we met
and he gave me all his war medals.
the second time I met him
he gave me his gold pocket watch.
it was very heavy and I took it home
and wound it very tight
and it stopped running
which made me feel bad.
I never saw him again
and my parents never spoke of him
nor did my grandmother
who had long ago
stopped living with him.
once I asked about him
and they told me
he drank too much
but I liked him best
standing very straight
in front of his house
and saying, “hello, Henry, you
and I, we know each
other.”
talking to my mailbox…
boy, don’t come around here telling me you
can’t cut it, that
they’re pitching you low and inside, that
they are conspiring against you,
that all you want is a chance but they won’t
give you a
chance.
boy, the problem is that you’re not doing
what you want to do, or
if you’re doing what you want to do, you’re
just not doing it
well.
boy, I agree:
there’s not much opportunity, and there are
some at the top who are
not doing much better than you
are
but
you’re wasting energy haranguing and
bitching.
boy, I’m not advising, just suggesting that
instead of sending your poems to me
along with your letters of
complaint
you should enter the
arena—
send your work to the editors and
publishers, it will
buck up your backbone and your
versatility.
boy, I wish to thank you for the
praise for some of my
published works
but that
has nothing to do with
anything and won’t help a
purple shit, you’ve just got to
learn to hit that low, hard
inside pitch.
this is a form letter
I send to almost everybody, but
I hope you take it
personally,
man.
I liked him
I liked D. H. Lawrence
he could get so indignant
he snapped and he ripped
with wonderfully energetic sentences
he could lay the word down
bright and writhing
there was the stink of blood and murder
and sacrifice about him
the only tenderness he allowed
was when he bedded down his large German
wife.
I liked D. H. Lawrence—
he could talk about Christ
like he was the man next door
and he could describe Australian taxi drivers
so well you hated them
I liked D. H. Lawrence
but I’m glad I never met him
in some bistro
him lifting his tiny hot cup of
tea
and looking at me
with his worm-hole eyes.
one for the shoeshine man
the balance is preserved by the snails climbing the
Santa Monica cliffs;
the luck is in walking down Western Avenue
and having the girls in a massage
parlor holler at you, “Hello, Sweetie!”
the miracle is having 5 women in love
with you at the age of 55,
and the goodness is that you are only able
to love one of them.
the gift is having a daughter more gentle
than you are, whose laughter is finer
than yours.
the peace comes from driving a
blue 67 Volks through the streets like a
teenager, radio tuned to The Host Who Loves You
Most, feeling the sun, feeling the solid hum
of the rebuilt motor as you needle through traffic.
the grace is being able to like rock music,
symphony music, jazz…anything that contains the original energy of
joy.
and the probability that returns
is the deep blue low
yourself flat upon yourself
within the guillotine walls
angry at the sound of the phone
or anybody’s footsteps passing;
but the other probability—
the lilting high that always follows—
makes the girl at the checkstand in the
supermarket look like
Marilyn
like Jackie before they got her Harvard lover
like the girl in high school that we
all followed home.
there is that which helps you believe
in something else besides death:
somebody in a car approaching
on a street too narrow,
and he or she pulls aside to let you
by, or the old fighter Beau Jack
shining shoes
after blowing the entire bankroll
on parties
on women
on parasites,
humming, breathing on the leather,
working the rag
looking up and saying:
“what the hell, I had it for a
while. that beats the other.”
I am bitter sometimes
but the taste has often been
sweet. it’s only that I’ve
feared to say it. it’s like
when your woman says,
“tell me you love me,” and
you can’t.
if you see me grinning from
my blue Volks
running a yellow light
driving straight into the sun
I will be locked in the
arms of a
crazy life
thinking of trapeze artists
of midgets with big cigars
of a Russian winter in the early 40s
of Chopin with his bag of Polish soil
of an old waitress bringing me an extra
cup of coffee and laughing
as she does so.
the best of you
I like more than you think.
the others don’t count
except that they have fingers and heads
and some of them eyes
and most of them
legs and all of them
good and bad dreams
and a way to go.
justice is everywhere and it’s working
and the machine guns and the frogs
and the hedges will tell you
so.
the proud thin dying
I see old people on pensions in the
supermarkets and they are thin and they are
proud and they are dying
they are starving on their feet and saying
nothing. long ago, among other lies,
they were taught that silence was
bravery. now, having worked a lifetime,
inflation has trapped them. they look around
steal a grape
chew on it. finally they make a tiny
purchase, a day’s worth.
another lie they were taught:
thou shalt not steal.
they’d rather starve than steal
(one grape won’t save them)
and in tiny rooms
while reading the market ads
they’ll starve
they’ll die without a sound
pulled out of rooming houses
by young blond boys with long hair
who’ll slide them in
and pull away from the curb, these
boys
handsome of eye
thinking of Vegas and pussy and
victory.
it’s the order of things: each one
gets a taste of honey
then the knife.
shot of red-eye
I used to hold my social security card
up in the air,
he told me,
but I was so small
they couldn’t see it,
all those big
guys around.
you mean the place with the
big green screen?
I asked.
yeah. well, anyhow, I finally got on
the other day
picking tomatoes, and Jesus Christ,
I couldn’t get anywhere
it was too hot, too hot
and I couldn’t get anything in my sack
so I lay under the truck
in the shade and drank
wine. I didn’t make a
dime.
have a drink, I said.
sure, he said.
two big women came in and
I mean BIG
&
nbsp; and they sat next to
us.
shot of red-eye, one of them
said to the bartender.
likewise, said the other.
they pulled their dresses up
around their hips and
swung their legs.
um, umm. I think I’m going mad, I told
my friend from the tomato fields.
Jesus, he said, Jesus and Mary, I can’t
believe what I see.
it’s all
there, I said.
you a fighter? the one next to me
asked.
no, I said.
what happened to your
face?
automobile accident on the San Berdoo
freeway. some drunk jumped the divider. I was
the drunk.
how old are you, daddy?
old enough to slice the melon, I said,
tapping my cigar ashes into my beer to give me