bottom.
and he says things like,
“Shakespeare bores me.”
Shakespeare!
imagine that!
and the only people he cares to see
now are the Hollywood stars!
he doesn’t want to see anybody
else.
well, I don’t want to see him
either.
I remember when he lived
in rooms the size of a
closet.
now that he has had a few books
published
he’s too good for the
rest of us!
look, I’m tired of talking about
Chinaski.
I want you to look at these
poems here.
my Collected Works,
my work of a lifetime.
I sent them to Chinaski for a
reading,
asked for a foreword or
at least a
blurb.
that was two months ago and
not a word from him
since.
not even a sign that
he’s received the
stuff.
and I got him his start!
I got him in that prestigious anthology!
and then he asked his publishers not
to publish me!
tremor
at 9:50 the dogs started barking.
a few minutes later there was an earthquake
near Palm Springs.
the television stations break into their
programs with the news.
then the radio stations begin belaboring
the situation and
the earthquake experts at Caltech are
asked for their opinion.
the announcers are in their element.
phones begin to ring
in radio stations all
over the city.
yes, it was a quake.
yes, there will be aftershocks.
yes, we should check for gas leaks
and run a supply of water into the tub.
yes, we are all as one now.
yes, we have something we can all talk about
and we can talk about it
together.
yes, we should all call our friends
to be sure they’re safe.
(I can only wonder,
will some say they were copulating when
it happened?
will others have been sitting on the
toilet?
so many people may have been copulating
or sitting on the toilet!)
the announcer continues:
what’s that, caller?
you say you were copulating on the toilet
when it happened?
this is no time to be funny!
now we will switch to our Eye in the
Sky.
Henderson?
Henderson, are you there?
Henderson?
very well, ladies and gentlemen, we seem to have
lost contact with Henderson
so we’ll go to our roving reporter who is now
on the scene.
Barbara, are you there?
my Mexican buddy
I liked him
he was clever and he could make me laugh
and often when he worked the case next to
mine we would stick our letters together and
talk
even though it was against the
rules.
he had become an American citizen
had found his way into the post office
and owned a movie theatre in
Mexico City.
I usually disliked ambitious fellows
but this guy was humorous so I forgave
him his ambition.
“hey, man,” he asked me one night,
“how long has it been since you had
a piece of ass?”
“god, I don’t know, man, 10 years
I guess.”
“10 years? how old are you?”
“50.”
“well, listen, I’ve been shacked with this
crazy woman, you know, and I’ve told her all
about you and I thought I might send her
over to your place some night, she could cook
you dinner or something. how about it?”
“please do not project your troubles
upon me,” I told him.
“I didn’t think it would work,”
he said with a grin.
the supervisor walked up behind us and
stood there.
“listen, I’ve warned you guys about
talking!”
“about talking when?” I asked.
“listen,” he said, “just keep it up and I’ll
fry your ass!”
“you win,” I said.
the supervisor walked away.
interesting things like that happened there
almost every night!
strangers at the racetrack
I do not want to meet
them or
their wife
or look at
photographs of
their
children.
this is
serious business
this is
war
all
the
time.
I look into
their
maledict
eyes,
excuse myself
and walk
away.
and as
Rome burns and as
the odds
flash on the
tote board
Lady Luck
smiles,
crosses
her
legs
and
applauds
my
grit.
will you tiptoe through the tulips with me?
the sky is broken like a wet sack of
offal.
the air stinks, I walk into a building,
wait for the elevator, it arrives, I get in and
join 3 people with new shoes and
dead eyes.
we rise toward the tenth floor.
one of the people is a big woman
with long brown hair.
she begins to hum a little song.
I hate it.
I press the button and get off the
elevator 2 floors
early.
I wait for the next elevator.
it arrives.
it’s empty.
it’s a beautiful elevator.
I go up two floors, get out and
walk down the hall looking for
room 1002.
I find it.
I go in.
I tell the receptionist that I have a
2 o’clock appointment.
she tells me to be seated, that
they will be with me
soon.
I sit down.
there is only one other person in
the waiting room.
it is the big woman who was humming
the little song on the
elevator.
now she is silent.
she wears a green dress and
pretends to read a
magazine.
I look at her legs.
not good legs.
I get up and walk out, walk down
the hall.
I find a water fountain,
bend over, drink some
water.
then I walk back to
1002.
the woman in the green
dress is gone
but where she was
sitting on that chair
there is her green dress,
nicely folded, her shoes
and her panty
hose.
her purse is gone.
the receptionist slides
back the glass partition
and smiles at me:
“we’ll be with you
soon!”
as she slides the
partition closed
I get up and walk out of there,
fast.
I take the elevator down.
soon I am at the first floor and
then I am outside on the
street.
as I walk away from the
building I look back.
flames are rising from
the windows of the tenth
floor and spreading up.
nobody on the street seems
to notice.
I decide to have lunch.
I look for a place to eat.
I walk along humming the
same little song that the big
woman hummed.
it’s now about 95 degrees on a hot
Wednesday afternoon in
August
exactly one
year from
yesterday.
the novel life
one night I started
shivering, I got ice cold, I shivered and
shook for 2 and one half hours, the whole
bed jumped, it was like an
earthquake.
“you’re panicking,” said my girl. “breathe deeply
and try to relax.”
“I’m not panicking,” I said. “death doesn’t
mean shit to me. this is coming from some
place that I don’t understand.”
all during the freezing and shaking,
my only thought was, well, I’ve written my 5th
novel but I haven’t made the final revisions yet.
it’s not fair that I die
now.
then I got well and revised my 5th novel and
it’s supposed to be out next spring, so you
know I won’t die, be killed, or catch a fatal
disease until then.
even in midlife I never
dreamed I’d write a novel
and here I’ve written 5, it’s a bloody
miracle, a shout from the heart,
far from the school yards of hell
which started the luck
and far from
the world of hell that followed and
which kept it
going.
thanks for your help
here
there’s less and less reason to write as they all close in.
I’ve barricaded the doors and windows, have bottled water, canned
food, candles, tools, rope, bandages, toothpicks, catnip,
mousetraps, reading material, toilet paper, blankets, firearms,
mirrors, knives
—cigarettes, cigars, candy—
memories, regrets, my birth certificate,
photographs of
picnics
parades
invasions;
I have roach spray, fine French wine, paper clips and last year’s
calendar because
THIS COULD BE MY LAST POEM.
it could happen and, of course, I’ve considered and
reconsidered
death
but I haven’t yet come up with how, which makes me feel
rather foolish about everything,
especially now.
—just waiting is the worst.
nothing worse than waiting
just waiting. always hated to
wait. what’s there about waiting that’s so
intolerable?
—like you’re waiting for me to finish this
poem and
I don’t know exactly
how
so I won’t.
—so, if you happen to read this
in a magazine or a book
just
rip the page out
tear it up
and that’s the graceful way
to end this poem
once and for
all.
I have continued regardless
almost ever since I began writing
decades ago
I have been dogged by
whisperers and gossips
who have proclaimed
daily
weekly
yearly
that
I can’t write anymore
that now
I slip
and fall.
when I first began
there was much complaining about
the content of my
poems and stories.
“who cares about the low life of a
drunken bum?
is that all he can write about,
whores and puking?”
and now
their complaint is:
“who cares about the life of a
rich
bum?
why doesn’t he write about whores
and puking
anymore?”
the Academics consider me
too raw
and I haven’t consorted with most of the
others.
the few people I know well have nothing to do
with poetry.
there has also been envy-hatred
on the part of
some fellow writers
but I consider this
one of my finest
accomplishments.
when I first began this dangerous
game
I predicted that these
very things would
occur.
let them all rail:
if it wasn’t me,
it would just be someone
else.
these
gossips and complainers,
what have they accomplished
never having risen
they
can neither
slip nor
fall.
balloons
I saw too many faces today
faces like balloons.
at times I felt like
lifting the skin
and asking,
“anybody under there?”
there are medical terms for
fear of height
for
fear of
enclosed spaces.
there are medical terms for
any number of
maladies
so
there must be a medical term
for:
“too many people.”
I’ve been stricken with
this malady
all my life:
there has always been
“too many people.”
I saw too many faces
today, hundreds of
them
with eyes, ears, lips,
mouths, chins and so
forth
and
I’ve been alone
for several hours
now
and
I feel that I am
recovering.
which is the good part
but the problem
remains
that I know I’m going to
have to go out there
among them
again.
moving toward the dark
if we can’t find the courage to go on,
what will we do?
what should we do?
what would you do?
if we can’t find the courage to go on,
then
what day
what minute
in what year
did we go
wrong?
or was it an accumulation of all the
years?
I have some answers.
to die, yes.
to go mad, maybe.
or perhaps to
gamble everything away?
if we can’t find the courage to go on,
what should we do?
what did all the others
do?
they went on
living their lives,
badly.
we’ll do the same,
probably.
living too long
takes more than
time.
the real thing
yes, I know that you think
I am wrong
but
I know what is right for me
and what
is not.
may I tell you my
dream?
I am surrounded by
thick cement walls,
I am dressed in a red
robe
and I am sitting at an
organ.
there is
not a
sound.
I begin to play the
organ.
the hiss of the notes
is sharp and soft
at the same
time.
it is a slightly bitter
music
but among the dark notes
there are flashes of light and
laughter.
as I play,
the incomprehensible mystery
of the past
and of the present
becomes
comprehensible.
and best of all,
as I play,
nobody hears the music
but me.
the music is only for
me.
that is my