and it moved
like something
alive.
I sat and watched it
until I had smoked the
5 or 6
cigarettes left.
then I got up
and went to bed.
man in the sun
she reads to me from the New Yorker
which I don’t buy, don’t know
how they get in here, but it’s
something about the Mafia
one of the heads of the Mafia
who ate too much and had it too easy
too many fine women patting his
walnuts, and he got fat sucking at good
cigars and young breasts and he
has these heart attacks—and so
one day somebody is driving him
in this big car along the road
and he doesn’t feel so good
and he asks the boy to stop and let
him out and the boy lays him out
along the road in the fine sunshine.
I don’t know whether it’s Crete or
Sicily or Italy proper
but he’s lying there in the sunshine
and before he dies he says:
how beautiful life can be, and
then he’s gone.
sometimes you’ve got to kill 4 or 5
thousand men before you somehow
get to believe that the sparrow
is immortal, money is piss and
that you have been wasting
your time.
woman
this head like a saucer
decorated with everything
as lip to lip we hang
in mechanical joy;
my hands blaze with arias
but I think of books
on anatomy,
and I fall from you
as nations burn in anger…
to recover from most pitiful error
and rebuild, this is it
loss and mending
until they take us in.
the glory of a Saturday afternoon
like biting into an old peach
and you walk across the room
heavy with everything
except my love.
like all the years wasted
yesterday drunken Alice
gave me
a jar of fig jam
and today she
whistles
for her cat
but
he will not
come—
he is with the horses
at a
tub of beer
or
in room 21
at the Crown Hill
Hotel
or he is at the
Crocker
Citizens National
Bank
or
he arrived in
New York City at
5:30 p.m.
with paper suitcase
and
$7.
next to Alice
in her yard
a paper goose
walks
upside down
on a carton that says:
California
Oranges.
drunken Alice whistles.
no good. no good.
work slowly.
everybody tries hard
but the
gods.
Alice goes in for a
drink, comes
out.
whistles again
all the way to a
park bench in
El Paso—
and her love comes
running out of the
bushes
bright-eyed as a
color film
and not waiting
for
Monday.
we go in
together.
they, all of them, know
ask the sidewalk painters of Paris
ask the sunlight on a sleeping dog
ask the 3 pigs
ask the paperboy
ask the music of Donizetti
ask the murderer
ask the man leaning against a wall
ask the preacher
ask the maker of cabinets
ask the pickpocket or the
pawnbroker or the glass blower
or the seller of manure or
the dentist
ask the revolutionist
ask the man who sticks his head in
the mouth of a lion
ask the man who will release the next
atom bomb
ask the man who thinks he’s Christ
ask the bluebird who comes home
at night
ask the peeping Tom
ask the man dying of cancer
ask the man who needs a bath
ask the man with one leg
ask the blind
ask the man with the lisp
ask the opium eater
ask the trembling surgeon
ask the leaves you walk upon
ask a rapist or a
streetcar conductor or an old man
pulling weeds in his garden
ask a bloodsucker
ask a trainer of fleas
ask a man who eats fire
ask the most miserable man you can
find in his most
miserable moment
ask a teacher of judo
ask a rider of elephants
ask a leper, a lifer, a lunger
ask a professor of history
ask the man who never cleans his
fingernails
ask a clown or ask the first face you see
in the light of day
ask your father
ask your son and
his son to be
ask me
ask a burned-out bulb in a paper sack
ask the tempted, the damned, the foolish
the wise, the slavering
ask the builders of temples
ask the men who have never worn shoes
ask Jesus
ask the moon
ask the shadows in the closet
ask the moth, the monk, the madman
ask the man who draws cartoons for
The New Yorker
ask a goldfish
ask a fern shaking to a tapdance
ask the map of India
ask a kind face
ask the man hiding under your bed
ask the man you hate the most in this
world
ask the man who drank with Dylan Thomas
ask the man who laced Jack Sharkey’s gloves
ask the sad-faced man drinking coffee
ask the plumber
ask the man who dreams of ostriches every
night
ask the ticket-taker at a freak show
ask the counterfeiter
ask the man sleeping in an alley under
a sheet of paper
ask the conquerors of nations and planets
ask the man who has just cut off his finger
ask a bookmark in the bible
ask the water dripping from a faucet while
the phone rings
ask perjury
ask the deep blue paint
ask the parachute jumper
ask the man with the bellyache
ask the divine eye so sleek and swimming
ask the boy wearing tight pants in
the expensive academy
ask the man who slipped in the bathtub
ask the man chewed by the shark
ask the one who sold me the unmatched
gloves
ask these and all those I have left out
ask the fire the fire the fire—
ask even the liars
ask anybody you please at anytime
you please on any d
ay you please
whether it’s raining or whether
the snow is there or whether
you are stepping out onto a porch
yellow with warm heat
ask this ask that
ask the man with birdshit in his hair
ask the torturer of animals
ask the man who has seen many bullfights
in Spain
ask the owners of new Cadillacs
ask the famous
ask the timid
ask the albino
and the statesman
ask the landlords and the poolplayers
ask the phonies
ask the hired killers
ask the bald men and the fat men
and the tall men and the
short men
ask the one-eyed men, the
oversexed and undersexed men
ask the men who read all the newspaper
editorials
ask the men who breed roses
ask the men who feel almost no pain
ask the dying
ask the mowers of lawns and the attenders
of football games
ask any of these or all of these
ask ask ask and
they’ll all tell you:
a snarling wife on the balustrade is more
than a man can bear.
a nice day
the virus holds
the concepts give way like rotten
shoelaces
toothache and bacon dance on the
lawn
I open a drawer to dirty
stockings
a stockbroker’s universe
steel balls flutter like
butterflies
I can feel doom like
something under the sheets with bristles
that stinks and moves
toward me
the mailman is insane and
hands me a bagful of snails
eaten inside
out
by some rat of decay
in the madhouse a man kisses the walls
and dreams of sailboating down some
cool Nile
I read about the bullfights the ballgames
the boxing matches
things continue to fight
and in the churches they play at parlor
games and peek at legs
I go outside to absolutely
nothing
a square round of orange zero
headpieces over obscene mouths that form
at me like suckerfish
good morning, nice day isn’t it?
a fat woman says
I am unable to answer
and down the sidewalk I go
shamed
unable to tell her
of the knife inside me
I do notice though the sun is shining
that the flowers are pulled up on
their strings
and I on mine:
belly, bellybutton, buttocks, bukowski
waving walking
teeth of ice with the taste of tar
tear ducts propagandized
shoes acting like shoes
I arrive on time
in the blazing midday of
mourning.
III
At Terror Street and Agony Way
Poems 1965-1968
it was a splendid day in Spring
and outside we could hear the birds
that hadn’t been killed
by the smog
beerbottle
a very miraculous thing just happened:
my beerbottle flipped over backwards
and landed on its bottom on the floor,
and I have set it upon the table to foam down,
but the photos were not so lucky today
and there is a small slit along the leather
of my left shoe, but it’s all very simple:
we cannot acquire too much: there are laws
we know nothing of, all manner of nudges
set us to burning or freezing; what sets
the blackbird in the cat’s mouth
is not for us to say, or why some men
are jailed like pet squirrels
while others nuzzle in enormous breasts
through endless nights—this is the
task and the terror, and we are not
taught why. still, it’s lucky the bottle
landed straightside up, and although
I have one of wine and one of whiskey,
this foretells, somehow, a good night,
and perhaps tomorrow my nose will be longer:
new shoes, less rain, more poems.
the body
I have been
hanging here
headless
for so long
that the body has forgotten
why
or where or when it
happened
and the toes
walk along in shoes
that do not
care
and although
the fingers
slice things and
hold things and
move things and
touch
things
such as
oranges
apples
onions
books
bodies
I am no longer
reasonably sure
what these things
are
they are mostly
like
lamplight and
fog
then often the hands will
go to the
lost head
and hold the head
like the hands of a
child
around a ball
a block
air and wood—
no teeth
no thinking part
and when a window
blows open
to a
church
hill
woman
dog
or something singing
the fingers of the hand
are senseless to vibration
because they have no
ears
senseless to color because
they have no
eyes
senseless to smell
without a nose
the country goes by as
nonsense
the continents
the daylights and evenings
shine
on my dirty
fingernails
and in some mirror
my face
a block to vanish
scuffed part of a child’s
ball
while everywhere
moves
worms and aircraft
fires on the land
tall violets in sanctity
my hands let go let go
let go
k.o.
he was easy, fat as a hummingbird
and I had him blowing,
I jabbed and crossed and took my time:
everybody was waiting for the main event,
drinking beer, and I was thinking
how we were going to furnish the house,
I needed a workbench and some tools,
and then he came over with the right—
I had been looking at the lights
and the next thing I knew everybody was
howling, and I was down on my knees like
praying, and when I got up
he was strong and I was weak;
well, I thought, I’ll go back to the farm,
I always was a poor winner.
sunday before noon
spinach, Gabriel,
all fall down,
all fall down and blow,
barbados, barbados,
where are yr toe
s?
the branches break, the birds fall, the buildings burn,
the whores stand straight,
the bombs stack,
evening, morning, night,
peanutbutter,
peanutbutter falcons,
rain breathing like lilies from the top of my head,
pincers pincers
kisses like steel clamps
mouths full of moths,
hydra-headed cocksuckers,
Florida in full moon,
shark with mouthful of man
man with mouthful of peanutbutter, rain
rain peeking into the guts of grey hours,
horses dreaming of horses,
flowers dreaming of flowers,
horses running with greyhour pieces of my lovely flesh,
bread burning, all Spain on fire and
cities dreaming of craters,
bombs bigger than the brains of anything,
going down
are the clocks cocks roosters?
the roosters stand on the fence
the roosters are peanutbutter crowing,
the FLAME will be high, the flame will be big,
kiss kiss kiss
everything away,
I hope it rains today, I hope
the jets die, I hope
the kitten finds a mouse, I hope
I don’t see it, I hope
it rains, I hope
anything away from here,
I hope a bridge, a fish, a cactus somewhere
strutting whiskers to the noon,
I dream flowers and horses
the branches break the birds fall the buildings
burn, my whore walks across the room and
smiles at me.
7th race when the angels swung low and burned
I watched the board and the 6 dropped to 9
after a first flash of 18 from a morning line
of 12…two minutes to post and a fat man
kept jamming against my back, but I made it,
I bet 20 to win and walked out to the deck
looking down at my program:
purple and cerise quarters, cerise sleeves