no matter what the statistics
or what your mother named you.
the grandstands are crowded with the dead
screaming for a winner
wanting a number to carry them over
into living,
but it is not as easy as that—
just as with the poem:
if you are dead
you might as well be buried
and throw the typewriter away
and stop fooling with
poems horses women life:
you are cluttering up
the exits—
so get out fast
and desist from the
precious few
pages.
Seahorse
I own the ticks on a horse
I own his belly and balls
I own this
the way his eyes roll
the way he eats hay
and shits and
stands up asleep
he is mine
this machine
like a blue train I used to play with
when my hands were smaller
and my mind better
I own this horse,
someday I will ride my horse
down all the streets
past the trees we will go
up the mountain
down the valley
ticks and eyes and balls
the both of us
we will go to where kings eat
dandelions
in the giant sea
where thinking is not terror
where eyes do not go out
like Saturday night children
the horse I own and the myself I own
will become blue and nice and clean
again
and I will get off and
wait for you.
I Have Lived in England
I have lived in England
and I have lived in hell,
but perhaps there is nothing quite so horrible
as picking up the latest literary review
filled with the latest literary darlings;
K. teaches at L.; M. has a second volume of
poems coming out; O. has been published
in the leading journals; S. has won a
scholarship to Paris—
and you hold the pages up
to the overhead light
and still
nothing comes through.
it is a puzzle indeed,
far more a puzzle than when a 90-to-one shot
leaps through at the last moment
along the rail.
a horse can live.
and, indeed, do you expect to find
poetry
in a poetry review?
things are not that
simple.
Farewell, Foolish Objects
I have lain in bed all day
but I have written one poem
and I am up now
looking out the window
and like a novelist might say
drunk: the clouds are coming at me
like scullery maids with dishpans
in their hands—
something that holds gritty dirty
water.
but I am a drunken non-novelist
but in clear condition now
here sits the bottle of beer
and I am warmly thinking
in a kind of foam-shaped idle fancy
working closely
but all I can stoke up are
squares and circles which
do not fit; so
messeigneurs
I will tell you the truth:
again (in bed)
I read another article on D. Thomas &
some day I will get lucky and sit around
and own a French horn and a tame eagle
and I will sit on the porch all day
a white porch always in the sun
one of those white porches with green
vines all around, and
I will read about Dylan and D.H. until
my eyes fall out of my head for eagle
meat and I will play the French horn
blind. but even now it gets darker
the evening thing into night
the stars up there
somebody rattling the springs in
Denver so another pewker can be born.
I think everything is a sheet of sun
and the best of everything
is myself walking through it
wondering about the pure nerve
of the life-thing going on:
after the jails the hospitals
the factories the good dogs
the brainless butterflies.
but now I am back at the window
there is an opera on the radio
and a woman sits in a chair to my left
saying over and over again:
BRATCH BRATSHT BRAATCHT!
and she is holding a book in her hand:
How to Learn Russian Easily.
but there is really nothing you can do
easily: live or die or accept fame
or money or defeat, it’s all hard.
the opera says this, the dead birds
the dead countries the dead loves
the man shot because somebody thought
he was an elk
the elk shot because somebody thought
it was an elk.
all the pure nerve of going on
this woman wanting to speak Russian
myself wanting to get drunk
but we need something to eat.
GRIND CAT GRIND MEAT says
the woman in Russian so I figure
she’s hungry, we haven’t eaten
in a couple of hours. CLAM
BAYONET TURKEY PORK
AND PORK she says, and I walk
over and put on my pants and
I am going out to get something.
the forests are far away and I am
no good with the bow and arrow
and somebody sings on the radio:
“farewell, foolish objects.”
and all I can do is walk into a grocery
store and pull out a wallet and hope
that it’s loaded. and this is
about how I waste my Sundays.
the rest of the week gets better
because there is somebody telling
me what to do
and although it seems madness
almost everybody is doing it
whatever it is.
so now if you will excuse me
(she is eating an orange now)
I will put on my shoes and shirt
and get out of here—it’ll
be better for
all of us.
A Report Upon the Consumption of Myself
I am a panther shut up and bellowing in
cement walls, and I am angry at blue
evenings without ventilation
and I am angry with you, and it will come
like a rose
it will come like a man walking through fire
it will shine like an unseen trumpet in a trunk
the eyes will smell like sausages
the feet will have small propellers
and I will hold you in Bayonne and
the sailors will smile
my heart like something cut away from
cancer will feel and beat again feel
and beat again—but now
the blue evening is cinched like old
muskets and the dangling sex rope hangs
as the tree stands up and calls:
July. the dust of hope in the bottom of paper cups
along with small spiders that have names like ancient
European cities; spit and dross, heavy wheels;
oilwells stuck
between fish and sucking up the grey gas
of love and the palms up on the cliff waving
waving in the warm yellow light
as I walk into a drugstore to buy toothpaste,
rubbers, photographs of frogs, a copy of the latest
Consumer Reports (50 cents) for I consume and
am consumed and would like to know
on this blue evening
just which razorblade it would be best for me
to use, or maybe I could get a station wagon or buy a
stereo or a movie camera, say 8mm, under $55
or an electric frying pan…like the silver head
of some god-thing after they drop the bomb BANG
and the grass gives up and love is a shadow
and love is a fishtail weaving through
threads that seem eyes but are only what’s
left of me on the last blue evening after the bands
have suicided out, the carnival has left town and
they’ve blown up the Y.W.C.A. like a giant balloon and
sent it out to sea full of screaming lovely lonely
girls.
Fleg
Now it’s Borodin…4:18 a.m.,
symphony #2,
the gas is on
but the masses still sleep
except the bastard
downstairs
who always has the light on
all night, he yawns all night
and sleeps all day,
he’s either a madman
or a poet; and has an
ugly wife,
neither of them work
and we pass each other
on the steps (the wife and I)
when we go down
to dump our bottles,
and I look at his name
on the mailbox: Fleg
God. No wonder. A fleg
never sleeps. Some kind
of fish-thing waiting
for a twist in the sky.
but very kind, I must
remember, when the
drunk women up here
scream or throw things
Fleg ignores it all,
yawns, and this is
fine. There used to be
an Anderson, a Chester
Anderson always at my door
in his pants
and undershirt,
red-eyed as a woman
who has lost a lover,
manager behind his shoulder
(and one night 2 cops),
“God, I can’t sleep.
I’m a working man,
I’ve got to get my sleep
Jesus. I can’t SLEEP.”
Fleg? Sleep? I’ve never even
seen him. I don’t think
he does anything. Just some
kind of shoulder of mutton
with silver eyes
looking up at his ceiling,
tiredly smiling,
saying softly to his
ugly wife: “That Bukowski
up there, he’s a kick
for sore balls, ain’t he?”
“Now, Honey, don’t talk that way.”
“He had a colored woman up there
the other night. I can tell,
I can tell.”
“Now, Mission, you can’t tell no
such damn thing.”
(Mission? Mission Fleg. Christ.)
“Yes, I can. I heard her screaming.”
“Screaming?”
“Well, moaning, kind of like you
know. What’s this guy look like,
baby?”
“Passed him today. Face kind of smashed
in. A long nose like an ant-eater.
Mouth like a monkey. Kind of funny eyes.
Never saw eyes like those.”
It’s about 4:38 a.m. Borodin is finished (yeah)
not a very long symphony. I turn my radio down
and the Flegs I find
are listening
to the same station.
I hope we never meet,
I like Fleg the way he is
(in my mind)
and I’m sure he wants me
the way I am
(in his mind),
and he has just yawned now
up through the ceiling
his ceiling
which is my floor; ah,
my poor tired Fleg
waiting for me to give
him LIFE;
he’s probably slowly dying of
something
and I am too,
but I’m so glad
he doesn’t call the police
while I’m
at it.
Interviewed by a Guggenheim Recipient
this South American up here on a Gugg
walked in with his whore
and she sat on the edge of my bed and
crossed her fine legs
and I kept looking at her legs
and he pulled at his stringy necktie
and I had a hangover
and he asked me
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE AMERICAN
POETS?
and I told him I didn’t think very much
of the American poets
and then he went on to ask some other
very dull questions
(as his whore’s legs layed along the side of
my brain) like
WELL? YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING
BUT IF YOU WERE TEACHING A CLASS AND ONE OF THE
STUDENTS ASKED YOU WHICH AMERICAN POETS
THEY SHOULD READ
WHAT WOULD YOU TELL THEM?
she crossed her legs as I watched and I thought
I could knock him out with one punch
rape her in 4 minutes
catch a train for L.A.
get off in Arizona and walk off into the desert
and I couldn’t tell him that I would never teach
a class
that along with not liking American poetry
that I didn’t like American classes either
or the job that they would expect me to
do,
so I said
Whitman, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence’s poems about
reptiles and beasts, Auden. and then I
realized that Whitman was the only true American,
that Eliot was not an American somehow and the
others certainly not, and
he knew it too
he knew that I had fucked up
but I made no apologies
thought some more about rape
I almost loved the woman but I knew that when she walked out
that I would never see her again
and we shook hands and the Gugg said
he’d send me the article when it came out
but I knew that he didn’t have an article
and he knew it too
and then he said
I will send you some of my poems translated into
English
and I said fine
and I watched them walk out of the place
I watched her highheels clack down the tall
green steps
and then both of them were gone
but I kept remembering her dress sliding all over her
like a second skin
and I was wild with mourning and love and sadness
and being a fool unable to
communicate
anything
and I walked in and finished that beer
cracked another
put on my ragged king’s coat
and walked out into the New Orleans street
and that very night
I sat with my friends and acted vile and
the ass
much mouth and villainy
and cruelness
and they never
knew why.
Very
; I take the taxi to Newport and study the wrinkles in the
driver’s skull; all anticipation is gone:
defeat has come so often
(like rain)
that it has assumed more meaning
than victory; the player is good at
the piano
and we wait in a corner
(this poet!)
waiting to recite
poems; it’s like a cave here:
full of bats and whores
and bodiless music
moving at the back of the world; my head aches,
and seeking a deliberate door
I think gently of successful papa Haydn
rotting in the rainy garden
above copulating
tone-deaf gophers…
the sun is in a box somewhere
asleep like a cat;
the bats flit, a body
takes my hand (the one with the drink:
the right hand is the drinker)
a woman, a horrible
damned woman,
something alive
sits
and blinks
at me:
Hank, it says,
they want you up
front!
fuck ’em, I say, fuck ’em.
I have grown quite fat and
vulgar (a deliberate death
on the kitchen floor) and
suddenly I laugh
at my excellent condition
like some swine of a businessman
and I don’t even feel
like getting up
to piss…
Angels,
we have grown apart.
The Look:
I once bought a toy rabbit
at a department store
and now he sits and ponders
me with pink sheer eyes:
He wants golfballs and glass
walls.
I want quiet thunder.
Our disappointment sits between us.
One Night Stand
the latest sleeping on my pillow catches