the arms he threw to his dog
and he kept the hands to use as nut-crackers, and all the
leftover and assorted parts
like breasts and buttocks he boiled into a soup
which strangely
tasted better than she ever had.
he spent the money in her purse
he bought good French wine, frijoles, a pound of grass
and two parakeets; he bought the collected works of
Keats, a 5 foot square red bandana, a scissors with
ivory handles, and a box of candy for his
landlady.
then he drank and ate and slept for three days and nights
and when the police came
he seemed very friendly and calm
and all the way to the station house
he talked of the weather, the color of the mountains,
various things like that, he didn’t seem like that kind of killer
at all.
it was very strange.
children in the sky
the boys come up
the boys climb up the
brown pole
as the waterheater gurgles
in Spanish
the boys climb the
brown pole—
Charlemagne fought for this
Il Duce was tilted from his car
skinned like a bear
and hung
upsidedown
for this—
the boys climb up
the brown pole
3 or 4 of
them;
we have just moved in
this building,
the paintings still
unpacked, the letters from
England and Chicago and
Cheyenne and
New Orleans,
but the beer’s on
and there are 5 oranges
and 4 pears on the table
so life’s not
bad
except somebody wanted
$15 to
turn on the gas;
the boys climb the phonepole
to leap onto the
bluegreen
garage roofs
and I stand naked
behind a curtain,
smoking a cigar,
and impressed
impressed as I can be
as if
the Virgin Mary
was dancing
outside;
and through the window
to the North
I can see 2 men
feeding
45 pigeons
and the pigeons
walk in separate circles
of 8 or 10
as if tied together
by a revolving string,
and it is 3 o’clock
in the afternoon and
a good cigar.
Cicero fought for this,
Jake LaMotta and
Waslaw Nijinsky,
but somebody stole
our guitar
and I haven’t taken my
vitamins
for weeks.
the boys run on the
greenblue roofs
as to the North the
pigeons rise;
it is desperately
holy
and I blow out
grey and quiet
smoke.
then a woman in a red coat,
evidently an official,
some matron of
learning
decides that
the sky needs
cleaning:
Hey!!! you boys get
from there!
it is beautiful as
deer
running from the
hunter.
Agrippina fought for this,
even Mithridates,
even William Hazlitt.
there is nothing to do
now
but unpack.
the weather is hot on the back of my watch
the weather is hot on the back of my watch
which is down at Finkelstein’s
who is gifted with 3 balls
but no heart, but you’ve got to understand
when the bull goes down
or the whore, the heart is laid aside for something else,
and let’s not over-rate obvious decency
for in a crap game you may be cutting down
some wobbly king of 6 kids
and a hemorrhoid butt on his last unemployment check,
and who is to say the rose is greater than the thorn?
not I, Henry,
and when your love gets flabby knees and prefers flat shoes,
maybe you should have stuck it into something else
like an oil well
or a herd of cows.
I’m too old to argue,
I’ve gone with the poem
and been k.o.’d with the old sucker-punch
round after round,
but sometimes I like to think of the Kaiser
or any other fool full of medals and nothing else,
or the first time we read Dos
or Eliot with his trousers rolled;
the weather is hot on the back of my watch
which is down at Finkelstein’s,
but you know what they say: things are tough all over,
and I remember once on the bum in Texas
I watched a crow-blast, one hundred farmers with one hundred shotguns
jerking off the sky with a giant penis of hate
and the crows came down half-dead, half-living,
and they clubbed them to death to save their shells
but they ran out of shells before they ran out of crows
and the crows came back and walked around the pellets and
stuck out their tongues
and mourned their dead and elected new leaders
and then all at once flew home to fuck to fill the gap.
you can only kill what shouldn’t be there,
and Finkelstein should be there and my watch
and maybe myself, and I realize that if the poems are bad
they are supposed to be bad and if they are good
they are likewise supposed to be—although there is a minor
fight to be fought,
but still I am sad
because I was in this small town somewhere in the badlands,
way off course, not even wanting to be there,
two dollars in my wallet, and a farmer turned to me
and asked me what time it was
and I wouldn’t tell him,
and later they gathered them up for burning
as if they were no better than dung with feathers,
feathers and a little gasoline,
and from the bottom of one pile
a not-quite-dead crow smiled at me.
it was 4:35 p.m.
note to a lady who expected rupert brooke
wha’, what did you expect? a schoolboy lisping Donne? or
some more practical lover filling you with the stench of Life?
I’m a fool and no gentleman: I walked the Brooklyn Bridge
with Crane in pajamas, but suicide fails as you get older:
there’s less and less to kill.
so among the skin and lambchops, the sick neckties of
other closets, I scheme schemes round as oranges
filled with the music of my crafty mumbling.
Brooke? no. I am a monkey with an olive lost in the
circus sand of your laughter, circus apes, circus tigers,
circus madmen of finance screwing their secretaries before
the 5:15…and what did you expect?
a pink-cheek dribbling Picasso colors on your dry brain?
so, the room was blue with the smoke of my boiling, hell,
a senseless sea
and
I fell fingers sotted to the last pinch of your juice,
fell through the thorned vines cursing your name,
no gentleman
no gentleman,
kissed-off love like snake-bite,
the veranda buzzed with flies, buzzed with flies
and lies, and your red mouth screamed,
your lamps screamed
breaking like overdue bills:
DRUNK! DRUNK AGAIN!
O, YOU IDIOT!
so, Yeats, Keats, teats…nothing but an apricot!
wha’, what happened to Spain? my boy Lorca?
the revolution? must join the brigade!
lemme outa here!
the difference between a bad poet and a good one is luck
I suppose so.
I was living in an attic in Philadelphia
it became very hot in the summer and so I stayed in the
bars. I didn’t have any money and so with what was almost left
I put a small ad in the paper and said I was a writer
looking for work…
which was a god damned lie; I was a writer
looking for a little time and a little food and some
attic rent.
a couple of days later when I finally came home
from somewhere
the landlady said, there was somebody looking for
you. and I said,
there must be some mistake. she said,
no, it was a writer and he said he wanted you to help him write
a history book.
oh, fine, I said, and I knew with that I had another week’s
rent—I mean, on the cuff—
so I sat around drinking wine on credit and watching the
hot pigeons
suffer and fuck on my hot roof.
I turned the radio on real loud
drank the wine and wondered how I could make a history book
interesting but true.
but the bastard never came back,
and I had to finally sign on with a railroad track gang
going West
and they gave us cans of food but no
openers
and we broke the cans against the seats and sides of
railroad cars a hundred years old with dust
the food wasn’t cooked and the water tasted like
candlewick
and I leaped off into a clump of brush somewhere in
Texas
all green with nice-looking houses in the
distance
1 found a park
slept all night
and then they found me and put me in a cell
and they asked me about murders and
robberies.
they wanted to get a lot of stuff off the books
to prove their efficiency
but I wasn’t that tired
and they drove me to the next big town
fifty-seven miles away
the big one kicked me in the ass
and they drove off.
but I lucked it:
two weeks later I was sitting in the office of the city hall
half-asleep in the sun like the big fly on my elbow
and now and then she took me down to a meeting of the council
and I listened very gravely as if I knew what was happening
as if I knew how the funds of a halfass town were being
dismantled.
later I went to bed and woke up with teethmarks all over
me, and I said, Christ, watch it, baby! you might give me
cancer! and I’m rewriting the history of the Crimean War!
and they all came to her house—
all the cowboys, all the cowboys:
fat, dull and covered with dust.
and we all shook hands.
I had on a pair of old bluejeans, and they said
oh, you’re a writer, eh?
and I said: well, some think so.
and some still think so…
others, of course, haven’t quite wised up yet.
two weeks later they
ran me out
of town.
the curtains are waving and people walk through the afternoon here and in Berlin and in New York City and in Mexico
I wait on life like a pregnancy, put the stethoscope to
the gut
but all I hear now is
the piano slamming its teeth through areas of my
brain
(somebody in this neighborhood likes
Gershwin which is too bad
for
me)
and the woman sits behind me
sits there sits there
and keeps lighting cigarettes
and now the nurses leave the hospital near here
and they wear dresses that are naked in the sun
to cheer the dead and the dying and the doctors
but it does not help
me
if I could rip them with moans of delight it
would neither add or take away
anything
now now
a horn blows a tired
summer like a gladiola given up and leaning against a
house and
the bottles we have emptied would strangle the
sensibilities…of God
now I look up and see my face in the mirror:
if I could only kill the man who killed the
man
more than coffeepots and cheroots have done me
in more than myself has done me
in
madness comes like a mouse out of the cupboard and
they hand me a photograph of the
moon
the woman behind me has a daughter who falls in love
with men in beards and sandals and berets
who smoke pipes and carefully comb their hair and
play chess and talk continually of the
soul and of Art
this is good enough: you’ve got to love
something
now the landlord waters outside dripping the
plants with false rain
Gershwin is finished now it sounds like
Greig
o, it’s all so common and hard! impossible!
I do wish somebody would go blackberry
wild
but no
I suppose it will be the
same: a beer and then another
beer and then another
beer
maybe then a halfpint of
scotch
three cigars—smoke smoke yes smoke
under the electric sun of night
hidden here in these walls with this woman and her
life while
the police are taking the drunks off the
streets
I do not know how much longer I can
last
but I keep thinking
ow! my god!
the
gladiola will straighten hard and
full of
color like an
arrow pointing at the
sun
Christ will shudder like
marmalade
my cat will look like Gandhi once
looked
everything everything
even the tiles in the men’s room at the
Union Station will be
true
all those mirrors there
finally with faces in them
roses
forests
no more policemen
no more
me.
for the mercy-mongers
it is justified
all dying is justified
all killing all death all
passing,
nothing is in vain
not even the neck
of a fly,
and a flower
passes through the armies
and like a small boy
bragging,
lifts up its
color.
IV
Burning In Water Drowning In Flame
Poems 1972-1973
if you think I have gone crazy
try picking a flower from the garden of your
neighbor
now
I had boils the size of tomatoes
all over me
they stuck a drill into me
down at the county hospital,
and
just as the sun went down
everyday
there was a man in a nearby ward
he’d start hollering for his friend Joe.
JOE! he’d holler, OH JOE! JOE! J O E!
COME GET ME, JOE!
Joe never came by.
I’ve never heard such mournful
sounds.
Joe was probably working off a
piece of ass or
attempting to solve a crossword puzzle.
I’ve always said
if you want to find out who your friends are
go to a madhouse or
jail.
and if you want to find out where love is not
be a perpetual
loser.
I was very lucky with my boils
being drilled and tortured
against the backdrop of the Sierra Madre mountains
while that sun went down;
when that sun went down I knew what I would do
when I finally got that drill in my hands