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******

bad action

I got a seat down front and started
working on my figures
and a man in a red shirt and red
pants
sat down two seats away
opened a brown paper bag
and began chewing on a sandwich and
potato chips.
I got up, moved several seats
away,
then I heard a man’s voice behind
me:
“let’s see, there are seven of us,
aren’t there?”
and there were: women and men and
children.
I walked downstairs to the crapper,
found a booth, closed the door,
sat down and began working on my
figures again.
there was a rap from the stall to
my left:
“hey buddy…hey, buddy!”
“yeah?” I answered.
“get down on your knees, slip your
cock under the partition and I’ll
give you the best blow job you
ever had!”
I got out of there fast, went back
upstairs, found a seat, sat down
and then I felt something under my
right foot: a dead wren.
another reminder of death.
the public address system
came on:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, the Flag of
the United States of America!”
we all stood up.
the flag went up.
we all sat down.
sometimes being at the racetrack
is worse than being in the
county jail.

******

dogs

someplace in Arizona
at the dog
races.
the dogs were
great
and the boys
led them out
on the track
junior highschool boys
in orange jackets
who should have been home
studying
contemporary history or
biology.
the night was
calm
the track looped in front
of those jagged
mountains
that stood above those
lizard-and-snake-crawled
sands,
the track was my
El Dorado and the crowd was
small
and I came up with
75% winners
none the actual
betting
favorite.
and as she drove me back
she was silent.
she knew I hadn’t been thinking
of her
although I had once loved her
very much, and I felt sad
for her,
she was very straight at the
wheel
her hair falling into her
face,
she said, “now I guess you want
to get drunk?”
“of course,”
I said.
she was always pissed and that
pissed her more and she hit the throttle
and the speedometer on her dash only went to
85
and the needle went past that
and my window was open and the
air rushed in
and the mountains sped by
and cars leaped aside as she
approached
but a jack rabbit didn’t make
it—
one the dogs had failed
to catch—
and the dead carcass was
thrown against the
windshield,
there was a splash of
blood and then the carcass was
gone, and I thought, fuck it, death
I accept
you.
but it didn’t happen, we
skidded to a stop
in front of her court
and we got out
and went inside
where her sister was
waiting,
and we sat there for
several hours
talking
laughing
drinking tea
(for them)
wine for
me
talking and
laughing
as if everything was
all right
instead of mutilated
and murdered
forever.

******

hey, Ezra, listen to this

I think I learned much about writing when
I read those issues of The Kenyon Review
over 40 years ago
the light of the starving library room
falling across my starving hands
holding fat pages full of
deliberate glorious
rancor
those critics
those spoiled fat gnats
bellicose
very fine energy
more fulfilling than my
park bench
I learned that words could
beat the hell out of
anything
they were
better than paint
better than music
better than clay
stone
or their
counterparts
yet
wasn’t it strange
that all I wanted to do then was
lift the skirt of the librarian and
look at her legs and
grab her panties?
I didn’t do it.
literary fame can be the consequence
of knowing
when to go wild
and how.

******

not all that bad

was sitting here, drinking a glass of
wine
the phone rang, I left the drink
to answer in the other
room.
came back in a few minutes
sat down
picked up the glass
felt something moving in my
mouth,
Jesus Christ!
I spit it out into the
ashtray:
a fly
wiggling there…
I picked up the wine glass,
walked into the bathroom
dumped the contents,
then the glass slipped out of
my hand
and rattled in the wash basin.
I rinsed out my mouth, the glass,
then walked back in
poured a new drink.
the fly was still wiggling…
there we were,
a wino fly and a wino man
at 1:30 a.m.
and now there’s another fly
whirling and buzzing
above me
no doubt wanting to join
the party.
well, it could be worse:
I could be drinking with
things that can’t
fly
either with their bodies
or any other
way.
and you can’t
spit them
out.

******

Krutz

I was in Mannheim when my agent phoned me
at the hotel, he said Krutz wanted to have
dinner with the whole gang, and I told
my agent, o.k.
I thought that was very nice of Krutz
because it was a large gang—my agent, my
girlfriend, a French movie producer and his
girlfriend, and also
3 or 4 other people who were hanging on,
maybe more than 3 or 4.
the next evening found us at the most
expensive restaurant in town, at a large
reserved table with a head waiter and 2 or
3 additional waiters.
Krutz had his girlfriend with him and we
had drinks and appetizers, then some-
body remarked how young Krutz was to be
a leading publisher in Germany.
Krutz just smiled around his
cigar.
Krutz published me.
I smiled around my
cigarette.
my agent was there with his wife; I don’t
know how many were at the table, perhaps
12, and I thought what a good guy
Krutz was, not only for publishing me
but also for wining and dining all these
people.
everybody ordered, drank, and waited;
the food was slow to arrive and the
bottles of wine emptied and more arrived via
those gently smiling waiters, and we
all laughed and talked and smoked and
drank,
and then the food arrived—such magic:
frogs legs, crab legs, steaks so tender you
could cut them with your fork; and lobsters,
all manner of strange foodstuffs—onions,
greens, creams and gravies, olives, pickles,
delightful unknown specialties;
and hot bread so soft the butter ran through;
it was royal food, food beyond our ken,
and we ate and drank, and finally finished,
and then we drank some more,
they ran out of our favorite
wine and we ordered a new one, and then
it began to get late, quite late, and the waiters
were slower and slower bringing the bottles and
they were no longer smiling, and soon we stopped
laughing and just talked, and then the
bottles stopped arriving;
the head waiter walked up and placed the
bill in the center of the table on a large silver
platter
and it just sat there
as the waiters stood and waited as
we waited.
the bill was near Krutz and we all watched
Krutz but he didn’t reach
except into his coat where he extracted
a large and expensive cigar…
he took the cigar and leisurely began licking
it, turning and licking it, then
he came with the lighter, stuck the cigar
into his mouth, lit it, inhaled contentedly,
exhaling a slow and beautiful stream of gentle blue
aromatic smoke…
then he waited.
the message was obvious
to almost everybody.
I looked at my agent, but he was immune to the
tragedy, he was smiling and talking to
somebody.
I didn’t have the money
and I looked around the table:
it was an unbelievable scene as my girlfriend poked
her elbow into my side whispering, “what the hell’s
going on?”
Krutz leaned further back in his chair, sucked,
blew out another langorous stream of blue smoke.
then, suddenly, the waiters came forward, removed
all the plates, all the bottles, and all that was
left were our empty wine glasses and our ashtrays.
we all sat there and the waiters waited and the
head waiter waited and there was no more laughing,
no more talking (well, my agent was still busy
talking and smiling away at somebody).
it was agony, it was dirty dirty agony while
Krutz smoked…
finally, the French director saved us all, he waved
his credit card and the head waiter moved in for the
kill…

we were able to leave then and we met later
outside near the automobiles where Krutz lit a fresh
cigar and his girlfriend gave me a bag of apples
from their garden
which I
thanked them for…

back at the hotel
my girlfriend and I each
ate an apple
and she said,
“these are great apples, these German apples…”
and I said,
“yes, they are.”
and when she went to the bathroom
I took my drink and the bag of apples and
I went out on the balcony…
we were on the top floor
and I hurled the apples
one by one
into the night
into the street
and toward the park
and grabbing the last apple
I really zoomed it
almost going over the side
myself
but, of course, I didn’t
and I turned and walked back
in there
feeling better
but not
much.

******

how I got started

it has taken me decades to realize
why I was usually chosen over the
6 or 7 candidates for those
paltry shipping clerk jobs
in those small business houses
across the nation.
first, I was big—
which meant I could lift heavy
objects.
second, I was ugly—
which meant I was no threat to
the secretaries.
third, I looked dumb—
which meant I was too stupid
to steal.
if I had been running a business
and a guy like me had come to apply
for a job
I would have hired him
right away.
which is rather
the way I ended up anyhow
in another kind of
business.

******

the old gang

of course, we were all fucked-up, I was suicidal but hitting the
shit out of the typer,
couldn’t pick anything up off the floor: shirts, bottles, shorts,
towels, socks, cans,
I walked about naked and barefoot
stepping onto shards of glass
sometimes feeling it
sometimes not.
at times I tried to pick some of it
out
but I didn’t want to get it all
because I’d read somewhere that the glass could work its way
through the bloodstream to the
heart and kill
you, yes…
there was a girl in and out,
a semi-girlfriend called K.
she came along mostly
but sometimes with a thin mad lady
called Sunflower,
and sometimes K. arrived with her
brother N.,
or sometimes all 3 arrived at
once.
anyhow, K. and N. and Sunflower were
all on drugs:
blacks, reds, yellows, whites,
coke.
I had a coke dealer who cut it so
fine
you got a headache just looking at
a line.
I was also on scotch, beer, wine
hitting the shit out of the typer
with K. and N. and Sunflower
banging on my door
usually at 4 or 5 a.m.
when I was up
anyhow.
they were more like sharks from hell
than friends
but K. had a fine body and very long red
hair
and she laid it on me
just often enough to keep me on her
leash.
meanwhile
I kept hitting the shit out of the typer
and some luck started
moneywise
which enabled me to escape that
neighborhood
and move to a small town down the
coast
where I continued to hit the shit out of
the typer,
even going back once to see K.
who was drying out in her mother’s
home
and as she sat on the edge of her
bed
I told her,
“it’s over between us, I don’t know how
you got that grab on me…”
what a gang they had been,
driving their cars without pink
slips, license plates, driver’s
licenses, just ripping and roaring, waiting
for the next drug
hit.
last I heard, they were clean,
Sunflower had
vanished,
but K. and her brother N.
surfaced in a recent issue of a national
magazine
sober
speaking as reliable sources
about my life
literary and
otherwise.
not that they were unkind, just
inaccurate.
it’s well that they didn’t
o.d.
but I hope it’s their last
hurrah
regarding me,
and I’ll never again quite
believe
what other people say
about
writers.

******

how do they get your number?

the dogs of hell have claws like cats
and faces like women
and the doors of hell have numbers on
them
upside down
and to get through them
you have to walk with your hands
using your legs like giant
antennae:
in hell they give the answers
first
and ask the questions
later;
in hell you’re always in love
with nothing to love,
and something hates you
for all the wrong reasons;
the cats of hell are all
bunghole
so dry
they want to wink but
can’t
your father rules hell and your mother
licks his toes;
in this hell, it’s never night
it’s always morning
you’re always getting up to the
sound of stinking alarms,
it’s morning
more and more
leprous light like
the worst of your memories;
in this hell, there are no flames
just this moment
dangling intestines nailed to
mutilated palms
and the phone rings and
you pick it up
and somebody speaks through the
instrument
at 8:35 a.m.
“are you the poet,
Chinaski?
we all love you here and we
want you to read at our
bookstore…
all the beer you can drink, and
who knows? you old fuck, maybe
we can even find a piece of ass
for you somewhere! ha, ha, ha…”

******

a strange moment

as I was walking through this parking
lot
I saw a crowd gathered about two men
bloodied
in a fist fight
they were cursing and
they were breathing
heavily;
then one man caught a punch in the
mouth
crashed backwards into a
yellow Mercedes
bounced back
dug his fist into the other man’s
gut.
I hated that crowd
they were watching like spectators at
a cockfight.
I pushed through
got between the men
caught a fist on the right
temple.
“all right,” I said, “that’s
enough, it’s over.”
they stood looking at each
other.
“that’s it, go your
ways…”
one guy turned away but the other
guy charged,
“you son of a bitch!”
I caught him and held him
back…
“that’s it, buddy, don’t be
an asshole…”
for a moment it looked as if
he was going to swing on
me
then he put his hands
down and walked away through
the crowd.
I walked to my car
got in
started it
thinking, now what did
you do that for?
that was none of your
business
but I was smiling
I had altered a bit of
ugliness
into something
else
even though
such an act
was against
whatever vague
philosophy
I had
personal or
otherwise…
and pulling out of the
parking lot
and into traffic
it was crowded
and preparing to make a
lane change
I reached for the
blinker lever
touched the wrong
one
and my windshield wipers
began lashing
about
and then I
laughed: back to
normal: it sure felt
more
real.

******

goodbye

goodbye Hemingway goodbye Celine (you died on the same day)
goodbye Saroyan goodbye good old Henry Miller goodbye Tennessee
Williams goodbye the dead dogs of the freeways goodbye all the
love that never worked goodbye Ezra it’s always sad it’s
always sad when people give and then are taken I accept I
accept and I will give you my automobile and my cigarette
lighter and my silver drinking chalice and the roof that kept
out most of the rain goodbye Hemingway goodbye Celine goodbye
Saroyan goodbye old Henry Miller goodbye Camus goodbye Gorky
goodbye the tightrope walker falling from the wire as the
blank faces look up then down then away
be angry at the sun, said Jeffers, goodbye Jeffers, I can only
think that the death of good people and bad are equally sad
goodbye D.H. Lawrence goodbye to the fox in my dreams and
to the telephone
it’s been more difficult than I ever expected
goodbye Two Ton Tony goodbye Flying Circus
you did enough goodbye Tennessee you alcoholic speed-freak fag
I’m drinking an extra bottle of wine for you
tonight.

******

the famous writer

when I was a mailman
one of my routes was special:
a famous writer lived in one of those
houses,
I recognized his name on the letters,
he was a famous writer but not a very
good one,
and I never saw him
until this one morning when I was
hungover
I walked up to his house
and he was outside
he was standing in an old bathrobe,
he needed a shave and he looked ill
about 3 years from death
but he had this good looking woman
standing there with him
she was much younger than he
the sun shining through her full hair
and her thin dress,
I handed him his mail over the gate and
said, “I’ve read your books,”
but he didn’t answer
he just looked down at the letters
and I said, “I’m a writer too…”
he still didn’t answer,
he turned and walked off
and she looked at me
with a face that said nothing,
then turned and followed
him.
I moved on to the next house
where halfway across the lawn
a toy bulldog
came charging out
growling
with his putrid little eyes
seething
I caught him under the belly with
my left foot
and flung him up against a
picture window
and then I felt much better
but not
entirely
so.

******

transformation and disfiguration

there were always little tragedies
we heard about them on the job
sitting on those stools
eleven-and-one-half hours a night
every bit of outside news
was greeted by us
much like the inmates of a prison camp
every now and then
a courier would come by and say
“it’s 3 to 2, end of the 3rd…”
he never said 3 to 2 who
because
we were able to decipher all that
one night I heard two fellows
talking:
“Ralph checked out early
when he walked into his house
it was dark
his wife and her lover were in bed
they thought he was a burglar
the lover had a gun
and he shot Ralph…”
“where’s Louie?”
I asked one night
I hadn’t seen Louie
in a couple of weeks
Louie had two jobs
when he slept I didn’t know
“Louie?
Louie fell asleep in bed
smoking a cigarette
the mattress caught fire
he burned to death…”
there were many deaths
among the mail clerks
feeling like an
inmate of a prison
I also felt as if we were
front line troops
under continual bombardment and
attack
when there weren’t deaths
there were breakdowns—
people who after years of
sticking letters
just couldn’t do it anymore
or there were dismissals
for the slightest reason
it was death and transformation
and disfiguration:
people found
they couldn’t walk anymore
or they suddenly
came up with speech defects
or they were shaken by tremors or
their eyes blinked or
they came to work drugged or
drunk or both
it was terror and dismemberment
and the survivors
hunched on their stools wondering
who would be next
the supervisors brutalized us
and the supervisors
were in turn brutalized
by their superiors who
were in turn brutalized
by the Postmaster General
who always demanded
more for less
and the public brutalized
the Postmaster General
and it was finally
the little old lady
pruning her garden roses
who was the first cause
of misery for everybody:
Democracy at work
one night I asked,
“where’s Hodges?”
(I don’t know why but
I was always
the last to know anything
perhaps because I was white
and most of them were black)
there was no reply
about Hodges
who was the meanest soup
and white
to top it all
and I asked again
and somebody said
“he won’t be around
for a while…”
and then
in pieces and bits
it was revealed to me:
Hodges had been knifed
in the parking lot
on the way to his car
and then
it was inferred
that everybody knew
who did it
“would it be anybody
I know?”
I smiled
it got very quiet
Big George put his mail down
stared at me
he stared at me a long time
then he turned
started sticking his letters again
and I said
“I wonder who’s winning
the old ball game?”
“4 to 2,”
somebody said
“end of the 4th…”
Hodges never came back
and soon
I got out of there too.

******

suggestion for an arrangement

it would be nice to die at the typer instead of with my
ass stuck into some hard bed pan.
I visited a writer friend in the hospital who was dying
inch by inch
in the most terrible way
possible.
yet during each visit
(when conscious) he continued to
talk to me
about his
writing (not as an accomplishment but
as a magic obsession)
and he didn’t mind my
visits because
he knew I understood exactly what he was
saying.
at his funeral
I expected him to rise from his
coffin and say, “Chinaski,
it was a good run, well
worth it.”
he never knew what I looked like
because before I met him
he had become blind
but he knew I
understood
his slow and terrible
death.
I told him one time that
the gods were punishing him because
he wrote so
well.
I hope that I never write that
well, I want to die with my head down on this
machine
3 lines from the bottom of the
page
burnt-out cigarette in my
fingers, radio still
playing
I just want to write
just well enough to
end like
that.

******

result

the room was small but neat and when I visited him
he was on that bed like a grounded seal
and it was embarrassing, I mean,
coming across with the conversation;
I really didn’t know him that well
except through his writing,
and they kept him drugged—
they kept operating, chopping parts of him
away
but being a true writer
Fante talked about his next novel.
blind, and cut away, again and again,
he had already dictated one novel
from that bed
a good work, it had been published
and now he talked to me about another
but I knew he wouldn’t make it
and the nurses knew
everybody knew
but he just went on talking to me
about his next novel.
he had an unusual plot idea
and I told him it sounded
great,
and after another visit or two
his wife phoned me one afternoon
and told me that
it was over…
it’s all right, John, nobody has ever
written that last one.
you were really tough on those nurses, though,
and that pleased me, the way you brought them
running in there in their crinkled whites,
you proved me more than right:
my assertion
that your power of command
with simple language was
one of the magnificent things of
our century.

******

sardines in striped dresses

all right, they’re playing Beethoven again; when I was
sleeping on that park bench in Texas they were playing
Beethoven, when it rained last Sunday and the pier fell
into the water they were playing Beethoven; I walked on
that pier 55 years ago and now it’s down in the ocean,
like Atlantis
but things break and vanish, that’s not news, got a
letter today from Louise, she says she’s leaving the
French Quarter and moving in with her sister in a small
town 45 minutes out of New Orleans.
people are getting tired, people are falling down and getting
back up, and they are playing Beethoven as the bums stop
me outside the post office: “Good morning, sir, have you
got a dollar?”
the old aerial circus is falling from the sky, dogs and
cats look at me oddly, the Klan appears, vanishes, Hitler
sniffles underground between palm tree roots, this cheap
cigar I’m smoking, it says Cuba, it says Havana, smuggled
all this way to gag me as
they are playing Beethoven, as Beethoven plays
William Saroyan is dead Celine is dead but Fante won’t
die
legs chopped off, and blind in his narrow grave he won’t
die:
3 years laying flat like that in that hospital, what is
he thinking?
I want to go quick like a seedless olive into the mouth
of a fool, as young girls keep arriving from Des
Moines wiggling like sardines in striped dresses, what
does it mean, listening to Beethoven now?
and now it’s over…“Head for some Palm Springs sun,”
the announcer begins as I tune him out and grimace at
this cigar, turn the radio back up: it’s
Mahler, the 10th, right after the Bee’s 5th, some hell
of a heavy night as pretty much alone here
I think of how much I like Somerset Maugham’s title The Razor’s Edge,
then I put out the fucking cigar, drain some wine,
get up, thinking, it’s the
same for everybody, more or less, some more, some
less, Celine’s dead, Beethoven’s quiet a moment:
it’s been a world full of the brave
and I love them all
as outside the
Vincent Thomas Bridge arcs in the dark
holding, just now, the luck of us all.

******

a note to the boys in the back room:

I get more and more mimeo chapbooks in the mail
written by fellows who used to know me
in the good old days.
these fellows are all writers
and they write about me
and they seem to remember
what I said
what I did.
some of it is exaggerated
some of it is humorous
and a majority of it is
self-serving—
where I tend to look bad or
ridiculous
or even insane
they always describe themselves
as calm and dependable observers
instead of
(in many cases)
as the non-talented
boring
ass-sucking
pretentious and
time-consuming
little farts
that they were.
I feel no rancor at what they
write.
it’s only that I’ve already done a
better job
with that particular subject
matter
and I would suggest that they
move on to the next man
just as my women have
done.

******

the condition

all up and down the avenues
the people are in pain;
they sleep in pain, they awaken
in pain;
even the buildings are in pain,
the bridges
the flowers are in pain
and there is no release—
pain sits
pain floats
pain waits
pain is.
don’t ask why there are
drunks
drug addicts
suicides
the music is bad
and the love
and the script:
this place now
as I type this
or as you read this:
your place now.

******

the day the epileptic spoke

the other day
I’m out at the track
betting Early Bird
(that’s when you bet at the
track before it opens)
I am sitting there having
a coffee and going over
the Form
and this guy slides toward
me—
his body is twisted
his head shakes
his eyes are out of
focus
there is spittle upon his
lips
he manages to get close to
me and asks,
“pardon me, sir, but could you
tell me the number of
Lady of Dawn in the
first race?”
“it’s the 7 horse,”
I tell him.
“thank you, sir,”
he says.
that night
or the next morning
really:
12:04 a.m.
Los Alamitos Quarter Horse
Results on radio
KLAC
the man told me
Lady of Dawn
won the first at
$79.80
that was two weeks
ago
and I’ve been there
every racing day since
and I haven’t seen that
poor epileptic fellow
again.
the gods have ways of
telling you things
when you think you know
a lot
or worse—
when you think
you know
just a
little.

******

the star

I was drunk and they
got me out of my car
put the bracelets on
and made me lay down
on the roadway
in the rain.
they stood in their
yellow raincoats
cops from 3
squadcars.
the water soaked
into my clothing.
I looked up
at the moon through
the raindrops,
thinking,
here I am
62 years old
and being
protected
from myself
again.
earlier that night
I had attended the
opening
of a movie
which portrayed the
life of a drunken
poet:
me.
this then was
my critical review
of their
effort.

******

terminology

my other favorite cat seemed to be dying and
I had him in and out of the vet’s
for x-rays, consultations, injections,
operations
“anything at all,” I told the doc,
“let’s try to keep him going…”
one morning I drove over to pick him
up and the girl at the counter
a vast girl in a wrap-around white
nurse’s outfit
asked me, “do you want your cat put
to sleep?”
“what?” I asked.
she repeated her
statement
“put to sleep?” I asked, “you mean
exterminated”
“well, yes,” she said, smiling with her
tiny eyes, then looking at the card
in her hand she said, “oh, I see it was
Mrs. Evans who wanted it done…”
“really?” I asked.
“sorry,” she said and walked into the other
room with her card and her sorry fat ass and
her sorry walk and her sorry life and
her sorry death and her sorry Mrs. Evans and
both of their sorry fat shits.
I walked over, sat down and opened up a
cat magazine, then closed it, thinking, it’s
just her job, it’s something she does, she doesn’t
kill the cats.
when she came into the office again she no
longer quite disgusted me and I opened the pages
of the cat magazine again and looked at and turned
the pages as if I had forgotten everything, which
I hadn’t
exactly.

******

John Dillinger marches on

I sometimes write about the 30’s because
they were a good training ground.
people learned to live with adversity
as a common everyday thing
when trouble came
they adjusted and made the next move,
and if there wasn’t one
they often created
one.
and the people who had jobs
did them with artistry.
a garage mechanic could fix your
car.
doctors made house calls.
cab drivers not only knew every
street in town
but they were also versed in
philosophy.
pharmacists would walk up to you
in drugstores and ask you what you
needed.
the ushers in movie houses were more
handsome than the movie
stars.
people made their own clothes,
repaired their own shoes.
almost everybody did things well.
now people in and out of their
professions are totally
inept,
how they even wipe their own asses
is beyond me.
and when adversity arrives they are
dismayed,
they quit,
spit it out,
lay down.
these, coddled to the extremes
are only used to victory or
the soft way.
it’s not their fault, I suppose,
that they didn’t live
through the 30’s
but I’m still hardly tempted to
adore
them.

******

the sickness

if
one night
I write
what I consider to
be
5 or 6 good poems
then I begin
to worry:
suppose the house
burns down?
I’m not worried
about
the house
I’m worried
about
those 5 or 6
poems
burning
up
or
an x-girlfriend
getting in
here
while I’m away
and stealing or
destroying
the poems.
after writing
5 or 6 poems
I am fairly
drunk
and
I sit
having a few
more
drinks
while deciding
where to hide
the poems.
sometimes I
hide the poems
while
thinking about
hiding
them
and when I
decide to
hide them
I can’t find
them…
then
begins the
search
and the
whole room is
a mass of
papers
anyhow
and
I’m very clever
at
hiding poems
perhaps more
clever than I
am
at
writing
them.
so
then
I find them
have another
drink
hide them
again
forget it
then
go
to sleep…
to awaken in
late morning
to remember
the poems
and
begin the
search
again…
usually only a
ten or fifteen
minute
period of
agony
to find
them
and read
them
and then
not like them
very much
but you know
after all
that
work
all that
drinking
hiding
searching
finding
I decide
it’s only
fair
to send
them
out
as a
record of
my travail
which
if accepted
will appear in
a little
magazine
circulation
between
100 and
750
a year-and
one-half
later
maybe.
it’s
worth
it.

******

our curious position

Saroyan on his deathbed said,
“I thought I would never die…”
I know what he meant:
I think of myself forever
rolling a cart through a
supermarket
looking for onions, potatoes
and bread
while watching the misshapen
and droll ladies push
by.
I think of myself forever
driving the freeway
looking through a dirty
windshield with the radio tuned to
something I don’t want
to hear.
I think of myself forever
tilted back in a
dentist’s chair
mouth
crocodiled open
musing that
I’m in
Who’s Who in America
I think of myself forever
in a room with a depressed
and unhappy woman.
I think of myself forever
in the bathtub
farting underwater
watching the bubbles
and feeling proud.
but dead, no…
blood pin-pointed out of
the nostrils,
my head cracking across
the desk
my fingers grabbing at
dark space…
impossible…
I think of myself forever
sitting upon the edge
of the bed
in my shorts with
toenail clippers
cracking off
huge ugly chunks
of nail
as I smile
while my white cat
sits in the window
looking out over the
town
as the telephone
rings…
in between the
punctuating
agonies
life is such a
gentle habit:
I understand what
Saroyan
meant:
I think of myself forever
walking down the
stairs
opening the door
walking to the
mailbox
and finding all that
advertising
which
I don’t believe
either.

******

the history of a tough motherfucker

he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and
terrorized
a white cross-eyed tailless cat
I took him in and fed him and he stayed
grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway
and ran him over
I took what was left to a vet who said, “not much
chance…give him these pills…his backbone
is crushed, but it was crushed before and somehow
mended, if he lives he’ll never walk, look at
these x-rays, he’s been shot, look here, the pellets
are still there…also, he once had a tail, somebody
cut it off…”
I took the cat back, it was a hot summer, one of the
hottest in decades, I put him on the bathroom
floor, gave him water and pills, he wouldn’t eat, he
wouldn’t touch the water, I dipped my finger into it
and wet his mouth and I talked to him, I didn’t go any-
where, I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to
him and gently touched him and he looked back at
me with those pale blue crossed eyes and as the days went
by he made his first move
dragging himself forward by his front legs
(the rear ones wouldn’t work)
he made it to the litter box
crawled over and in,
it was like the trumpet of possible victory
blowing in that bathroom and into the city, I
related to that cat—I’d had it bad, not that
bad but bad enough…
one morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and
just looked at me.
“you can make it,” I said to him.
he kept trying, getting up and falling down, finally
he walked a few steps, he was like a drunk, the
rear legs just didn’t want to do it and he fell again, rested,
then got up.
you know the rest: now he’s better than ever, cross-eyed,
almost toothless, but the grace is back, and that look in
his eyes never left…
and now sometimes I’m interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,
shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say, “look, look
at this”
but they don’t understand, they say something like, “you
say you’ve been influenced by Celine?”
“no,” I hold the cat up, “by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this”
I shake the cat, hold him up in
the smoky and drunken light, he’s relaxed he knows…
it’s then that the interviews end
although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures
later and there I am and there is the cat and we are photo-
graphed together.
he too knows it’s bullshit but that somehow it all helps.

******

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