чарльз буковски

******

those girls we followed home
in Jr. High the two prettiest girls were
Irene and Louise,
they were sisters;
Irene was a year older, a little taller
but it was difficult to choose between
them;
they were not only pretty but they were
astonishingly beautiful
so beautiful
that the boys stayed away from them;
they were terrified of Irene and
Louise
who weren’t aloof at all,
even friendlier than most
but
who seemed to dress a bit
differently than the other
girls:
they always wore high heels,
silk stockings,
blouses,
skirts,
new outfits
each day;
and,
one afternoon
my buddy, Baldy, and I followed them
home from school;
you see, we were kind of
the bad guys on the grounds
so it was
more or less
expected,
and
it was something:
walking along ten or twelve feet behind them;
we didn’t say anything
we just followed
watching
their voluptuous swaying,
the balancing of the
haunches.
we liked it so much that we
followed them home from school
every
day.
when they’d go into their house
we’d stand outside on the sidewalk
smoking cigarettes and talking.
“someday,” I told Baldy,
“they are going to invite us inside their
house and they are going to
fuck us.”
“you really think so?”
“sure.”
now
50 years later
I can tell you
they never did
—never mind all the stories we
told the guys;
yes, it’s the dream that
keeps you going
then and
now.

******

a tragic meeting
I was more visible and available then
and I had this great weakness:
I thought that going to bed with many women
meant that a man was clever and good and
superior
especially if he did it at the age of
55
to any number of bunnies
and I lifted weights
drank like mad
and did
that.
most of the women were nice
and most of them looked good
and only one or two were really dumb and
dull
but JoJo
I can’t even categorize.
her letters were slight, repeated
the same things:
“I like your books, would like to meet
you…”
I wrote back and told her
it would be
all right.
then along came the instructions
where I was to meet
her: at this college
on this date
at this time
just after her
classes.
the college was up in the
hills and
the day and time
arrived
and with her drawings
of twisting streets
plus a road map
I set out.
it was somewhere between the Rose Bowl
and one of the largest graveyards in
Southern California
and I got there early and sat in my
car
nipping at the Cutty Sark
and looking at the
co-eds—there were so many of
them, one simply couldn’t have
them all
then the bell rang and I got out of my
car and walked to the front of the
building, there was a long row of
steps and the students walked out of the
building and down the steps
and I stood and
waited, and like with airport
arrivals
I had no idea
which one
it would be.
“Chinaski,” somebody said
and there she was: 18, 19,
neither ugly nor beautiful, of
average body and features,
seeming to be neither vicious,
intelligent, dumb or
insane.
we kissed lightly and then
I asked her if she
had a car
and she said
she had a car
and I said, “fine, I’ll drive you
to it, then you follow
me…”
JoJo was a good follower, she followed me all
the way to my beat-up court in east
Hollywood.
I poured her a drink and we talked very
drab talk and kissed a
bit.
the kisses were neither good nor bad
nor interesting or un-
interesting.
much time went by and she drank very
little
and we kissed some more and she said,
“I like your books, they really do things
to me.”
“Fuck my books!” I told her.
I was down to my shorts and I had her
skirt up to her ass
and I was working hard
but she just kissed and
talked.
she responded and she didn’t
respond.
then
I gave up and started drinking
heavily.
she mentioned a few of the other
writers
she liked
but she didn’t like any of them
the way she liked
me.
“yeah,” I poured a new one, “is that
so?”
“I’ve got to get going,” JoJo said,
“I’ve got a class in the
morning.”
“you can sleep here,” I suggested, “and
get an early start, I scramble great
eggs.”
“no, thank you, I’ve got to
go…”
and she left with
several copies of my books
she had never seen
before,
copies I had given her
much earlier in the
evening.
I had another drink and decided to
sleep it off
as an unexplainable
loss.
I switched off the lights
and threw myself upon the
bed without
washing-up or
brushing my
teeth.
I looked up into the dark
and thought, now, here is one
I will never be able to
write about:
she was neither good nor bad,
real or unreal, kind or
unkind, she was just a girl
from a college
somewhere between the Rose Bowl and
the dumping grounds.
then I began to itch, I scratched
myself, I seemed to feel things
on my face, on my belly, I inhaled,
exhaled, tried to sleep but
the itching got worse, then
I felt a bite, then several bites,
things appeared to be
crawling on me…
I rushed to the bathroom
and switched on the light
my god, JoJo had fleas
I stepped into the shower
stood there
adjusting the water,
thinking,
that poor
dear
girl.

******

a good gang, after all
I keep hearing from the old dogs,
men who have been writing for
decades,
poets all,
they’re still at their
typers
writing better than
ever
past wives and wars and
jobs
and all the things that
happen.
many I disliked for personal
and artistic
reasons…
but what I overlooked was
their endurance and
their ability to
improve.
these old dogs
living in smoky rooms
pouring the
bottle…
they lash against the
typer ribbons: they came
to
fight.

******

there’s fire in the fingers and there’s fire in the shoes and there’s
fire in walking across a room
there’s fire in the cat’s eyes and there’s fire in the cat’s
balls
and the wrist watch crawls like a snake across the back of the
dresser
and the refrigerator contains 9,000 frozen red hot dreams
and as I listen to the symphonies of dead composers
I am consumed with a glad sadness
there’s fire in the walls
and the snails in the garden only want love
and there’s fire in the crabgrass
we are burning burning burning
there’s fire in a glass of water
the tombs of India smile like smitten motherfuckers
the meter maids cry alone at one a.m. on rainy nights
there’s fire in the cracks of the sidewalks
and
all during the night as I have been drinking and typing these
eleven or twelve poems
the lights have gone off and on
there is a wild wind outside
and in between times
I have sat in the dark here
electric (haha) typer off lights out radio off
drinking in the dark
lighting cigarettes in the dark
there was fire off the match
we are all burning together
burning brothers and sisters
I like it I like it I like
it.

******

late late late poem
you think about the time in
Malibu
after taking the tall girl
to dinner and drinks
you came out to the Volks
and the clutch was
gone
(no Auto Club card)
nothing out there but the
ocean and
25 miles to your
room
(her suitcase there
after an air trip from somewhere
in Texas)
and you say to her, “well,
maybe we’ll swim back in,” and
she forgets to
smile.
and the problem with
writing these poems
as you get into number 7 or
8 or 9
into the second bottle near
3 a.m.
trying to light your
cigarette with a book of
stamps
after already setting the
wastebasket on fire
once
is
that there is still some
adventure and joy
in typing
as the radio roars its
classical music
but the content
begins to get
thin.

******

working out
Van Gogh cut off his ear
gave it to a
prostitute
who flung it away in
extreme
disgust.
Van, whores don’t want
ears
they want
money.
I guess that’s why you were
such a great
painter: you
didn’t understand
much
else.

******

during my worst times
on the park benches
in the jails
or living with
whores
I always had this certain
contentment—
I wouldn’t call it
happiness—
it was more of an inner
balance
that settled for
whatever was occurring
and it helped in the
factories
and when relationships
went wrong
with the
girls.
it helped
through the
wars and the
hangovers
the backalley fights
the
hospitals.
to awaken in a cheap room
in a strange city and
pull up the shade—
this was the craziest kind of
contentment
and to walk across the floor
to an old dresser with a
cracked mirror—
see myself, ugly,
grinning at it all.
what matters most is
how well you
walk through the
fire.

******

it’s ours
there is always that space there
just before they get to us
that space
that fine relaxer
the breather
while say
flopping on a bed
thinking of nothing
or say
pouring a glass of water from the
spigot
while entranced by
nothing
that
gentle pure
space
it’s worth
centuries of
existence
say
just to scratch your neck
while looking out the window at
a bare branch
that space
there
before they get to us
ensures
that
when they do
they won’t
get it all
ever.

******

Рождён доходить

я сидел в общей камере,
и у всех сокамерников были наколки:
РОЖДЁН ДОХОДИТЬ
РОЖДЁН ПОДОХНУТЬ

каждый из них мог свернуть цыгарку
одной рукой.

если бы я упомянул Уоллеса Стивенса
или даже Пабло Неруду,
они сочли бы меня сумасшедшим.

я мысленно присвоил моим сокамерникам имена:
этот был Кафка
тот был Достоевский
этот был Блейк
тот был Селин
и вон тот был
Микки Спиллейн.

я не любил Микки Спиллейна.

и, конечно, вечером, когда погас свет,
мы сцепились – кому спать на
верхних нарах.

кончилось тем, что никому из нас не достались
верхние нары —
каждому достался карцер.

выйдя из одиночки,
я обратился к тюремщику:
я сказал ему, что я писатель,
чувствительная и одарённая душа
и что я желаю работать в библиотеке.

он добавил мне ещё двое суток карцера.

когда я вышел, меня отправили в обувной цех.

я работал с Ван Гогом, Шопенгауэром, Данте,
Робертом Фростом
и Карлом Марксом.

Спиллейна они отправили штамповать номерные знаки.

******

I could tell by the crouch of the cat,
the way it was flattened,
that it was insane with prey;
and when my car came upon it,
it rose in the twilight
and made off
with bird in mouth,
a very large bird, gray,
the wings down like broken love,
the fangs in,
life still there
but not much,
not very much.
the broken love-bird
the cat walks in my mind
and I cannot make him out:
the phone rings,
I answer a voice,
but I see him
again and again,
and the loose wings
the loose gray wings,
and this thing held
in a head that knows no mercy;
it is the world, it is ours;
I put the phone down
and the cat-sides of the room
come in upon me
and I would scream,
but they have places for people
who scream;
and the cat walks
the cat walks forever
in my brain.

******

a poem is a city

a poem is a city filled with streets and sewers
filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,
filled with banality and booze,
filled with rain and thunder and periods of
drought, a poem is a city at war,
a poem is a city asking a clock why,
a poem is a city burning,
a poem is a city under guns
its barbershops filled with cynical drunks,
a poem is a city
where God rides naked
through the streets like Lady Godiva,
where dogs bark at night, and chase away
the flag; a poem is a city of poets,
most of them quite similar
and envious and bitter…
a poem is this city now,
50 miles from nowhere,
9:09 in the morning,
the taste of liquor and cigarettes,
no police, no lovers, walking the streets,
this poem, this city, closing its doors,
barricaded, almost empty,
mournful without tears, aging without pity,
the hardrock mountains,
the ocean like a lavender flame,
a moon destitute of greatness,
a small music from broken windows…
a poem is a city, a poem is a nation,
a poem is the world…
and now I stick this under glass
for the mad editor’s scrutiny,
and night is elsewhere
and faint gray ladies stand in line,
dog follows dog to estuary,
the trumpets bring on gallows
as small men rant at things
they cannot do.

******

I thought of ships, of armies, hanging on…

I have practiced
death for so long
and still I have not learned it,
and tonight I came in
and my goldfish was not in his bowl,
he had leaped
for reasons of his own
(I had changed the water; it might have been
a fly…)
and he was now on the rug
with black spots upon his golden body,
and he was still and he was stiff
but I put him back in the water
(some sound told me to do this)
and I seemed to see the gills move,
a large air bubble formed
but the body was
still stiff
but miraculously
it did not float flat—
the tail part was down in the water,
and I thought of ships, of armies,
hanging on,
and then I saw the small fins
near the underside of the head
move
and I sat down on the couch
and tried to read,
tried not to think
that the woman who had given me these fish
was now dead 6 months,
the world going on past living things
now no longer living,
and the other fish had died.
he had overeat
en, he had eaten his meal
and most of the meal of the small one,
and now the woman was gone
and the small one was stiff,
and an hour later
when I got up
he floated flat and finished;
his eyes looking up at me did not look at me
but into places I could not see,
and the slave carried the master,
this goldfish with black spots
and dumped him into the toilet
and flushed him away.
I put the bowl in the corner
and thought, I really cannot stand
much more of this.
dead fish, dead ladies, dead wars.
it does seem a miracle to see anybody alive
and now somebody on the radio is playing
a guitar very slowly and I think, yes,
he too: his fingers, his hands, his mind,
and his music goes on but it is very still
it is very quiet, and I am tired.

******

the screw-game

one of the terrible things is
really
being in bed
night after night
with a woman you no longer
want to screw.
they get old, they don’t look very good
anymore—they even tend to
snore, lose
spirit.
so, in bed, you turn sometimes,
your foot touches hers—
god, awful!—
and the night is out there
beyond the curtains
sealing you together
in the
tomb.
and in the morning you go to the
bathroom, pass in the hall, talk,
say odd things; eggs fry, motors
start.
but sitting across
you have 2 strangers
jamming toast into mouths
burning the sullen head and gut with
coffee.
in 10 million
places in America
it is the same—
stale lives propped against each
other
and no place to
go.
you get in the car
and you drive to work
and there are more strangers there, most of them
wives and husbands of somebody
else, and besides the guillotine of work, they
flirt and joke and pinch, sometimes tend to
work off a quick screw somewhere—
they can’t do it at home—
and then
the drive back
home
waiting for Christmas or Labor Day or
Sunday or
something

******

those sons of bitches

the dead come running sideways
holding toothpaste ads,
the dead are drunk on New Year’s eve
satisfied at Christmas
thankful on Thanksgiving
bored on the 4th of July
loafing on Labor Day
confused at Easter
cloudy at funerals
clowning at hospitals
nervous at birth;
the dead shop for stockings and shorts
and belts and rugs and vases and
coffeetables,
the dead dance with the dead
the dead sleep with the dead
the dead eat with the dead.
the dead get
hungry looking at hogs’ heads.
the dead get rich
the dead get deader
those sons of bitches
this graveyard above the ground
one tombstone for the mess,
I say:
humanity, you never had it
from the beginning.

******

the tragedy of the leaves

I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead,
the potted plants yellow as corn;
my woman was gone
and the empty bottles like bled corpses
surrounded me with their uselessness;
the sun was still good, though,
and my landlady’s note cracked in fine and
undemanding yellowness; what was needed now
was a good comedian, ancient style, a jester
with jokes upon absurd pain; pain is absurd
because it exists, nothing more;
I shaved carefully with an old razor
the man who had once been young and
said to have genius; but
that’s the tragedy of the leaves,
the dead ferns, the dead plants;
and I walked into a dark hall
where the landlady stood
execrating and final,
sending me to hell,
waving her fat, sweaty arms
and screaming
screaming for rent
because the world had failed us
both.

******

to the whore who took my poems

some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don’t keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; it’s stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn’t you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I’m not Shakespeare
but sometime simply
there won’t be any more, abstract or
otherwise;
there’ll always be money and whores and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.

******

the state of world affairs
from a 3rd floor window

I am watching a girl dressed in a
light green sweater, blue shorts, long black stockings;
there is a necklace of some sort
but her breasts are small, poor thing,
and she watches her nails
as her dirty white dog sniffs the grass
in erratic circles;
a pigeon is there too, circling,
half dead with a tick of a brain
and I am upstairs in my underwear,
3 day beard, pouring a beer and waiting
for something literary or symphonic to happen;
but they keep circling, circling, and a thin old man
in his last winter rolls by pushed by a girl
in a catholic school dress;
somewhere there are the Alps, and ships
are now crossing the sea;
there are piles and piles of H- and A-bombs,
enough to blow up fifty worlds and Mars thrown in,
but they keep circling,
the girl shifts buttocks,
and the Hollywood Hills stand there, stand there
full of drunks and insane people and
much kissing in automobiles,
but it’s no good: che sera, sera:
her dirty white dog simply will not shit,
and with a last look at her nails
she, with much whirling of buttocks
walks to her downstairs court
trailed by her constipated dog (simply not worried),
leaving me looking at a most unsymphonic pigeon.
well, from the looks of things, relax:
the bombs will never go off.

******

the life of borodin

the next time you listen to Borodin
remember he was just a chemist
who wrote music to relax;
his house was jammed with peor e:
students, artists, drunkards, bur s,
and he never knew how to say: no.
the next time you listen to Borodin
remember his wife used his compositions
to line the cat boxes with
or to cover jars of sour milk;
she had asthma and insomnia
and fed him soft-boiled eggs
and when he wanted to cover his head
to shut out the sounds of the house
she only allowed him to use the sheet;
besides there was usually somebody
in his bed
(they slept separately when they slept
at all)
and since all the chairs
were usually taken
he often slept on the stairway
wrapped in an old shawl;
she told him when to cut his nails,
not to sing or whistle
or put too much lemon in his tea
or press it with a spoon;
Symphony #2, in B Minor
Prince Igor
On the Steppes of Central Asia
he could sleep only by putting a piece
of dark cloth over his eyes;
in 1887 he attended a dance
at the Medical Academy
dressed in a merrymaking national costume;
at last he seemed exceptionally gay
and when he fell to the floor,
they thought he was clowning.
the next time you listen to Borodin,
remember…

******

a literary romance

I met her somehow through correspondence or poetry or magazines
and she began sending me very sexy poems about rape and lust,
and this being mixed in with a minor intellectualism
confused me somewhat and I got in my car and drove North
through the mountains and valleys and freeways
without sleep, coming off a drunk, just divorced,
jobless, aging, tired, wanting mostly to sleep
for five or ten years, I finally found the motel
in a small sunny town by a dirt road,
and I sat there smoking a cigarette
thinking, you must really be insane,
and then I got out an hour late
to meet my date; she was pretty damned old,
almost as old as I, not very sexy
and she gave me a very hard raw apple
which I chewed on with my remaining teeth;
she was dying of some unnamed disease
something like asthma, and she said,
I want to tell you a secret, and I said,
I know: you are a virgin, 35 years old.
and she got out a notebook, ten or twelve poems:
a life’s work and I had to read them
and I tried to be kind
but they were very bad.
and I took her somewhere, the boxing
matches,
and she coughed in the smoke
and kept looking around and around
at all the people
and then at the fighters
clenching her hands.
you never get excited, do you? she asked.
but I got pretty excited in the hills that night,
and met her three or four more times
helped her with some of her poems
and she rammed her tongue halfway down my throat
but when I left her
she was still a virgin
and a very bad poetess.
I think that when a woman has kept her legs closed
for 35 years
it’s too late
either for love
or for
poetry.

******

the race

it is like this
when you slip down,
done like a wound-up victrola
(you remember those?)
and you go downtown
and watch the boys punch
but the big blondes sit with
someone else
and you’ve aged like a punk in a movie:
cigar in skull, fat gut,
but only no money,
no wiseness of way, no worldliness,
but as usual
most of the fights are bad,
and afterwards
back in the parking lot
you sit and watch them go,
light the last cigar,
and then start the old car,
old car, not so young man
going down the street
stopped by a red light
as if time were no problem,
and they come up to you:
a car full of young,
laughing,
and you watch them go
until
somebody behind you honks
and you are shaken back
into what is left
of your life.
pitiful, self-pity,
and your foot is to the floor
and you catch the young ones,
you pass the young ones
and holding the wheel like all love gone
you race to the beach
with them
brandishing your cigar and your steel,
laughing,
you will take them to the ocean
to the last mermaid,
seaweed and shark, merry whale,
end of flesh and hour and horror,
and finally they stop
and you go on
toward your ocean,
the cigar biting your lips
the way love used to.

******

the house

they are building a house
half a block down
and I sit up here
with the shades down
listening to the sounds,
the hammers pounding in nails,
thack thack thack thack,
and then I hear birds, and
thack thack thack
and I go to bed,
I pull the covers to my throat;
they have been building this house
for a month, and soon it will have
its people…sleeping, eating,
loving, moving around,
but somehow
now
it is not right,
there seems a madness,
men walk on its top with nails in their mouths
and I read about Castro and Cuba,
and at night I walk by
and the ribs of house show
and inside I can see cats walking
the way cats walk,
and then a boy rides by on a bicycle,
and still the house is not done
and in the morning the men
will be back
walking around on the house
with their hammers,
and it seems people should not build houses
anymore,
it seems people should stop working
and sit in small rooms
on second floors
under electric lights without shades;
it seems there is a lot to forget
and a lot not to do
and in drugstores, markets, bars,
the people are tired, they do not want
to move, and I stand there at night
and look through this house and the
house does not want to be built;
through its sides I can see the purple hills
and the first lights of evening,
and it is cold
and I button my coat
and I stand there looking through the house
and the cats stop and look at me
until I am embarrassed
and move North up the sidewalk
where I will buy
cigarettes and beer
and return to my room.

******

room.
side of the sun

the bulls are grand as the side of the sun
and although they kill them for the stale crowds,
it is the bull that burns the fire,
and although there are cowardly bulls as
there are cowardly matadors and cowardly men,
generally the bull stands pure
and dies pure
untouched by symbols or cliques or false loves,
and when they drag him out
nothing has died
something has passed
and the eventual stench
is the world.

******

the workers

they laugh continually
even when
a board falls down
and destroys a face
or distorts a
body
they continue to
laugh,
when the color of the eye
becomes a fearful pale
because of the poor
light
they still laugh;
wrinkled and imbecile
at an early age
they joke about it:
a man who looks sixty
will say
I’m 32, and
then they’ll laugh
they’ll all laugh;
they are sometimes let
outside for a little air
but are chained to return
by chains they would not
break
if they could;
even outside, among
free men
they continue to laugh,
they walk about
with a hobbled and inane
gait
as if they’d lost their
senses; outside
they chew a little bread,
haggle, sleep, count their pennies,
gaze at the clock
and return;
sometimes in the confines
they even grow serious
a moment, they speak of
Outside, of how horrible
it must be
to be
shut Outside
forever, never to be let
back in;
it’s warm as they work
and they sweat a
bit,
but they work hard and
well, they work so hard
the nerves revolt
and cause trembling,
but often they are
praised by those
who have risen up
out of them
like stars,
and now the stars
watch
watch too
for those few
who might attempt a
slower pace or
show disinterest
or falsify an
illness
in order to gain
rest (rest must be
earned to gain strength
for a more perfect
job).
sometimes one dies
or goes mad
and then from Outside
a new one enters
and is given
opportunity.
I have been there
many years;
at first I believed the work
monotonous, even
silly
but now I see
it all has meaning,
and the workers
without faces
I can see are not really
ugly, and that
the heads without eyes—
I know now that those eyes
can see
and are able to
do the work.
the women workers
are often the best,
adapting naturally,
and some of these I
made love to in our
resting hours; at first
they appeared to be
like female apes
but later
with insight
I realized
that they were things
as real and alive as
myself.
the other night
an old worker
grey and blind
no longer useful
was retired
to the Outside
speech! speech!
we demanded.
it was
hell, he said.
we laughed
all 4000 of us:
he had kept his
humor
to the
end.

******

machineguns towers & timeclocks

I feel gypped by dunces
as if reality were the property
of little men
with luck and a headstart,
and I sit in the cold
wondering about purple flowers
along a fence
while the rest of them
stack gold
and Cadillacs and
ladyfriends,
I wonder about palmleaves
and gravestones
and the preciousness of a
cocoon-like sleep;
to be a lizard would be
bad enough
to be scalding in the sun
would be bad enough
but not so bad
as being built up to
Man-size and Man-life
and not wanting the
game, not wanting
machineguns and towers and
timeclocks,
not wanting a carwash
a toothpull
a wristwatch, cufflinks
a pocket radio
tweezers and cotton
a cabinet full of iodine,
not wanting cocktail parties
a front lawn
sing-togethers
new shoes, Christmas presents
life insurance, Newsweek
162 baseball games
a vacation in Bermuda.
not wanting not wanting,
and I judge the purple flowers
better off than I
the lizard better off
the dark green hose
the ever grass
the trees the birds,
the cats dreaming in the butter
sun are
better off than
I, getting into this old coat now
feeling for my cigarettes
car keys
a roadmap back,
going out
down the walk
like a man to be executed
walking toward it
surely,
going into it
without guards
driving toward it
racing at it
70 miles per hour,
jockeying
cussing
dropping ashes
deadly ashes of every
deadly thing
burning,
the caterpillar knows less
horror
the armies of ants are
braver
the kiss of a snake
less ravenous,
I only want the sky
to burn me more and more
burn me out
so that the sun begins at
6 in the morning
and goes past midnight
like a drunken door always open,
I drive toward it
not wanting it
getting it getting it
as the cat stretches
yawns
and rolls over into
another dream.

******

lack of almost everything

the essence of the belly
like a white balloon sacked
is disturbing
like the running of feet
on the stairs
when you don’t know
who is there.
of course, if you turn on the radio
you might forget
the fat under your shirt
or the rats lined up in order
like old women on Hollywood Blvd
waiting on a comedy
show.
I think of old men
in four dollar rooms
looking for socks in dresser drawers
while standing in brown underwear
all the time the clock ticking on
warm as a
cobra.
ah, there are some decent things, maybe:
the sky, the circus
the legs of ladies getting out of cars,
the peach coming through the door
like a Mozart symphony.
the scale says 198. that’s what
I weigh. it is 2:10 a.m.
dedication is for chess players.
the glorious single cause is
waiting on the anvil
while
smoking, pissing, reading Genet
or the funny papers;
but maybe it’s early enough yet
to write your aunt in
Palm Springs and tell her
what’s wrong.

******

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