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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.

******

don’t come round but if you do…

yeah sure, I’ll be in unless I’m out
don’t knock if the lights are out
or you hear voices or then
I might be reading Proust
if someone slips Proust under my door
or one of his bones for my stew,
and I can’t loan money or
the phone
or what’s left of my car
though you can have yesterday’s newspaper
an old shirt or a bologna sandwich
or sleep on the couch
if you don’t scream at night
and you can talk about yourself
that’s only normal;
hard times are upon us all
only I am not trying to raise a family
to send through Harvard
or buy hunting land,
I am not aiming high
I am only trying to keep myself alive
just a little longer,
so if you sometimes knock
and I don’t answer
and there isn’t a woman in here
maybe I have broken my jaw
and am looking for wire
or I am chasing the butterflies in
my wallpaper,
I mean if I don’t answer
I don’t answer, and the reason is
that I am not yet ready to kill you
or love you, or even accept you,
it means I don’t want to talk
I am busy, I am mad, I am glad
or maybe I’m stringing up a rope;
so even if the lights are on
and you hear sound
like breathing or praying or singing
a radio or the roll of dice
or typing—
go away, it is not the day
the night, the hour;
it is not the ignorance of impoliteness,
I wish to hurt nothing, not even a bug
but sometimes I gather evidence of a kind
that takes some sorting,
and your blue eyes, be they blue
and your hair, if you have some
or your mind—they cannot enter
until the rope is cut or knotted
or until I have shaven into
new mirrors, until the world is
stopped or opened
forever.

******

letter from too far

she wrote me a letter from a small
room near the Seine.
she said she was going to dancing
class, she got up, she said
at 5 o’clock in the morning
and typed at poems
or painted
and when she felt like crying
she had a special bench
by the river.
her book of Songs
would be out
in the Fall.
I did not know what to tell her
but
I told her
to get any bad teeth pulled
and be careful of the French
lover.
I put her photo by the radio
near the fan
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.

******

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 barber
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 day 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.

******

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 girls

I have been looking at
the same
lampshade
for
5 years
and it has gathered
a bachelor’s dust
and
the girls who enter here
are too
busy
to clean it
but I don’t mind
I have been too
busy
to notice
until now
that the light
shines
badly
through
5 years’
worth.

******

x-pug

he hooked to the body hard
took it well
and loved to fight
had seven in a row and a small fleck
over one eye,
and then he met a kid from Camden
with arms thin as wires—
it was a good one,
the safe lions roared and threw money;
they were both up and down many times,
but he lost that one
and he lost the rematch
in which neither of them fought at all,
hanging on to each other like lovers through the boos,
and now he’s over at Mike’s
changing tires and oil and batteries,
the fleck over the eye
still young,
but you don’t ask him,
you don’t ask him anything
except maybe
you think it’s going to rain?
or
you think the sun’s gonna come out?
to which he’ll usually answer
hell no,
but you’ll have your important tank of gas
and drive off.

******

john dillinger and le chasseur maudit

it’s unfortunate, and simply not the style, but I don’t care:
girls remind me of hair in the sink, girls remind me of intestines
and bladders and excretory movements; it’s unfortunate also that
ice-cream bells, babies, engine-valves, plagiostomes, palm trees,
footsteps in the hall…all excite me with the cold calmness
of the gravestone; nowhere, perhaps, is there sanctuary except
in hearing that there were other desperate men:
Dillinger, Rimbaud, Villon, Babyface Nelson, Seneca, Van Gogh,
or desperate women: lady wrestlers, nurses, waitresses, whores
poetesses…although,
I do suppose the breaking out of ice-cubes is important
or a mouse nosing an empty beercan—
two hollow emptinesses looking into each other,
or the nightsea stuck with soiled ships
that enter the chary web of your brain with their lights,
with their salty lights
that touch you and leave you
for the more solid love of some India;
or driving great distances without reason
sleep-drugged through open windows that
tear and flap your shirt like a frightened bird,
and always the stoplights, always red,
nightfire and defeat, defeat…
scorpions, scraps, fardels:
x-jobs, x-wives, x-faces, x-lives,
Beethoven in his grave as dead as a beet;
red wheel-barrows, yes, perhaps,
or a letter from Hell signed by the devil
or two good boys beating the guts out of each other
in some cheap stadium full of screaming smoke,
but mostly, I don’t care, sitting here
with a mouthful of rotten teeth,
sitting here reading Herrick and Spenser and
Marvell and Hopkins and Bronte (Emily, today);
and listening to the Dvorak Midday Witch
or Franck’s Le Chasseur Maudit,
actually I don’t care, and it’s unfortunate:
I have been getting letters from a young poet
(very young, it seems) telling me that some day
I will most surely be recognized as
one of the world’s great poets. Poet!
a malversation: today I walked in the sun and streets
of this city: seeing nothing, learning nothing, being
nothing, and coming back to my room
I passed an old woman who smiled a horrible smile;
she was already dead, and everywhere I remembered wires:
telephone wires, electric wires, wires for electric faces
trapped like goldfish in the glass and smiling,
ing smoke,
but mostly, I don’t care, sitting here
with a mouthful of rotten teeth,
sitting here reading Herrick and Spenser and
Marvell and Hopkins and Bronte (Emily, today);
and listening to the Dvorak Midday Witch
or Franck’s Le Chasseur Maudit,
actually I don’t care, and it’s unfortunate:
I have been getting letters from a young poet
(very young, it seems) telling me that some day
I will most surely be recognized as
one of the world’s great poets. Poet!
a malversation: today I walked in the sun and streets
of this city: seeing nothing, learning nothing, being
nothing, and coming back to my room
I passed an old woman who smiled a horrible smile;
she was already dead, and everywhere I remembered wires:
telephone wires, electric wires, wires for electric faces
trapped like goldfish in the glass and smiling,
and the birds were gone, none of the birds wanted wire
or the smiling of wire
and I closed my door (at last)
but through the windows it was the same:
a horn honked, somebody laughed, a toilet flushed,
and oddly then
I thought of all the horses with numbers
that have gone by in the screaming,
gone by like Socrates, gone by like Lorca,
like Chatterton…
I’d rather imagine our death will not matter too much
except as a matter of disposal, a problem,
like dumping the garbage,
and although I have saved the young poet’s letters,
I do not believe them
but like at the
diseased palm trees
and the end of the sun,
I sometimes look.

******

a little sleep and peace of stillness

if you’re a man, Los Angeles is where you hang it up and
battle; or if you’re a woman, and you’ve got enough leg and
the rest, you sail it against a mountain backdrop so
when you grow grey you can hide in Beverly Hills
in a mansion so nobody can see how you’ve decayed.
so we moved here—and what do we come up against
except a religious maniac in the next shack who
drinks cheap wine and has visions and plays his radio
as loudly as possible, my god!
I know all the spirituals now!
I know how very much I have sinned and I realize I must die
and I’ve got to get ready…
but I could use a little sleep first
just a little sleep and peace of silence.
I open the window and there he is
out on the lawn
dancing to a hymn
a spiritual
a whatever.
he has on a pair of red bathing trunks
he’s well-tanned and drunk on wine
but his movements are hard and awkward—
he’s too fat
a walnut-like man, distorted and shapeless at
55.
and he waves his arms in the sun and
the birds fly up
frightened
and then he whirls back into his doorway.
but the view from the street here is good—
there are Japanese and old women and young girls and
beggars.
we have large palms
plenty of birds
and the parking’s not bad…
but our religious maniac does not work
he’s too clever to work
and so we both lie around
listen to his radio
drink
and I wonder which of us will get to hell first—
him with his bible or me with my Racing Form
but if I’ve got to hear him down there I know I’m going to have to
have some help, and the next dance will be mine.
right now I wish I had something to sell so I could hide in a place
with walls twelve feet high
with moats
and high-yellow mamas.
but it looks like some long days and
nights ahead,
as always.
at the least I can only hope for the weakening of a
radio tube,
and at the most for his death,
which we are both praying and
ready for.

******

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
like I have it
now.

******

the trash men

here they come
these guys
grey truck
radio playing
they are in a hurry
it’s quite exciting:
shirt open
bellies hanging out
they run out the trash bins
roll them out to the fork lift
and then the truck grinds it upward
with far too much sound…
they had to fill out application forms
to get these jobs
they are paying for homes and
drive late model cars
they get drunk on Saturday night
now in the Los Angeles sunshine
they run back and forth with their trash bins
all that trash goes somewhere
and they shout to each other
then they are all up in the truck
driving west toward the sea
none of them know
that I am alive
REX DISPOSAL CO.

******

tv

I went to this place to see a movie
on tv
Alexander the Great,
and here come the armies
ta ta ta
horses, spears, knives, swords, shields,
men falling…
then turn to a roller derby—
here’s a girl strangling another,
then back to Alexander—
a guy jumps out and assassinates Alex’s father,
Alex kills the guy, Alex is king,
back to the roller derby—
a man is down across the track and another man rams his head
with his skates—
and here come the armies
they appear to be fighting in a cave, there’s smoke and
flame, swords,
men falling—
the Thunderbirds are behind,
one girl dives under another girl’s ass,
throws her into the rail—
Alexander stands there listening to a guy who is holding
a glass of wine in his hand, and this boy is really telling
Alex wherehow, you know, and he turns his back to walk away
and Alex spears him—
the Thunderbirds are behind, they send out
Big John—
ta ta ta, here come the armies
they are splashing through water
through forests, they are going to get it
all
ta ta ta—
Big John didn’t make it,
the girls are out again now—
Alexander is dying
Alexander the Great is dying
and they pass by his pallet in the open
he is dressed in fancy black garb and looks like
Richard Burton
the boys have their helmets off as they pass
and there’s Alex’s love by the pallet, and then
Alex begins to go, some men rush up,
one asks, Alex, who do you turn the rule over to?
who will rule now?
they wait.
he says, the strongest, and he dies
we are shown the clouds, the heavens,
way up there, and—
the Thunderbirds pull it out
in the last 12 seconds, they win it
112 to 110,
the crowd is consumed with Joy,
mercury bleeds into the light,
good night, sweet prince,
hail Mary,
Jesus Christ, what a
night.

******

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