virgins before young boys in dementia, & it’s
too much hair on the neck and flowers dying in a
bowl. my wife comes out of the
can.
are you all right? she
asks. yeah, I
say.
down by the wings
they speak of angels or she
speaks of angels
from a plateglass window overlooking the
Sunset Strip
(she has these visions)
(I don’t have these visions)
but maybe angels prefer people with
money
daughters of rich farmers who are dying of
throat cancer in Brazil.
myself—I keep seeing these
wingless creatures of mean story and dismal
intent
and she says
when I defame her
dream:
you are trying to
pull me down
by the wings.
she’s going to Europe in the summer—
Greece, Italy, most probably
Paris and she’s
taking some of her angels with
her.
not all
but some.
now there’s this half-Chinese boy who used to
sleep on fire escapes
the Negro homosexual who plays chess and
recited Shelley at the Sensualist
then there’s the one who has real talent with the
brush (Nickey) but who simply can’t get
started
somehow and
there’s also Sieberling who cries because he
loves his mother (actually).
many of these
angels
will leave town and
flow around the
Arch of Triumph
to be photographed or
to chase beetles at
9 rue Git-le-Coeur, and
it’s going to be a hot and
lonesome summer
for many of us when
the devil walks in and retakes Hollywood
once more.
fire
schoolgirls in tight skirts and first heels
came
sparrows flew away and fat landlords parted from their
electric mirrors
skinny housewives with runny noses and dirty aprons
came
and the fire engine: polished wailing disorder spilling
intestines of water
came
firemen in helmets
firemen with axes
came
god, a tree 90 feet high
BURNING
A HOUSE BURNING RED
tolling
lordward
the grass melting and yelling on the top of the
ground and
those smokesweet pictures of bluegray putting the
whole sky out of
place
and all the while nobody saying anything just
watching
what the flames did
like something busted out
finally and having its
say
we all came
together.
one for the old man
standing in the plaza I can hear speeches about a new
world—
men asking for their kind of love
while mine is a kind of pinch-eyed drag of
going on, for that which seems so important to them
seems worthless to me.
so
I go back to the hotel room
and look at the pitcher of water on the dresser
and the bits of glass hung on string
left in the window by a Mexican whore
to reflect what’s left of me
and this seems
sensible
as sensible as reading the history of the
Crimean War
as sensible as wax and women and
dogs.
I watch a fly and read the newspaper
then eat sausage and bananas
and an orange.
then I pull the shade on the speechmakers.
over the back of a chair are my
belt and necktie,
necktie knotted
for my throat
which is like a flower 80 feet high and
pumping out phrases of
bedlam.
mutilated forever at the age of
46. our dear sweet father said we’d come to
this.
a drawer of fish
he kept drawing fish
on sheets of paper
and I said,
Jack, what’s wrong?
but he wouldn’t answer
and his wife said
he won’t look for a job
that’s what’s wrong,
and I gotta stay with
the kids; I don’t know
how in the hell we’re
going to make it.
he kept drawing fish
on sheets of paper
and he wasn’t even drunk.
I went down and got 2
bottles of wine
and the old lady poured
them around.
and Jack drank his,
then cursed: this g.d.
ballpoint pen always runs
out of blood
just when I’m at the point,
the crux, just when I’m
finally burning
in the imbecile wax of fire…
he threw the pen
into a papersack full of empty bottles,
empty sardine and
bean cans, put on his coat
and walked out.
where’s he going?
I asked.
I don’t give a damn
where’s he’s going,
his old lady said.
then she pulled her dress back
and showed me a lot of leg;
it looked pretty good, I
have always been a leg man
but I walked over to the closet
and put on my coat.
where you going? she asked.
I’m going to look for a job,
I told her,
there’s an ad in the Times,
they need janitors for the
new Fleischman building.
I walked down the steps
and half a block North
to the nearest bar.
Jack was sitting there.
I don’t know, he said,
I think I’m going
to kill myself.
it doesn’t matter, I said,
it’s going to happen
anyhow.
we sat there the rest of the afternoon
drinking
and about 7 p.m. we left,
he with one with fire in her hair
and I with one with a limp
a reader of Henry James
who laughed out of the side
of her mouth.
it was 63 degrees
and not much left
of the world.
L. Beethoven, half-back
he came out for the team;
Ludwig V. Beethoven, blocking
half-back. he really knocked
them down. but he drank beer
and played the piano all night.
Schiller, you’re a freak, he
said. leave the ladies alone.
the ladies will always be the
same. don’t fret, when you
need one, she’ll be there.
and Tchaikovsky, he said,
take some vitamins. I don’t
mind that you’re a homo:
just stay away
from me. that’s the trouble
with all you guys:
you’re too
pale!
I took a lateral from G. B. Shaw
and ducked around the end;
Beethoven blocked out 3 men,
and as I went past
he said, I got a couple of
babes lined up for tonight;
don’t injure
anything
you might need
later…
I shot up the field
evading tacklers
like a madman. B. was
studying harmony, but
I doubted if he could
ever
make it. he was just
a fat
beer-drinking
German.
self-destruction
my snake’s red fingers
he said
and they took him off the couch
and put him on the stretcher
and carried him down
25 steps
and his woman crossed her legs
(I could almost see her beautiful crotch)
and lit a cigarette
and said
I just
can’t kaant see what possessed him,
and I slapped her across the face
flying the cigarette to the rug
like some Mars thing
and followed the stretcher
on down.
these mad windows that taste life and cut me if I go through them
I’ve always lived on second and third floors or higher
all my life
but I got some woman pregnant
and since she wasn’t my wife
we moved over here—
we were in the back at first
2nd floor rear
as Mr. and Mrs.—
a new start—
and there was a madwoman in this
place and she kept the shades drawn
and hollered obscenities in the dark
(I thought she was pretty sharp)
but they took her away one day
and we moved in here and had the baby,
a beautiful skunk of a child with pale blue eyes
who made me swallow my heart like a cherry in a chilled drink,
but the woman decided I was insane too
and moved the child and herself to Hollywood
and I give them what money I can—
but most of the time I lay around all day
sweating in bed
wondering how much longer I can fool them
listening to my landlord outside
watering his lawn
46 years hanging on my bones
and big green tears cascade ha, ha,
down my face and are tabulated by my dirty pillow:
all those years shot through the head
assassinated forever
drunk senseless
hobbled and slugged in factories
poked with bad dreams
dripping away in mouse- and ghost-infested rooms
across an America without meaning,
boy o boy.
about 3 p.m. I get up
having failed to sleep but more than a few minutes
anyhow
and then I put on an old undershirt
crisp fresh torn shorts
and a pair of stolen army pants
and I pull up the shades
and sit a little back in a hard folding chair
near a window on the streetside
and then they come by,
young girls
fresh fluid divine intelligent
drinks of orange juice
rides in air-conditioned elevators,
in blue and green and yellow in motion
in red in waves
in squads and battalions of laughter
they laugh at me and for me,
old 46, at attention, pig green eyes
like a Van Gogh bursting and breaking
the trachea and tits of the earth and the sun,
my god, look, here I am
and no matter what I said to them
they would run away
I would be reported as an old goof
babbling in the marketplace for hard pennies—
they expect me to use the bathroom,
a shadow-picture for their singing flesh
and the pliers of my hand—
a good citizen jacksoff, votes, and looks at Bob Hope—
and even old maids
with husbands killed
making swivel chairs in industry
they walk by
in green in yellow in red
and they have bodies like high-school girls
they perch on their stilts and dare me to break
custom
but to have any of these would take weeks and months
of torture—introduction, niceties, conversation that
cleaves the soul like a rusty axe—
no, no, god damn it! no more!
a man who cannot adjust to society is called a
psychotic, and the boy in the Texas tower
who shot 49 and killed 15 was one,
although in the Marine Corps he got the o.k.
to go ahead—it’s all in the way you’re dressed
and if the beehive says the project
protects the Queen and Goodyear Rubber and so
forth,
but the way I see it from this window
his action was nothing extraordinary or
unexpected and psychiatrists are just paid liars
of a continuing social
disorder.
and soon I get up from the window
and move around
and if I turn on the radio
and luck on Shostakovich or Mahler
or sit down to type a letter to the president,
the voices begin all around me—
“HEY! KNOCK IT OFF!”
“YOU SON OF A BITCH! WE’LL CALL THE LAW!”
on each side of me are two high-rise apartments
things lit at night with blue and green lights
and they have swimming pools that everybody has
too much class to get into
but the rent is very high
and they sit looking at their walls
decorated with pictures of people with chopped-off
heads
and wait to go back to
WORK,
meanwhile, they sense that my sounds are not
their sounds—
66 people on each side of my head
in love with Green Berets and piranhas—
“GOD DAMN YOU, COOL IT!”
these I cannot see through my window
and for this I am glad
my stomach is in bad shape from drinking cheap wine,
and so for them
I become quiet
I listen to their sounds—
their baseball games, their comedies, their quiz shows,
their dry kisses, their kindling safety,
their hard bodies stuffed into the walls and murdered,
and I go to the table
take my madman’s crayons
and begin drawing them on my walls
all of them—
loving, fucking, eating, shitting,
frightened of Christ, frightened of poverty,
frightened of life
they crawl my walls like roaches
and I draw suns between them
and axes and guns and towers and babies
and dogs, cats, animals, and it becomes
difficult to distinguish the animal from the
other, and my whole body sweats, stinks,
as I tremble like a liar from the truth of things,
and then I drink some water, take off my clothing and
go to bed
where I will not sleep
first pulling down all the shades
and then waiting for 3 p.m.
my girls my lad
ies my way
with nothing going through and nothing coming in and
nothing going out, Cathedrals and Art Museums and
mountains wasted, only the salt of myself, some ants,
old newspapers, my shame, my shame
at not having
killed
(razor, carcrash, turpentine, gaspipe)
(good job, marriage, investments in the market)
what is left of
myself.
birth
I.
reading the Dialogues of Plato when the
doctor walks up and says
do you still read that highbrow
stuff? last time I read that I
was in
high school.
I read it, I tell
him.
well, it’s a girl, 9#, 3 oz. no trouble at
all.
shit. great. when can I see
them?
they’ll let you know. good
night.
II.
I sit down to Plato again. there are 4 people playing
cards. one woman has beautiful legs that she doesn’t hide
and I keep looking at her legs until she covers them with a
blue sweater.
III.
I am called upstairs. they show me the thing through glass.
it’s red as a boiled crab and tough. it will make
it. it will see it through.
hey, look at this, Plato: another broad!
I can see her now on some Sunday afternoon
shaking it in a tight skirt
making boulevards of young men warble in their
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills Page 7
