fuck, don’t
you?
amen, I
said.
Soirée
ants crawl upon paper flowers with all the insect color
of my hatred and
I crash out the lamp and rise to scream,
but, lo, I am greater than garlic and faster
than the foreigner Errico!
in the cupboard sits my bottle
like a dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers.
I drink and cough like some idiot at a symphony,
sunlight and maddened birds are everywhere,
the phone rings gamboling its sound
against the odds of the crooked sea;
I drink deeply and evenly now,
I drink to paradise
and death
and the lie of love.
at the window I watch the soldiers parachute down
as my radio plays the Symphonie Fantastique by
Berlioz;
the lightning stills the ants, stiffens them with
the fear of man, and there is a knock upon my door.
I walk with my luger and turn the knob. everything
is nonsense, nothing matters. the flies are upon
the sugar, wildly in the small richness: they have
my blithe and tinkered soul…
THE MARCH TO THE GALLOWS!
I laugh gaily as the chandeliers swing
and the last of the lovers
clutch at the straws of their lives,
and I fire through the doorway
as the music sinks to a lisp at the dismay
and derangement
of Birth.
Notations from a Muddled Indolence
a woman walks by and I look at her and know that her
existence is
depleted of thought and worms
that she does not realize that successful men can be such
beasts
that she does not know that I have fallen into the sloth of
formula
I watch her as I sit in a dirty kitchen on a dirty
afternoon
she walks dreaming of oranges and
Cadillacs
mentally I throw her up into a palm
tree
physically I rape her
spiritually I spit in her
eye
I realize that really she is no more say than
some words written by a small boy in a public
crapper
these innumerable and astounding
realizations
this dirty
life
her skin is white and sagging
she has on a purple
underslip
this is what causes
wars
great paintings
suicides
harps
geognosy and
hermits.
Nothing Subtle
there is nothing subtle about dying or
dumping garbage, or the spider
and this fist full of nickels and
the barking of dogs tonight
when the beast puffs on beer
and moonlight,
and asks my name
and I hold to the wall
not man enough to cry
as the city dumps its sorrow
in wine bottles and stale kisses,
and the handcuffs and crutches and slabs
fornicate like mad.
I Don’t Need a Bedsheet with Slits for Eyes to Kill You in
if it’s raining and you’re sitting behind a shade with
a cup of curari or a dead
antelope
with bluer eyes than any of the beautiful blue eyes
of any of the girls in this ugly
town
I’ll paint your fence green or
unplug your drain for almost
nothing;
if the fog comes in like soft cleanser
and you can see old men looking out at it
from behind curtains
these warm old men smoking pipes
I will tell you stories to make your dreams
easier;
but if you mutilate me
hang me alongside the scarecrow like a
cheap Christ
and let some schoolboy hang a sign about my
throat
I’m going to walk your streets of night
with a knife
in the rain in the snow
on gay holidays I’ll be there
behind you
and when I decide finally that we will
meet
you will not understand
because you did not want
to
and the flowers and the dogs and the
cities and the children will not
miss you.
86’d
the most binding labor
is
trying to make it
under a sanctified
banner.
similarity of intention
with others
marks the fool from the
explorer
you can learn this at
any
poolhall, racetrack, bar
university or
jail.
people run from rain but
sit
in bathtubs full of
water.
it is fairly dismal to know that
millions of people are worried about
the hydrogen bomb
yet
they are already
dead.
yet they keep trying to make
women
money
sense.
and finally the Great Bartender will lean forward
white and pure and strong and mystic
to tell you that you’ve had
enough
just when you feel like
you’re getting
started.
The Ants
I was down by the mill at last,
and I saw a rabbit go by
and a rotten log
and a rotten heart,
and I sat and smoked on a stump
and I watched the ants;
the ants are everywhere
picking up the dead,
their dead and the other dead,
cleaning up the earth,
and the sky was the same old
pale blue
like a weak water color,
and a couple of clouds,
fat and senseless;
and I took out the bottle
and the notebook
and I was a man a thousand years old,
and a thousand years back
or a thousand years ahead,
and I looked down into the oil of water
and the sun came back
painting blurs in my head,
showing me who was master
and how weak I was
and I put my hand flat on the dirt
palm up
and the ants came up
and touched
and passed around
so I guessed that I was not dead,
but no, there was one,
he came up and climbed
and I could feel the thin hair-legs
as he climbed
both of us brilliant in the sunlight,
and then down he went into the dirt,
and he ran ahead, but the next one ran
up my sleeve and then out,
and then stood there in my palm, blind,
looking up at me, and while he stood there
another came up and touched his feelers
and they talked about me,
and then came a third and a fourth
and I felt their excitement:
this palm in the dust could be theirs,
and I rose with a curse
and pinched and blew them off
like the idiots they were:
their time would come to share with the worm,
but this time this time was mine!
but no matter that I walked off into the pines
and frightened a squirrel,
they had said,
they’d had their say,
and I was done.
Suicide
he told me he had all the gas on
without flame
but when I got there
at 11:30 p.m. the gas was flaming and
he was drunk on the couch
with his ragged goatee:
“it got too much,” he told me,
“I got to thinking
and it got too much.”
which is good enough, we who think
or work with words, we who carve
can come up against this, especially
if we believe our early successes
and believe the game is won.
I think of Ernie tagging himself
when the time was ready
and I think of Frost
going on,
licking the boots of politicians,
telling the pretty lies
of an addled mind,
and I think,
well, Ernie’s won
another round.
I pour the kid a drink, then
pour myself one. kid?
hell, he’s 30. a lady’s man
and a master of the English
language with a
peanut-shell soul.
and I? and I? nothing more.
we drink and he reels off
petty larcenies. later I leave,
both of us alive.
the next Sunday, I’m told,
my friend was in Frisco
in a green bow tie
reading his poems to a
society of misplaced ladies.
I’m told he
gassed them to
death.
3:30 A.M. Conversation
at 3:30 a.m. in the morning
a door opens
and feet come down the hall
moving a body,
and there is a knock
and you put down your beer
and answer.
god damn it, she says,
don’t you ever sleep?
and she walks in
her hair in curlers
and herself in a silk robe
covered with rabbits and birds
and she has brought her own bottle
to which you splendidly add
2 glasses;
her husband, she says, is in Florida
and her sister sends her money and dresses,
and she has been looking for a job
for 32 days.
you tell her
you are a jockey’s agent and a
writer of jazz and love songs,
and after a couple of drinks
she doesn’t bother to cover
her legs
with the edge of the robe
that keeps falling away.
they are not bad legs at all,
in fact, very good legs,
and soon you are kissing a
head full of curlers,
and the rabbits are beginning
to wink, and Florida is a long way
away, and she says we are not strangers
really because she has seen me
in the hall.
and finally
there is very little
to say.
Cows in Art Class
good weather
is like
good women—
it doesn’t always happen
and when it does
it doesn’t
always last.
a man is
more stable:
if he’s bad
there’s more chance
he’ll stay that way,
or if he’s good
he might hang
on,
but a woman
is changed forever
by
children
age
diet
conversation
sex
the moon
the absence or
presence of the sun
or good times.
a woman must be nursed
into subsistence
by love
where a man can become
stronger
by being hated.
I am drinking tonight in Spangler’s Bar
and I remember the cows
I once painted in Art class
and they looked good
they looked better than anything
in here. I am drinking in Spangler’s Bar
wondering which to love and which
to hate, but the rules are gone:
I love and hate only
myself—
the others stand beyond me
like oranges dropped from the table
and rolling away; it’s what I’ve got to
decide:
kill myself or
love myself?
which is the treason?
where’s the information
coming from?
books…like broken glass:
I wdn’t wipe my ass with ’em
yet, it’s getting
darker, see?
(we drink here and speak to
each other and seem knowing.)
paint the cow with the biggest
tits
paint the cow with the biggest
rump.
the bartender slides me a beer
it runs down the bar
like an Olympic sprinter
and the pair of pliers that is my hand
stops it, lifts it,
golden, dull temptation,
I drink and
stand there
the weather bad for cows
but my brush is ready
to stroke up
the green grass straw eye
sadness takes me over
and I drink the beer straight down
order a shot
fast
to give me the guts and the love to
go
on.
Practice
I keep practicing death
and as the worms writhe
in agony of waiting
I might as well have another
drink, and I am thinking
I am there:
and I cross my legs
in the patio of
some Mexico City hotel
in 1997
and the birds come down
to pick out my eyes
and the birds fly away
and I no longer see
them.
is it shotguns of cancer
or sun-madness?
the rotting of the heart,
the gut, the lily.
now there’s Hem. I always thought of Hem
as a tough old guy frying a steak
in some kitchen
under a bright light. what
happened, Ernie?
Hem was practicing too.
Everytime he watched a bull die
he got ready. when he lit a cigar
at four in the afternoon, he
got ready.
the bulls, the soldiers, the cities
the towns…
my sadness, my sadness
(let me have this drink)
could be strung across guitars
everywhere
and played for 10 minutes
with all the generals bowing
whores little girls again
maids kissing my photograph
on the plaza wall haha
and old warriors
rubbing their blue stiff veins
and hopin
g for one more day
of bravery.
I practice for you, death:
your wig
that dress
your eyes
these teeth.
I too am an old man frying a steak
in a small kitchen.
when I run out of luck
I’ll run out of whiskey
and when I run out of whiskey
the land will not be green,
and my love and my sadness…
who needs these?
I practice death pretty good:
send in the bull
send in the girl whose white flesh
maddens men on the boulevards,
send in Paris,
send in a car on the freeway
with 6 people going to a picnic,
send in the winner of the 8th,
send in Palm Beach and all the people
on the sand!
and I practice for you
too,
and the man sweeping the sidewalk
and the lady in bed with me
and the poems of Shakespeare
and the elephants
and the queers and the murderers,
I practice for everybody,
but for myself mostly.
pouring another drink now
at 9:30 in the morning,
the Racing Form on the couch,
the mailman walking toward me
with a loveletter from a lady who
doesn’t want to die and a letter from the
government
telling me to give them money;
and I practice for the government too,
The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966 Page 9
