(she doesn’t care that
I’ve got to finish this thing).
it’s just a poor little neighborhood
no place for Art,
whatever that is, and
I hear sprinklers
there’s a shopping basket
a boy on roller skates.
I quit I quit
for the miracle of food and
maybe nobody ever angry
again, this place and
all the other places.
Conversation in a Cheap Room
I keep putting the empties out back but
the kids smash them against the
wall almost as fast as I can drink them, and
old Mr. Sturgeon died and
they carried him down the stair and
I was in
my underwear; the rats ran after
him leaping with beautiful tails like the
tails of young whores half-drunk on
wine; I kept watching the
signal change outside and
my shoes sitting in the closet and
pretty soon people started coming
in, talking about death and
I watched a billboard advertising beer, and
we turned out all the lights and
it was dark and
somebody lit a cigarette and
we all watched the
flame; it warmed the
room, it put a glow on the walls and
there was a flaring concert of
liquid voices saying the
room is still here, the
drawers are
still here; Mrs. McDonald will
want her rent.
that’s all they
said.
soon somebody went out for another bottle and
we were thinking of
something else.
I don’t remember what, but
the
signal kept changing.
I Was Born to Hustle Roses Down the Avenues of the Dead
1
rivergut girlriver damn drowned
people going in and out of books and
doors and graves people dressed in pink
getting haircuts and tired and dogs and
Vivaldi
2
you missed a cat argument the grey was
tired mad flipping tail and he monkied
with the black one who didn’t want to
be bothered and then the black one
chased the grey one pawed it once the
grey one said yow
ran away stopped scratched its ear
flicked at a straw popped in air and
ran off defeated and planning as a
white one (another one) ran along the
other side of the fence chasing a
grasshopper as somebody shot Mr
Kennedy.
3
the best way to explain the meaning
of concourse is to forget all about
it or any meaning at all
is
just something that grows or does not
grow lives a while and dies a long time
life is weak, the rope around a man’s
neck is stronger than the man because
it does not suffer it also does not
listen to Brahms but Brahms can get
to be a bore and even insufferable when
you are locked in a cage with
sticks almost forever.
I remember my old
man raged because I did not sweat
when I mowed his lawn twice over
while the lucky guys played football
or jacked-off in the garage, he threw a
2 by 4 at the back of one of my legs
the left one, I have a bloodvessel that
juts out an inch there now and I
picked up the log and threw it into
his beautiful roses and limped around
and finished the lawn not sweating
and 25 years later I buried him. it
cost me a grand: he was stronger
than I was.
4
I see the river now I see
the river now grassfish
limping through milkblue
she is taking off her stockings
she is beginning to cry.
my car needs 2 new
front tires.
Winter Comes to a Lot of Places in August
Winter comes in a lot of places in August,
like the railroad yards
when we come over the bridge,
hundreds of us,
workers, like cattle,
like Hannibal victorious over the Mountain;
Winter comes in Rome, Winter comes in Paris
and Miami
and we come
over the silver bridge,
carrying our olive lunch pails
with the good fat wives’ coffee
and 2 bologna sandwiches
and oh, just a tid-bit found somewhere
to warm our gross man-bones
and prove to us that love
is not clipped out like a coupon;
…here we come,
hundreds of us,
blank-faced and rough
(we can take it, god damn it!)
over our silver bridge,
smoking our cheap cigars in the grapefruit air;
here we come,
bulls stamping in cheap cotton,
bad boys all;
ah hell, we’d rather play the ponies
or chance a sunburn at the shore,
but we’re men, god damn it, men,
can’t you see?
men,
coming over our bridge,
taking our Rome and our coffee,
bitter, brave and
numb.
Bring Down the Beams
folding away my tools with the dead parts of
my soul
I go to night school, study Art;
my teacher is a homosexual who teaches us to
make shadows with
a 2b pencil (there are five laws of light, and it
has only been
known for the last 400 years
that shadows have a core);
there are color wheels,
there are scales
and there are many deep and futile rules
that must never be broken;
all about me sit half-talents, and suddenly—
I know
that there is nothing more incomplete than a
half-talent;
a man should either be a genius
or nothing at all;
I would like to tell that homosexual
(though I never will)
that people who dabble in the Arts
are misfits in a misshapen society;
the superior man of today is the man
of limited feeling
whose education consists of
ready-made actions and reactions to
ready-made situations;
but he is more interested in men than ideas,
and if I told him that a society which takes
its haircuts from characters in comic strips
needs more than heavenly guidance,
he would say
with sweeping and powerful irrelevance
that I was a bitter man;
so we sit and piddle with charcoal
and talk about Picasso
and make collages; we are getting ready
to do nothing unusual
and I alone am angry
as I think about the sun clanging against the earth
and all the bodies moving
but ours;
I would bring down the world’s stockpile of drowned
and mutilated days!
I would bring down the beams of sick warehouses
I have counted
&nb
sp; with each year’s life!
I want trumpets and crowing,
I want a red-palmed Beethoven rising from the grave,
I want the whir and tang of a simple living orange
in a simple living tree;
I want you to draw like Mondrian, he says;
but I don’t want to draw
like Mondrian,
I want to draw like a sparrow eaten by a cat.
Reunion
the love of the bone
where the earth chewed it down, that’s
what lasts,
and I remember sitting on the grass
with the negro boy,
we were sketching housetops and
he said,
you’re leaving some out,
you’re cheating,
and I walked across the street
to the bar
and
then he came in—
you are due back in class
at 2, he told me,
then he left.
class doesn’t matter, I thought,
nothing matters that we’re told,
and if I am a fly I’ll never know
what a lion really is.
I sat there until 4:30
and when I came out,
there he was.
Mr. Hutchins liked my
sketch, he told me.
that was over 20 years
ago.
I think
I saw him the other night.
he was a cop in the city jail
and he pushed me into
a cell.
I’m told
he doesn’t paint
any
more.
Fragile!
I tried all night to sleep
but I couldn’t sleep
and I began drinking
around 5:30
and reading about Delius
and Stravinsky,
and soon I heard them getting up
all over the building,
putting on coffee,
flushing toilets,
and then the phone rang
and she said,
“Sam, you haven’t been in jail?”
“not lately,”
I told her,
and then she asked where the hell
I had been and all that,
and finally I got rid of her
and pulled up the shades
and put my clothes on,
and I went down to the coffeeshop
and they were all sitting there
with bacon and eggs.
I had a coffee and went on in.
I emptied the baskets and
ashtrays, put toilet paper
in the women’s john
and then scattered the compound
to sweep. the old man came in
and eyed me riding the broom.
“you look like hell,” he said, and
“did you
put paper in the ladies’ room?”
I spit into the compound and
nodded. “that package to
McGerney’s,” he said. “12 pints
of floor wax…”
“yeah?” I asked.
“he says 7 of them pints
were broken. did you pack them right?”
“yeah.”
“did you put FRAGILE labels
on them.”
“yeah.”
“if you run out of FRAGILE
labels, let me know.”
“O.K.”
“…and be more careful
from now on.”
he went into the office and
I swept on toward the back.
a few minutes later
I heard him laughing with
the secretaries.
I unlocked the back door, brought in
the empty trashcans, sat down and
smoked
a cigarette. I began to get sleepy
at last.
one of the secretaries came back
rotating her can,
pounding her spikes
on the cement floor.
she handed me a stack of orders
to pick and pack, and this look, this
smile
on her face saying—
I don’t have to do much work,
but you do.
then she walked away wobbling,
wobbling meat.
I put some water in the tape machine
and stood there
waiting
waiting for 5:30.
I Am with the Roots of Flowers
Here without question is the bird-torn design,
drunk here in this cellar
amongst the flabby washing machines
and last year’s rusty newspapers;
the ages like stone
whirl above my head
as spiders spin sick webs;
I can leech here for years
undetected
sleeping against the belly of a boiler
like some growthless
hot yet dead
foetus;
I lift my bottle like a coronet
and sing songs and fables
to wash away
the fantastic darkness
of my breathing;
oh, coronet, coronet:
sing me no bitterness
for I have tasted stone,
sing me no child’s pouting and hate
for I am too old for night;
I am with the roots
of flowers
entwined, entombed
sending up my passionate blossoms
as a flight of rockets
and argument;
wine churls my throat,
above me
feet walk upon my brain,
monkies fall from the sky
clutching photographs
of the planets,
but I seek only music
and the leisure
of my pain; oh, damned coronet:
you are running dry!
…I fall beneath the spiders,
the girders move like threads,
and feet come down the stairs,
feet come down the stairs, I think,
belonging to the golden men
who push the buttons
of our burning universe.
Monday Beach, Cold Day
bluewhite bird-light
nothing but the motor of sand
noticing bits of life:
I and fleas and chips of wood,
wind sounds, sounds of paper
caught with its life flapping,
deserted dogs
as content as rock,
facing rump to sea
furred against sun and sensibility,
snouting against dead crabs
and last night’s bottles…
everything dirty, really,
really dirty,
like back at the hotel,
the white jackets and 15c tips,
the old girls skipping rope
not like young neighborhood girls
but for room, bottle and trinket,
and the hotel sits behind you
like grammar school and old wars
and you simply roll upon your stomach,
skin against warm dirty sand
and a dog comes up with his ice-nose
against the bottoms of your feet
and you howl angry laughter
through hangover and forty-year old kisses,
through guilty sun and tired wave,
through cheap memories that can never be
transformed by either literature or love,
and the dog pulls back
looking upon this stick of a white man
with red coal eyes
through filtered smoke,
and he makes for the shore, the sea,
and I get up and chase after
him,
another hound, I am,
and he looks over a round shoulder,
frightened, demolished,
as our feet cut patterns of life,
dog-life, man-life,
lazy indolent life, gull-life
and running, and the sharks
out beyond the rocks
thrashing for our silly blood.
The High-Rise of the New World
it is an orange
animal
with
hand grenades
fire power
big teeth and
a horn of smoke
a colored man
with cigar
yanks at
gears and the damn thing never gets
tired
my neighbor
…an old man in blue
bathing trunks
…an old man
a fetid white obscene
thing—
the old man
lifts apart some purple flowers
and peeks through the fence at the
orange animal
and like a horror movie
I see the orange animal open its
mouth—
it belches it has teeth fastened onto a giraffe’s
neck—
and it reached over the fence and it gets the
old man in his blue
bathing trunks
neatly
it gets him
from behind the fence of purple flowers
and his whiteness is like
garbage in the air
and then
he’s dumped into a
shock of lumber
and then the orange animal
backs off
spins
turns
runs off into the Hollywood Hills
the palm trees the
boulevards as
the colored man
The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966 Page 14
