worse.”
“I’m sorry, mom.”
“you know, you were right, your father
is a terrible man.”
poor woman. a brutal husband and
an alcoholic son.
“excuse me, mom, I’ll be right
back …”
the smell had seeped into me,
my stomach was jumping.
I got out of the room
and walked halfway down the stairs,
sat there
holding on to the railing,
breathing the fresh
air.
the poor woman.
I kept breathing the air and
managed not to
vomit.
I got up and walked back up the
stairs and into the room.
“he had me committed to a mental
institution, did you know
that?”
“yes. I informed them
that they had the wrong person
in there.”
“you look sick, Henry, are you all
right?”
“I am sick today, mom, I’m going
to come back and see you
tomorrow.”
“all right, Henry …”
I got up, closed the door, then
ran down the stairs.
I got outside, to a rose
garden.
I let it all go into the rose
garden.
poor damned woman …
the next day I arrived with
flowers.
I went up the stairway to the
door.
there was a wreath on the
door.
I tried the door anyhow.
it was locked.
I walked down the stairway
through the rose garden
and out to the street
where my car was
parked.
there were two little girls
about 6 or 7 years old
walking home from school.
“pardon me, ladies, but would you
like some flowers?”
they just stopped and stared at
me.
“here,” I handed the bouquet to the
taller of the girls, “now, you
divide these, please give your
friend half of them.”
“thank you,” said the taller
girl, “they are very
beautiful.”
“yes, they are,” said the other
girl, “thank you very
much.”
they walked off down the street
and I got into my car,
it started, and
I drove back to my
place.
The Death of the Father
My mother had died a year earlier. A week after my father’s death I stood in his house alone. It was in Arcadia, and the nearest I had come to the house in some time was passing by on the freeway on my way to Santa Anita.
I was unknown to the neighbors. The funeral was over, and I walked to the sink, poured a glass of water, drank it, then went outside. Not knowing what else to do, I picked up the hose, turned on the water and began watering the shrubbery. Curtains drew back as I stood on the front lawn. Then they began coming out of their houses. A woman walked over from across the street.
“Are you Henry?” she asked me.
I told her that I was Henry.
“We knew your father for years.”
Then her husband walked over. “We knew your mother too,” he said.
I bent over and shut off the hose. “Won’t you come in?” I asked. They introduced themselves as Tom and Nellie Miller and we went into the house.
“You look just like your father.”
“Yes, so they tell me.”
We sat and looked at each other.
“Oh,” said the woman, “he had so many pictures. He must have liked pictures.”
“Yes, he did, didn’t he?”
“I just love that painting of the windmill in the sunset.”
“You can have it.”
“Oh, can I?”
The doorbell rang. It was the Gibsons. The Gibsons told me that they also had been neighbors of my father’s for years.
“You look just like your father,” said Mrs. Gibson.
“Henry has given us the painting of the windmill.”
“That’s nice. I love that painting of the blue horse.”
“You can have it, Mrs. Gibson.”
“Oh, you don’t mean it?”
“Yes, it’s all right.”
The doorbell rang again and another couple came in. I left the door ajar. Soon a single man stuck his head inside. “I’m Doug Hudson. My wife’s at the hairdresser’s.”
“Come in, Mr. Hudson.”
Others arrived, mostly in pairs. They began to circulate through the house.
“Are you going to sell the place?”
“I think I will.”
“It’s a lovely neighborhood.”
“I can see that.”
“Oh, I just love this frame but I don’t like the picture.”
“Take the frame.”
“But what should I do with the picture?”
“Throw it in the trash.” I looked around. “If anybody sees a picture they like, please take it.”
They did. Soon the walls were bare.
“Do you need these chairs?”
“No, not really.”
Passersby were coming in from the street, and not even bothering to introduce themselves.
“How about the sofa?” someone asked in a very loud voice. “Do you want it?”
“I don’t want the sofa,” I said.
They took the sofa, then the breakfastnook table and chairs.
“You have a toaster here somewhere, don’t you, Henry?”
They took the toaster.
“You don’t need these dishes, do you?”
“No.”
“And the silverware?”
“No.”
“How about the coffee pot and the blender?”
“Take them.”
One of the lathes opened a cupboard on the back porch. “What about all these preserved fruits? You’ll never be able to eat all these.”
“All right, everybody, take some. But try to divide them equally.”
“Oh, I want the strawberries!”
“Oh, I want the figs!”
“Oh, I want the marmalade!”
People kept leaving and returning, bringing new people with them.
“Hey, here’s a fifth of whiskey in the cupboard! Do you drink, Henry?”
“Leave the whiskey.”
The house was getting crowded. The toilet flushed. Somebody knocked a glass from the sink and broke it.
“You better save this vacuum cleaner, Henry. You can use it for your apartment.”
“All right, I’ll keep it.”
“He had some garden tools in the garage. How about the garden tools?”
“No, I better keep those.”
“I’ll give you $15 for the garden tools.”
“O.K.”
He gave me the $15 and I gave him the key to the garage. Soon you could hear him rolling the lawn mower across the street to his place.
“You shouldn’t have given him all that equipment for $15, Henry. It was worth much more than that.”
I didn’t answer.
“How about the car? It’s four years old.”
“I think I’ll keep the car.”
“I’ll give you $50 for it.”
“I think I’ll keep the car.”
Somebody rolled up the rug in the front room. After that people began to lose interest. Soon there were only three or four left, then they were all gone. They left me the garden hose, the bed, the refrigerator and stove, and a roll of toilet paper.
I walked outside and locked the garage door. Tw
o small boys came by on roller skates. They stopped as I was locking the garage doors.
“See that man?”
“Yes.”
“His father died.”
They skated on. I picked up the hose, turned the faucet on and began to water the roses.
—HOT WATER MUSIC
The Genius of the Crowd
There is enough treachery, hatred,
violence,
Absurdity in the average human
being
To supply any given army on any given
day.
AND The Best At Murder Are Those
Who Preach Against It.
AND The Best At Hate Are Those
Who Preach LOVE
AND THE BEST AT WAR
—FINALLY—ARE THOSE WHO
PREACH
PEACE
Those Who Preach GOD
NEED God
Those Who Preach PEACE
Do Not Have Peace.
THOSE WHO PREACH LOVE
DO NOT HAVE LOVE
BEWARE THE PREACHERS
Beware The Knowers.
Beware
Those Who
Are ALWAYS
READING
BOOKS
Beware Those Who Either Detest
Poverty Or Are Proud Of It
BEWARE Those Quick To Praise
For They Need PRAISE In Return
BEWARE Those Quick To Censure:
They Are Afraid Of What They Do
Not Know
Beware Those Who Seek Constant
Crowds; They Are Nothing
Alone
Beware
The Average Man
The Average Woman
BEWARE Their Love
Their Love Is Average, Seeks
Average
But There Is Genius In Their Hatred
There Is Enough Genius In Their
Hatred To Kill You, To Kill
Anybody.
Not Wanting Solitude
Not Understanding Solitude
They Will Attempt To Destroy
Anything
That Differs
From Their Own
Not Being Able
To Create Art
They Will Not
Understand Art
They Will Consider Their Failure
As Creators
Only As A Failure
Of The World
Not Being Able To Love Fully
They Will BELIEVE Your Love
Incomplete
AND THEN THEY WILL HATE
YOU
And Their Hatred Will Be Perfect
Like A Shining Diamond
Like A Knife
Like A Mountain
LIKE A TIGER
LIKE Hemlock
Their Finest
ART
a free 25 page booklet
dying for a beer dying
for and of life
on a windy afternoon in Hollywood
listening to symphony music from my little red radio
on the floor.
a friend said,
“all ya gotta do is go out on the sidewalk
and lay down
somebody will pick you up
somebody will take care of you.”
I look out the window at the sidewalk
I see something walking on the sidewalk
she wouldn’t lay down there,
only in special places for special people with special $$$$
and
special ways
while I am dying for a beer on a windy afternoon in
Hollywood,
nothing like a beautiful broad dragging it past you on the
sidewalk
moving it past your famished window
she’s dressed in the finest cloth
she doesn’t care what you say
how you look what you do
as long as you do not get in her
way, and it must be that she doesn’t shit or
have blood
she must be a cloud, friend, the way she floats past us.
I am too sick to lay down
the sidewalks frighten me
the whole damned city frightens me,
what I will become
what I have become
frightens me.
ah, the bravado is gone
the big run through center is gone
on a windy afternoon in Hollywood
my radio cracks and spits its dirty music
through a floor full of empty beerbottles.
now I hear a siren
it comes closer
the music stops
the man on the radio says,
“we will send you a free 25-page booklet:
FACE THE FACTS ABOUT COLLEGE COSTS.”
the siren fades into the cardboard mountains
and I look out the window again as the clasped fist of
boiling cloud comes down—
the wind shakes the plants outside
I wait for evening I wait for night I wait sitting in a chair
by the window—
the cook drops in the live
red-pink salty
rough-tit crab and
the game works
on
come get me.
funhouse
I drive to the beach at night
in the winter
and sit and look at the burned-down amusement pier
wonder why they just let it sit there
in the water.
I want it out of there,
blown-up,
erased;
that pier should no longer sit there
with madmen sleeping inside
the burned-out guts of the funhouse …
it’s awful, I say, blow the damn thing up,
get it out of my eyes,
that tombstone in the sea.
the madmen can find other holes
to crawl into.
I used to walk that pier when I was 8
years old.
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 … alothough,
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,
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.
rain
a symphony orchestra.
there is a thunderstorm,
they are playing a Wagner overture
and the people leave their seats under the trees
and run inside to the pavilion
the women giggling, the men pretending calm,
wet cigarettes being thrown away,
Wagner plays on, and then they are all under the
pavilion. the birds even come in from the trees
and enter the pavilion and then it is the Hungarian
Rhapsody #2 by Lizst, and it still rains, but look,
one man sits alone in the rain
listening. the audience notices him. they turn
and look. the orchestra goes about its
business. the man sits in the night in the rain,