and something eventually
will. all I can say is that
today
I have just inserted a new
typewriter ribbon
into this old machine
and I am pleased with the way it
works and that makes for more than just an
ordinary day, thank
you.
residue
there’s an old movie
based on a Hemingway short story
I saw the beginning of it
again on late night /
early morning tv
but the fellow who plays
Hem
his ears aren’t right
neither are
his chin
his hair
his voice;
and there’s this lovely
wench
in the film
with perfect buns
whose role it is to
endure his precious
literary abuse
while he slowly dies in the
African jungle.
I click the movie off.
of course, I never met
Hemingway.
maybe he was like that fellow.
I hope
not.
then I look about my bedroom and
think, Jesus Jesus,
why am I so upset by this
lousy tv movie?
what did I want them to make him
look like?
act like?
he was just a journalist from
Michigan who liked to shoot
big game
and his last kill was his
biggest;
surely he would have deserved the
nice buns
and the adoring eyes
of that actress who
he never saw and
who
in real life
later
drank herself to
death.
(the actor
who plays Hem
in the film is
still around
however
but barely
functioning.)
I guess when I look at that
movie
all I can think of to say
is:
bwana, bring me a
drink.
Coronado Street: 1954
listen, I been in the navy and I never heard cussing like you and
your girlfriend, man, and it lasts all night, every night.
we got religious people here, children, decent working folk, you’re
keeping them awake every night and look at this place! everything’s
broken, when I evict you you’ve got to pay to replace everything, buddy!
what do you mean, you don’t have no fucking money?
what do you buy all that booze with?
credit?
don’t give me that!
listen, I want it so quiet in here tonight we’ll be able to hear the
church mice pray!
what’s that?
well, up yours too, buddy!
and you wanna know what?
I saw your old lady sucking some guy’s banana in the alley!
you don’t give a damn?
what do you give a damn about?
nothing?
what kind of shit is that, nothing!
did you get a lobotomy somewhere along the way?
I got a good mind to wipe up the floor with you!
you say I’m the one with a lobotomy?
hey, don’t go closing the door on me, pal!
I own this fucking place!
OPEN UP, BUDDY! I’M COMING IN!
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LAUGHING AT?
HEY, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LAUGHING AT?
a vision
we are in the clubhouse
3rd race, 83 degrees in June,
they have just sent in a 40-to-1 shot
in a maiden race,
the tote has clicked 3 or 4 times,
the old general feeling of futility
has arrived early
and then a girl walks by
to the window to make a bet
her skirt is slit
almost to the waist
and as she walks
this
most beautiful leg
is exposed
it sneaks out as she walks
flashes and vanishes.
every male in the clubhouse
watches that leg.
the girl is with a woman
who looks like her mother
and her mother keeps close
to the side of the skirt
that is slit,
trying to block our view.
the girl makes her bet
turns and now the leg is on
the other side
along with her mother.
the girl disappears down an
aisle to her seat
as all around us
there is a rising,
silent applause.
then the applause stops
and like forsaken children
we go back to our
Racing Forms.
cut-rate drugstore: 4:30 p.m.
this woman at the counter ahead of me
was buying four pairs of panties:
yellow, pink, blue and orange.
the lady at the register kept picking up
the panties and
counting them:
one, two, three, four.
then she counted them again:
one, two, three, four.
will there be anything else?
she asked the lady who was buying the
panties.
no, that’s it, she answered.
no cigarettes or anything?
no, that’s it.
the woman at the register
rang up the sale
collected the money
gave change
looked off into the distance
for a bit
and then she bent under the counter
and got a bag
and put the panties in this bag
one at a time—
first the blue pair, then the yellow,
then the orange, then the pink.
she looked at me next:
how are you doing today?
fair, I said.
is there anything else?
cigarettes?
all I want is what you see in front of
you.
I had hemorrhoid ointment
laxatives
and a box of paper clips.
she rang it up, took my money, made
change, bagged my things, handed them
to me.
have a nice day, she did not say.
and you too,
I said.
you can’t tell a turkey by its feathers
son, my father said, if you only had some
ambition! you have no
get up and go! no
drive!
it’s hard for me to believe that you are really
my son.
yeah, I
said.
I mean, he went on, how are you going to
make it?
your mother is worried sick and the neighbors
think you’re some kind of
imbecile.
what are you going to
do?
we can’t take care of you all your
life!
I’m 15 now, I told him, I won’t be around
much longer.
but look at you, you just sit around in your room
all day! other
boys have jobs, paper routes, Jim Stover works
as an usher at the
Bayou!
HOW IN THE HEL
L ARE YOU GOING TO
SURVIVE IN THIS
WORLD?
I don’t
know …
you make me SICK! sometimes, having a son like
you, I wish I was
dead.
well, he did die, he died more than 30 years
ago.
and last year I paid
$59,000 income
tax.
too early!
there are some people who will
phone a man at 7 a.m.
when he is desperately sick and
hungover.
I always greet
these idiots
with a few violent
words
and the slamming
down of the
receiver
knowing that their
morning eagerness
means that
they retired early
and thus wasted the
preceding
night
(and most likely
the preceding days, weeks and
years).
that they could
imagine
that
I’d want to
converse with
them
at 7 a.m.
is an insult
to
whatever
intelligent life
is left
in our dwindling
universe.
the green Cadillac
he hung the green Cadillac
standing on its nose
against the phone pole
next to the
All-American Hamburger
Hut.
I was
in the laundromat
with my girlfriend when
we heard the sound of it.
when we got there
the driver had
dropped out of the car
and run off.
and there was the
green Caddy
standing straight
up and down
against
the phone pole.
it was one of the most
magnificent sights
I had seen
in years:
in the 9 p.m. moonlight
it just stood there—
the people gathered
the people stood back
knowing the Caddy
could come crashing down
at any moment
but it didn’t
it just stood there
straight as an arrow
alongside
the phone pole.
how the hell
they were going to get
that down
without wrecking it
was beyond me.
my girlfriend wanted to
wait and see how
they did it
but we hadn’t
had dinner
yet
and I
talked her into
going back into the
laundromat and then
back to my place.
I was not
mechanically inclined
and it pissed
me off
to watch people
who were.
anyhow
about noon
the next day
when I went out to
buy a newspaper
the green Caddy
was gone.
there was just
an old bum
at the counter
in the All-American
having a coffee
but I had already seen
the real miracle
and I
walked back to
my place
satisfied.
I’m not all-knowing but …
one of the problems is
that when most people
sit down to write a poem
they think,
“now I am going to write a
poem”
and then
they go on to write a poem
that
sounds like a poem
or what they think
a poem should sound like.
this is one of their
problems.
of course, there are other
problems:
those writers of poems
that sound like poems
think that they then must
go around
reading them
to other people.
this, they say, is done
for status and recognition
(they are careful
not to mention
vanity
or the need for
instantaneous
approbation
from some
sparse, addled
crowd).
the best poems
it seems to me
are written out of
an ultimate
need.
and once the poem is
written,
the only need
after that
is to write
another.
and the silence
of the printed page
is the
best response
to a finished
work.
in decades past
I once warned
some poet-friends
about the masturbatory
nature of poetry readings
done just
for the applause of
a handful of
idiots.
“isolate yourself and
do your work and if you
must mix, then do it
with those who
have no interest at all
in what you consider
so
important.”
such anger,
such a self-righteous
response
did I receive then
from my poet-friends
that it seemed to me
that I had exactly
proved my
point.
after that,
we all drifted
apart.
and that solved just
one of my
problems
and I suppose
just one of
theirs.
in the clubhouse
he is behind me,
talking to somebody:
“well, I like the 5 horse, he closed well last
time, I like a horse who can close.
but you know, you gotta kinda consider
the 4 and the 12.
the 4 needed his last race and look at
him, he’s reading 40-to-1 now.
the 12’s got a chance too.
and look at the 9, he looks really good,
really got a shine to his skin.
then too, you also gotta consider the 7 …”
every now and then I consider murdering
somebody, it just flashes in my mind for a
moment, then I dismiss it and rightfully
so.
I considered murdering the man who
belonged to the voice I heard,
then I worked on dismissing the thought.
and to make sure, I changed my seat,
I moved far down to my left,
I found a seat between a woman wearing a
sun shade and a young man violently
chewing on a mouthful of
gum.
then I felt
better.
a famished orphan sits somewhere in the mind
a heavyweight fighter cal
led Young Stribling
was killed in the ring
so long ago
that I am certain
that I am the only one remembering him
tonight.
I am thinking of nobody else.
I sit here in this room and stare at the
lamp
and I think,
Stribling, Stribling.
outside
the starved palms continue to
decay
while in here
I remember and
watch a cigarette lighter,
an empty glass and a
wristwatch propped delicately on its
side.
Stribling.
son-of-a-bitch,
what causes me to think
about things like this?
I really don’t need to know,
yet I wonder.
form letter
dear sir:
thank you for your manuscript
but this is to inform you
that I have no special influence
with any editor or publisher
and if I did
I would never dream of telling
them who or what
to publish.
I myself have never mailed any
of my work to anybody but
an editor or a publisher.
despite the fact that
my own work
was rejected for
decades,
I still never considered
mailing my work to
another writer
hoping that this other
writer might help me
get published.
and although I have
read some of what you
have mailed me
I return the work without
comment
except to ask
how did you get my
address?
and the effrontery
to mail me such
obvious
crap?
if you think me unkind,
fine.
and thank you for telling
me that I am a
great writer.