and cap; b.f.3., Indian Red—Impetuous, by Top Row,
and people kept walking into me
although there was no place to go,
they were putting them in the gate
and the people were walking like ants over spilled
sugar,
the machine had cranked them up to die
and they were blind with it,
and now by the 7th race
stinking sweating broke ugly
reamed
there was no way back to the dream,
and the horses came out of the gate
and I looked for my colors—
I saw them, and the boy seemed to be riding sideways
he had the horse running in and was pulling his head back
toward the outer rail,
and I could tell by the way the horse was striding
that he was out of it;
the action had been all wrong
and I walked to the bar
while the winners turned into the stretch,
and they were making the final calls as I ordered my drink,
and I leaned there thinking
I once knew places that sweetly cried
their walls’ voices
where mirrors showed me chance,
I was once saddened when an evening became
finally a night to sleep away.
—the bartender said, I hear they are going to send in
the 7 horse in the next one.
I once sang operas and burned candles
in a place made holy by nothing but myself
and whatever there was.
—I never bet mares in the summer,
I told him.
then the crowd came on in
complaining
explaining
bragging
thinking of suicide or drunkenness or sex,
and I looked around
like a man waking up in jail
and whatever there was
became that,
and I finished my drink
and walked away.
on going out to get the mail
the droll noon
where squadrons of worms creep up like
stripteasers
to be raped by blackbirds.
I go outside
and all up and down the street
the green armies shoot color
like an everlasting 4th of July,
and I too seem to swell inside,
a kind of unknown bursting, a
feeling, perhaps, that there isn’t any
enemy
anywhere.
and I reach down into the box
and there is
nothing—not even a
letter from the gas co. saying they will
shut it off
again.
not even a short note from my x-wife
bragging about her present
happiness.
my hand searches the mailbox in a kind of
disbelief long after the mind has
given up.
there’s not even a dead fly
down in there.
I am a fool, I think, I should have known it
works like this.
I go inside as all the flowers leap to
please me.
anything? the woman
asks.
nothing, I answer, what’s for
breakfast?
i wanted to overthrow the government but all i brought down was somebody’s wife
30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses and one fox
and look here, they write,
you are a dupe for the state, the church,
you are in the ego-dream,
read your history, study the monetary system,
note that the racial war is 23,000 years old.
well, I remember 20 years ago, sitting with an old Jewish tailor,
his nose in the lamplight like a cannon sighted on the enemy; and
there was an Italian pharmacist who lived in an expensive apartment
in the best part of town; we plotted to overthrow
a tottering dynasty, the tailor sewing buttons on a vest,
the Italian poking his cigar in my eye, lighting me up,
a tottering dynasty myself, always drunk as possible,
well-read, starving, depressed, but actually
a good young piece of ass would have solved all my rancor,
but I didn’t know this; I listened to my Italian and my Jew
and I went out down dark alleys smoking borrowed cigarettes
and watching the backs of houses come down in flames,
but somewhere we missed: we were not men enough,
large or small enough,
or we only wanted to talk or we were bored, so the anarchy
fell through,
and the Jew died and the Italian grew angry because I stayed
with his
wife when he went down to the pharmacy; he did not care to have
his personal government overthrown, and she overthrew easy, and
I had some guilt: the children were asleep in the other bedroom;
but later I won $200 in a crap game and took a bus to New Orleans,
and I stood on the corner listening to the music coming from bars
and then I went inside to the bars,
and I sat there thinking about the dead Jew,
how all he did was sew on buttons and talk,
and how he gave way although he was stronger than any of us—
he gave way because his bladder would not go on,
and maybe that saved Wall Street and Manhattan
and the Church and Central Park West and Rome and the
Left Bank, but the pharmacist’s wife, she was nice,
she was tired of bombs under the pillow and hissing the Pope,
and she had a very nice figure, very good legs,
but I guess she felt as I: that the weakness was not Government
but Man, one at a time, that men were never as strong as
their ideas
and that ideas were governments turned into men;
and so it began on a couch with a spilled martini
and it ended in the bedroom: desire, revolution,
nonsense ended, and the shades rattled in the wind,
rattled like sabres, cracked like cannon,
and 30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses chased one fox
across the fields under the sun,
and I got out of bed and yawned and scratched my belly
and knew that soon very soon I would have to get
very drunk again.
the girls
I have been looking at
the same
lampshade
for
5 years
and it has gathered
a bachelor’s dust
and
the girls who enter here
are too
busy
to clean it
but I don’t mind
I have been too
busy
to notice
until now
that the light
shines
badly
through
5 years’
worth.
a note on rejection slips
it is not very good
to not get through
whether it’s the
wall
the human mind
sleep
wakefulness
sex
excretion
or most anything
you can name
or
can’t name.
when a chicken
catches its worm
the chicken gets through
and when the worm
catches you
(dead or alive)
I’d have to say,
even thro
ugh its lack
of sensibility,
that it enjoys
it.
it’s like when you
send this poem
back
I’ll figure
it just didn’t get
through.
either there were
fatter worms
or the chicken
couldn’t
see.
the next time
I break an egg
I’ll think of
you.
scramble with
fork
and then turn up
the flame
if I
have
one.
true story
they found him walking along the freeway
all red in
front
he had taken a rusty tin can
and cut off his sexual
machinery
as if to say—
see what you’ve done to
me? you might as well have the
rest.
and he put part of him
in one pocket and
part of him in
another
and that’s how they found him,
walking
along.
they gave him over to the
doctors
who tried to sew the parts
back
on
but the parts were
quite contented
they way they
were.
I think sometimes of all the good
ass
turned over to the
monsters of the
world.
maybe it was his protest against
this or
his protest
against
everything.
a one man
Freedom March
that never squeezed in
between
the concert reviews and the
baseball
scores.
God, or somebody,
bless
him.
x-pug
he hooked to the body hard
took it well
and loved to fight
had seven in a row and a small fleck
over one eye,
and then he met a kid from Camden
with arms thin as wires—
it was a good one,
the safe lions roared and threw money;
they were both up and down many times,
but he lost that one
and he lost the rematch
in which neither of them fought at all,
hanging on to each other like lovers through the boos,
and now he’s over at Mike’s
changing tires and oil and batteries,
the fleck over the eye
still young,
but you don’t ask him,
you don’t ask him anything
except maybe
you think it’s going to rain?
or
you think the sun’s gonna come out?
to which he’ll usually answer
hell no,
but you’ll have your important tank of gas
and drive off.
class
these boys have got class
they ought to make kings
out of old men
rolling cigarettes
in rooms small enough
to recognize
a single shadow;
for them
all has gone away
like a light under the
door
yet
they recognize and
bear the absence;
tricked and slugged to
zero
they wait on death
with the temperate patience of
a mother teaching her child
to eat;
for them, everything has
run away
like a rose in the mouth
of a hog;
the burning of cities
must have been
like this.
but like trucks of garbage
shaking with love
these boys
might
rise like Lorca
out of the road
with one more poem,
rise like
Lazarus to
gaze upon the
still living female,
and then
get drunk
drunk
until it all
falls apart
so sad
again.
living
I mean, I just slept
I awoke with a fly on my elbow and
I named the fly Benny
then I killed him
and then I got up and looked in the
mailbox
and there was some kind of warning from the
government
but since there wasn’t anybody standing in the bushes with
a bayonet
I tore it up
and went back to bed and looked up at the ceiling
and I thought, I really like this,
minutes
and I lay there for another ten minutes
and I thought,
it doesn’t make sense, I’ve got so many things to
do but I’m going to lie here another
half hour,
and I stretched
stretched
and I watched the sun through the small leaves of a tree
outside, and I didn’t have any wonderful thoughts,
I didn’t have any immortal thoughts,
and that was the best part
and it got a little hot
and I threw the blankets off and slept—
but a damned dream:
I was on the train again
on that same 5 hour round-trip to the track,
sitting by the window,
past the same sad ocean, China out there mouthing
peculiarities in the back of my
brain, and then somebody sat next to me
and talked about horses
mothballs of talk that ripped me apart like
death, and then I was there
again: the horses running like something shown on a
screen and the jockeys very white in the face
and it didn’t matter who finally
won and everybody knew
it, the ride back in the dream was the same as the ride
back in reality:
black tons of night around
the same mountains ashamed of being
there, the sea again, again,
the train heading like a cock through a needle’s
eye
and I had to get up and go to the urinal
and I hated to get up and go to the urinal
because somebody had thrown paper, some loser had thrown paper
into the toilet again and it wouldn’t
flush, and when I came back out
everybody had nothing to do but look at my
face
and I am so tired
that they know when they see my face
that I hate
them
and then they hate me
and want to
kill me
but don’t.
I woke up but since there wasn’t anybody
over my bed
to tell me I was doing
wrong
I slept some
more.
when I woke up this time
it was almost
evening. people were coming in from work.
I got up and sat in a chair and watched them
coming in. they didn’t look so good.
even the young girls didn
’t look so good as when they
left.
and the men came in: hatchet men, killers, thieves, con-men,
the whole bunch, and their faces were more horrible than any
halloween masks ever devised.
I found a blue spider in the corner and killed him with a
broom.
I looked at the people a while more and then I got tired and
stopped looking and fried myself a couple of eggs and sat down
and had some tea and bread with it.
I felt fine.
then I took a bath and went back to
bed.
the intellectual
she writes
continually
like a long nozzle
spraying
the air,
and she argues
continually;
there is nothing
I can say
that is really not’
something else,
so,
I stop saying;
and finally
she argues herself
out the door
saying
something like—
I’m not trying to
impress myself
upon you.
but I know
she will be
back, they always
come back.
and
at 5 p.m.
she was knocking at the door.
I let her in.
I won’t stay long, she said,
if you don’t want me.
it’s all right, I said,
I’ve got to take a
bath.
she walked into the kitchen and
began on the
dishes.