of the way the last three,
four, however many decades
it has taken to create the
styles we share that signify
no one time more than any
other and yet let me know
she is probably my age and
her the same if she reads
me like she does the world
that she survives in in ways
I once tried by choice and
then by imposition of forces
I could not control and so
avoid, proud that there but
for the will to see it through
as “free” as I can learn to
be go all the me’s I never
fail to see when I look into
the eyes, except maybe the
mean and nasty ones that
can’t abide the sight of
anyone less ready or unwilling
to survive their way, yet
maybe even they too reflect
a me I hate to see intolerant
toward the things I’ve been
or might become, though I
hope never so dismally or
inhumanly as that guy in that
car letting me know it’s not
the future anymore it’s just
another door we all pass through
“AS TIME GOES BY”
I’m getting crazy again about time,
the voices of the kids outside chanting
something I can’t quite make out like
Matty had a chocolate cake chocolate cake
to Mary had a little lamb and I can’t stand
how it all goes on someday without me
so afraid suddenly of what that might mean
that we can never know, you know what I mean?
Like the sound of Nat King Cole’s voice
soothing me earlier suddenly pisses me off
because it locates so accurately a memory
in me still living of an exact time in
my own life when romance was represented
by the teenaged affairs of my older sisters
and I worked overtime to trace the address
of a girl I had seen on the street one day
and finding it calling her up to say how
much I wanted to see her and her unable
to resist since we were both so young
it had to be the first time anyone ever
did that to her, or for her, or at her, and
now it’s gone and what do you care it
wasn’t your life and Nat King Cole singing
“somewhere along the way” means something
else to you or nothing, and that’s what
most of my writing and life have been
about, the attempt to make my memories
yours so I don’t have to be so scared
of it all meaning nothing when it has
to mean everything to make my heart
fill up like this and my head resonate
with the better than movies images of
the best and most enduring parts of
my life in the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s and
it’s like listening to Charles Ives is
so much easier because that don’t mean
shit in my life specifically except
the accident of discovering how much
I like to listen to his piano works
that don’t get in the way of my own
work by making me so conscious of my
past and the sweet fantasies of what
the future I have already passed through
would bring that it didn’t or did at
times but so different and unexpected
and sometimes unaccepted because so
much more dependent on fucking time
outside my heart and memories instead
of in my head the way it started, like
this impulse to write about how fucking
crazy time can get to me though not
all the time, just some of the time,
like some of the light and some of
the sound and some of the ways we
still get around the inevitable . . .
HOLLYWOOD MAGIC
(Little Caesar 1982)
MY IMAGE
So you think I’m cool?
I’m a fool you asshole.
Mean? Shit, I almost cream
at the thought of tenderness.
You think I’m some sort of
sissy? Not after I stick
this nail file in your eye
motherfucker. A faggot?
Ask your old lady, now that
she can’t take your straight
stick no more. A whore?
I never took nothin more
for it than a meal, you
can steal my love and my
lovin with plain niceness.
On the other hand, I got
plans, and if you’re part
of them, get a good hold
on your heart or your hard on.
I look like a nice boy to you?
A nice looking, clean living,
regular shoe? I’ve been the
star attraction at the freak
show and zoo. I got me
a j.d. badge “they” call a
tattoo. You think you can
see me, but I aint lookin
at you. I’m talkin bout
m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-my image,
and how whatever it is it
aint true, only whatever
you think I’m not gonna do.
I’m the ugliest fucker that
ever looked good and the
baddest cocksucker that ever
stood up for the saints and
the softies like I really am
only once in a while I gotta
kick out the jams and be
rock n roll history before you
were born and get high forty
ways and never reform. I’m
so smart I’m a jerk and
so hip I’m still starving,
I telegraph your secret
fantasies when I flirt
and then jerk off to anal
retentive jargon. I’m so
blase I’m frantic, so passe
I’m hot, so nervous I’m
calm, so mellow I’m not.
That wasn’t my life;
that was my image.
SOMETHING QUAINT
The Ramones sing about being “sedated”
& Marianne Faithful about “brain drain”
while my ex-wife lies “brain damaged”
in a DC hospital, lawyers and doctors
and well-intentioned meddlers poking
around in her life and what’s left of
her self, and the tragedy and unfairness
of such cheap shots of fate seem so
overwhelmingly insignificant in the
face of the larger cruelties of so many
we often call “fellow humans” I got
to once again rearrange my books and
records looking for the ones I know I
can do without til there’s only a handful
left I can run with when the time comes
again as it will if I survive this rage
and frustration with what some of us
once thought we’d surpassed, the hopeless
lack of tenderness and caring in the
world we were changing only to end up
with speeding fascists and junkie saints
quivering and jerking to the sounds of
something quaint, like screams in the
night from some earlier war, only this
isn’t war it’s mass self-parody and
regrets for the tv shows no longer
with us and the memory of something
even more ridiculous than us and our
sorry state we never think of as our
fault because we grew up watching others
do it for us like Lucy and Ethel and
Tom Hayden whose luck I can’t
help but see linked to the same dark
forces that contrived a liberation where
an exchange of prisoners was going on,
I mean how can Jane Fonda make love to
that creep who once told me we had to
think for “the people” because “the
people are either too dumb or too crazy
or both” and now he’s right about mine
if I honestly identify with the rocknroll
dancers and screamers in the night he
never was or seemed to be, and so what
if he gets to play sensual games with
a woman who seems so sexy and bright
even her dumbness and spoiled silver
spoon life are forgotten when she smiles
and shares her passion for a justice
she’ll never be the victim of, only
once are we here and it’s so fucking
delicate we don’t even know why we do
each other like we do, unless we’re
the ones who do it for money, but if
we were we wouldn’t be reading or
writing or listening to anything even
remotely resembling what once was
called “poetry,” no, we’re the ones
who were looking for kindness when
we found another boot up our ass . . .
THE WOMEN ARE STRONGER THAN THE MEN
always have been
I saw it in the old folks when I was growing up
but then
the women also loved their men
more than their dreams or strength or easy grace
for starting over again
ah but maybe that was because
back then the men were really men
I only meant to be more human
more tender and kind and understanding than
I remembered any man being for any woman
but who knew what went on when others weren’t looking
now I do my own and my kids’ cooking
and wonder why I exposed myself to so much
heartache and heartbreak and unmanly intuitions
when what everyone seems to want
is the cocky confident even arrogant man
I was on my way to being before my humanism
introduced me to the neo-communism that led me to
the super-feminism that helped me turn myself
inside out, a person above and beyond his roots
his heritage his initial influences
looking for a woman who might love me for
my variations
they went out to find themselves a real man
& I went out to find myself
from DC
[ . . . ]
It is 5:27AM on a Spring like DC morning in March
and only now at 5:28 in what is everywhere still winter
do I understand Kerouac, or The Paris Review!
Alice fucking in our bed and Seventh Day Adventist Hospitals!
I want to let the world in on it at 5:29AM on Emery Place
Northwest, reading lovers stories. DC doesn’t have to be
a museum in the pits! Spies! Ritual catalogue of dates!
Alternating friends, dressing rooms, cultures:
those eruptions of intra-human functions—grab a root
and growl, that’s the seventies satisfaction,
perceptively recognizing two kinds of jealousy:
passion transformed into the uprising of the masses,
and the complex of human relations.
I jerked off to the Korean War
Josie hasn’t been home in years
Everytime the Roosevelts touched it rained . . .
uncertain sexual stimulation. DC summertime clothes
make me feel like Christopher Columbus, all that land,
those high notes, we can dance, I can’t sleep—12:48AM
70 degrees inside, outside a woman in the dark makes noises
like Ted Berrigan in Chicago, not the musical, without speed,
not DC where Ed Sullivan plays blues harp til 2AM with
the natural aluminum of a Santa Claus whose amazing cells
love to dance. Midnight December 24th, 1972, 487th poetry
manuscript for the National Endowment for the Arts awards,
check another self-conscious crash, that’s a, this poetry Christ
my throat like I swallowed dry ice I ought to, that must have
really been, sounded like something hollow
maybe hit into the side door, lighting a cigarette dropping it,
surprised and almost pleased, thinking, imagine this happening,
like starring in your own movie, not crushed, dead, just broken,
into the pain, my throat, most of these poems and the lives
if we can believe each other and after 487 it seems obvious
we can’t just talk on the phone. That’s what the moments do!
Pretense!
Wisconsin Avenue balloon man, Hecht’s downtown store,
doin’ the GOOD FOOT. It’s the juxtaposition, the
“look I don’t know about you” but I live alone with ten others
and folks dropping in on their way from Georgetown
to Bethesda, the place where things seize down, and
no almighty righteous fonts of magic fill the cars—
the tight fit of our need to star and that Washington weather,
like trying to unclog the toilet all day where A
tried to make her manifesto disappear because they printed it
wrong, or the car I let B borrow then paid to get repaired
each time, seven times, and she still asked for money for gas,
or the typewriter C used til it no longer turned
and the “f” stuck so that life always came out lie,
and I wanted to know if when they were through using my
books and records and clothes and car and radio and
borrowing my money and I was through making their dinner
and doing their wash and cleaning up after them and their friends
would they still hate me for my male arrogance.
With zest and bizarre little energy bursts
the train that speeds them out of the night, “eeeeet eeeeees soooo
bad . . . oooo soooo baaaad “ because they’ve lost
the cosmic forces I give myself up most to,
that’s what people call “performing”—
the best ways to do some things is to do them the American way
cause they’re American things, like beauty pageants,
sit-ins, phone taps, rock’n’roll, Hollywood and Texas,
where even the mice throw tantrums. This is the question:
did I? Slowly, like bringing the war in your heart
into the streets, making money not music,
wanting to go away but also wanting to stay,
and then one day to go away.
3.
H. R. “Bob” Haldeman’s round queen’s eyes,
the Tottel House waitress who had two girls that died
before two boys that lived, talking to no one in particular:
“Guess I wasn’t supposed to have no girls.”
Can we make this place our home, when winter comes in
to Dulles Airport with one foot still in the clouds and
the other one we never say out loud, the partying crowd
from Howard. There is only one Georgetown, one Turkey Thicket;
turkeys, wild ones, were almost the national symbol, like
Mount Rainer, or dirty talk, or Love, Unlimited the way I
m
iss my kids (Natalie Wood’s turning James Dean’s filter tip
cigarette around so he doesn’t light the wrong end again and
again and again—on a flag!—) I wanted to choose.
I want other people to choose. And so forth.
[ . . . ]
Today in the unemployment line this black man punched this
black woman in her black face til she screamed and cried and
no one helped—I was going to, honest, I told myself
when he stopped to tell the cop who finally showed “She’s
my wife, it’s alright” her sobbing “No, we’re divorced . . .”
Arguments occurred like pastimes or the consequences of
the lives we wished we lived and never the few ways we’re given
to make our living work. I was horribly disappointed
I can’t talk about it.
I thought about other things:
Is Beckett still writing?
Living without ego, how can those bliss heads get anything done?
At the block party black kids pushed me aside like cops used to
at demonstrations. At Stone Soup your skin a light for the way
your body was reading the atmosphere casually as you passed
through it. Our “people” is a funny way to talk about
whatever we have in common that isn’t taste in music or
style of dress or memories of growing up in a time when even
Gertrude Stein was old. But look, you oughta see how
a real copy of incredible energy stays in touch:
a man changes a flat tire on the beltway and the sun emerges
a colossal job all healthy and strong and big boy dumb but
good hearted despite the fact it once helped the nasty Nazis
as well, agreeing with that too in some measure, coming and
going like “the long poem.” One year Allende didn’t know
what to do either. There’s a lot of ways of describing (anything).
There’s so many tough guys in the world.
In 1972 the Supreme Court declared the death penalty
as it had been imposed in the USA violated the 8th amendment’s
cruel and unusual punishment clause. After much rumination
I’m something like that, and overwhelmed.
ANOTHER WAY TO PLAY
“Live fast,
die young,
and have a
good looking
corpse” was
the expression to live up to
when I was
starting out
before I
realized
professional
football
players
are the personification of
contemporary