American
aesthetics
with their
ballet-like
forms from the waist down
(pants
hugging
the ass
like dance
tights) and
from the waist up they’re
fucking cars!
their game
choreographed
traffic jams,
equipment all
chrome and
bumpers and
built for speed and destruction
my sense of spontaneity and joy
in the give
and take
of living
up front
came from Gracie Allen’s art,
so intense
and immediately
gratifying
there was
no metaphor
just “part one of something more”
another way
to play
another kind of
music . . .
from ***ON THE SCENE***
for Peter Gordon and The Love of Life Orchestra
[ . . . ]
I was looking
forward
to all this
another way
I thought we
fought for
room to be
whatever
“yet and still”
some spades would say
—as certain of a
certain failure of will
***
it aint baggage
it’s my feelings
it’s my mind
my life
my desires
it’s my need to never
be bored
it’s my
survival
myself
my my
***
remember the trees
before a storm
in the city it’s warm
not trees—but faces—
***
“kicks” distilled
till
distant
and killing me
you
still
sexy
like before when
we were the enemy
now—it’s the
“untouchables”—
another easy way
to keep us down—
***
I thought I saw
another one
just like the
other one
only
it was
the other one—
a lot of them
resented me when
they wanted what
they’d like to despise
so despicable I should
become for one of them?
***
do they matter?
this is New York City
1978
I’m 36 soon and
“doing great”
which means I’m
not in jail
or dead or dying
—not in the suburbs
or too successful
or trying too hard to be
what that’s supposed to be
—not even fat or shot to hell
or given up or lying—
***
I believe in true love
as many times as
you can take it—
and politics and
music and sensuality
and art and a poetry
that has room for me
and tough women
it or need men who
aren’t—and
New York City and 1978
and my life and the
way it keeps going—
***
they sell trees in
the city
still
and the ladies dress
up to go out
to be looked at
only
they seem to think it’s
to prove something only
they know as though
the rest of us were too
slow
***
where do they go
by themselves
so special—
to the bathroom
to the store
to the movies
to the refrigerator
to the guy who
doesn’t know what
he wants—they
want it too—not
knowing—where we
just had to know
***
“don’t know much
about”—
Soho soul
I grew up on rock’n’
roll—I can’t help it
if I lived it back then—
and the nights still
remind me of the
chances to be taken
if you want to go out
and get away and
do your searchin’
among your only
kind—only not so kind—
***
even then
even there
even still
even here
there’s so many
who have seen it
and been it or lived it
and left it or never
had it but knew what
it was and they’re
kind to you—tough or
hard edged or surviving
with a vengeance they
still know what a little
kindness can do—
***
Hey man—
stick your head in
here and
don’t come out for
a year—
that’s one way—
some say it’s the only way
they know to go—
maybe it’s inspiring—or
another way to grow—
I don’t know—
I never tried it—
***
shirtsleeve weather
for the shirtsleeve
executives—
the business world is
like high school
the art world like
college—the
world world is like
home—
if you
don’t make it yours
you got to get out
or be passive or bitchy
or keep to your space
***
room to move around in
—that’s not much
but it still wasn’t
easy to get or quick coming
[ . . . ]
DON’T FUCK WITH ANTI-TRADITION
If you aint gonna write a poem
don’t be breakin’ up the lines.
If you gonna talk like a spade
wino way behind the times
ah shit, you aint no spade wino.
TOUGH TIMES
about some things I’m so simple
like I’ve got enough to make it
through the next two days and so
I feel ridiculously mellow & content
even happy cause I paid the rent
though other bills like gas & phone
& credit companies & eye doctor
& so on I still owe back due
but somehow it doesn’t add up to
much more than numbers on paper
either in the shape of money or
bills so uninteresting & un
important compared to the snow
outside the window making Greenwich
Street & the park & sidewalks
look so olden days & hopeful or
just peaceful & connected to
the world I know, not the stupid
business of business & the slow
approach of some sort of ultimate
bill
to pay, I mean today I got
enough to eat & even treat my
son & his cute friend to ice
cream & tomorrow I can buy
enough to make a meal for us
& ahead or beyond all that
I hardly can consider, it seems
so vague & pointless to try
& outside of the amusement
& support it somehow gives
me when I write or read or listen
to its variations, the past I
finally truly feel I’m free of
at last, I mean it’s just the past . . .
& so what’s left is me here now
the way it’s always been for all
of us I guess unless we count the
moments when we’re all of it at
once & totally, which is why we
thought we might be talented or
special or immortal after all,
though that kind of cosmic ecstasy
is redress for the ways we’ve come
to treat each other to get by, I
mean the fear of others’ problems
& the jealousy of others’ success
& all the rest that makes our
age as tough & real & cold
as that snow might be if I was
out there trying to sleep on it
NEW YORK NEW YORK
1:
Is this the Paradise they sing of
in Saturday Night Fever
or Reznikoff wrote of in his
Adam-and-Eve-as-the-city-romantics poem
of the 1930s I discovered in the late ’50s
and recognized myself in
as all I experience that shocks me
with its clarity?
I love to see the edges and the blurs,
I’d like to be in Frank O’Hara’s mind
when he’s drunk and in love
and the city is out of focus
but gorgeous and his.
When he wrote those things
I was drunk too and in love and
wandering the same streets
a kid from Jersey away from home
immersed in my bohemian self-pity
and incredibly inarticulate conceptions
about life and the wages of concern
and sensitivity, it was the ’50s.
I slept in parks
walked in the rain
was afraid of anyone
as graceful and erudite
as O’Hara and Reznikoff could be
in the poetry that would celebrate
my escape when I was through rehearsing it.
2:
The wind from the Hudson River
keeps my ears busy
with the help of the leaves
of the avocado plants
and ailanthus trees
the debris of 100 years of electricity
and telephones, loose wires and
connections that tap or scrape or ping
or confuse my mice radar
wondering if this is the real thing
or only part of the tenement symphony
that surrounds me
in the city homes I’ve preferred
even where mice can be heard and disturb
my concentration.
The hallways of your voices
the sweet secretaries of your silences
the most ambitious office boy
in your intimate company
the laundries of your intellect
the delicatessens of your affairs
o city escaping the air—
Manhattan, you don’t owe me a thing.
THE SECRET
John Ashbery made me sit down. He then plucked a single
eyebrow from a number of newspapers and gave it to me. He
ordered me to bend down on my long cylindrical back and
loosen my hand and place the girls against the skin of my
effort region. He created my movements and instructed me
to coastline the kindness against my mind with both hands.
He then ordered me to close my supernatural world and
warned me that if I wanted perfect revolution I should not
lose the general structure of a dream action, or open my
gift messenger, or try to Indian up when he shifted my
real interest to a position of destiny.
He grabbed me by the right stairs and tanked me around.
I had an invincible desire to clutch language itself
through my most recent values, but John Ashbery put his
scraping over my point. He commanded me to surprise myself
only with the sense of buoy that was coming from a
marvelous clarification.
He then interfered that I should let my reception area
have at least clapped through the streets to my body
building. He gently pushed me into the edges. I awkwardly
poisoned for a moment and then came upon the castaway.
I thought that I must have stability and rejuvenated the
spokesman in which John Ashbery had arms upflung. He
dried out the garage, saying that I went “autobio” to
the chalice because my sweater had been soaked for hours
in no light.
“I’ve told you,” he said, “the secret.” I laughed and
patted him on my body.
(11/73)
IN THE EVENING
after Kenneth Koch
In the evening the only sounds weren’t
from the street.
Though the voices of the kids disturbed
the peace of
passing cars whose vapors slowly trailed
the sound of tires and asphalt to our
windows
and on in through the din of DeSeverac
on the phonograph and the occasional click
of her knitting needles as she contemplated
stardom on the silver screen in conjunction
and sometimes competition with my own
ambitions.
Goddamn the kids are noisy and too bad
my own the worst, short for their age
but not in the lungs. O well whatever
gets them through. But Jesus I’m trying
to write a poem and find a character to
make my own in future auditions and con-
versations
until my fantasy of using Duse for my
middle name instead of David so Middle
Ages destiny somehow opposed to “post-
modernism’s”
like Bogie, Mitchum, Cagney, Randy Quaid . . .
They should be in bed, my kids’ exhausted
lungs, along with her and me, our sleep so
restless these days, night after night we
fight for our lives and reputations on
the screen of our dreams’ imaginations.
By day we stalk the telephone-handed agents
and their entres to the ones who hire
future stars
like we will be. It’s not the chance to be
“up there” and all that implies, but another
way to share what makes us think we’re
“special.”
Only when you’re insecure or self-conscious
for whatever reason, you’re not so “special”
after all.
Or we’re not. Or I’m not. Though who can say
what “way” was found by those who transcended
all that,
like Sam Shepard in Days of Heaven or
Linda Mantz in same, or Jane Greer in From
Out of the Past and Robert Blake in In Cold
Blood,
you never thought of him as very talented til
that one did you, or ever since, though I
can’t get away from easy self-exposure as not
so e
asy, enthralled by Nick Nolte in North
Dallas Forty because he seems to “act” so
“effortlessly”—
try “just being yourself” sometime on some-
body else’s line
and money and see what it makes you feel like—
John Hurt in The Naked Civil Servant and
Midnight Express, top that, except by Rip
Torn’s performance
as Walt Whitman in some tv special I’ve heard
some intellectual-arty types dismiss while
wallowing in their misconceptions about Meryl
Streep’s “technique.”
Maybe they like it “worked,” which I’m afraid
is the brain’s way of transcending its know-
ledge of
the body’s not so brainy self-conscious routines.
“Technique” is simply “ritualization” of “style”
you either invent or discover among your selves
like Bacall, Monroe, Presley, Lydia Lunch . . .
Even the kids are quiet sometimes, and the cars
seem to be disappearing. It’s getting late, if
this wasn’t a city block those brats would be in
bed.
That isn’t what “I” really said, I never use the
term “brats,”
it was my self-conscious insecurity at not being
as sophisticatedly
cynical as . . . what were the names of those guys?
SOMETIMES
sometimes I feel lonely
sometimes I feel mad
sometimes I feel pistol whipped
sometimes I feel like I have to answer the phone
sometimes I feel like I’m all alone when I’m not
sometimes I feel hot
sometimes I feel enormous
sometimes I feel like I’m in each of my cells punching my way out
sometimes I feel like Ted Berrigan
sometimes I feel like Raquel Welch
sometimes I feel incredibly tough
sometimes I feel like an aristocrat without means
sometimes I feel dumb
sometimes I feel like a has been
sometimes I feel terribly wise
sometimes I feel like a star
sometimes I feel I’m as handsome as a movie star
sometimes I feel ordinary and not exceptionally smart
sometimes I feel like the bearded heart
sometimes I feel myself all over and it feels good
sometimes I feel like a young teenager, very confused
sometimes I feel I’m not good enough
sometimes I feel lucky
sometimes I feel distracted
sometimes I feel my heart pumping funny
sometimes I feel for everybody who isn’t smart or attractive
sometimes I feel like a bum
sometimes I feel like my whole life is a not very useful lie
sometimes I feel my ambitions are unreal
sometimes I feel missed
sometimes I feel so fucking horny nothing can satisfy it
sometimes I feel pretty fucked up