of some contemporary person in another poet’s poem.
It made them seem they had a confidence I didn’t,
elevating their friends to what had once been the domain
of long dead famous cultural heroes and their kind.
When I did it too I ended up feeling guilty for
not including so-and-so instead of him or her and
having so many references to what once were
obscure jazz creators and rock n roll heroes of a time
I thought would never be revived because I hated it.
Now I can’t go out without
running into someone I think I dated 20 years ago,
only they wouldn’t look like that anymore,
their style long since lost to the inevitable:
cheap synthetic clothing, food, and hair.
What does that mean? Now I can feel guilty
for feeling so superior to the people I once knew
who stayed behind to raise a normal family
and grow old among the people who won’t care
what kind of clothes they wear or who they know
or what they’ve done with their potential.
[ . . . ]
Potential never filled my heart to bursting like new love,
or stopped starvation in the world, or ended war,
it never got me off incredibly intensely like new lust satisfied,
or put my picture in the paper or my “dependents” food on
the table or change in their pockets or braces in their mouths.
God, my kids got braces already.
I never knew anyone with braces when I was growing up.
My sisters and brothers had terrible teeth.
I was more fortunate.
I avoided dentists like the Arabs avoid Jews.
Although I’ve known some Arabs who were living as lovers with Jews
and obviously vice versa.
Braces sound so Waspy and middle-class.
Have I become Waspy and middle-class without my realizing it?
Or just my kids?
I had them baptized Catholic, just in case.
But the only time they’ve been to communion was by mistake
and scandalized a church full of relatives and their friends
who all suspected any kids of mine wouldn’t know what communion
was all about. They didn’t, but just got on line with everybody else.
I didn’t want to make a scene by yelling to them to come back,
as I was already conspicuous as the only person still
sitting in the pew and not on line to “eat god” as I remember
hearing a “beatnik” poet put it in a poem about first communion
ending with a line about a nun smacking him
and saying something like “Don’t chew it, brat,”
since that was against church regulations back then.
At the time it seemed a pretty bold thing to write, to me,
though the language, even then, made me want to do my own
in words and rhythms I felt would be so much more real
because I was so much more real to me than them.
But since that time I’ve given up control to
all kinds of things, like typing patterns and chance
and a simple love of language’s hidden orders.
It was easier then.
I was all confidence, a kid in love with words and music
if not entirely with myself, that came later when I found
a way of getting rid of guilt. No shit.
It didn’t last, but while it did . . .
well, I was happy.
What a wonderful word, who knows what it means.
We do when we are.
Though sometimes “it” seems almost childish, or backward.
Is that just the times, or any time?
That beatnik was reading his poem in The Gaslight Cafe
on McDougal Street where I had taken one of my cousins
who thought she wanted to be hip and a friend of the family
so close I rarely realized she was only our friend.
They were maybe in their early 20s and me in my mid-teens.
But the Village was already my turf, so to speak
at a time when the street living non-neighborhood teenagers
were few, and most of us knew each other.
It was maybe ’57 or so, me still spending afternoons
after school fixing things for a price
and my evenings and weekends and sometimes overnights
on the streets of the Village feeling so hip
I was sure this beatnik poet was really a fraud,
that no true beat would be on display in such an obvious
tourist trap as The Gaslight Café, just as a few years later
when I met a newcomer to town, I thought he was too phony country
and self-consciously folk to get any hipness renown.
Show’s what I know.
He became Bobby Dylan, while my cousin became one of those
Catholics they didn’t allow back then, like
fundamentalist holy roller or worse, believing in
healing and tongues and eye contact.
I just realized if Dylan’s new album is honest
he’s somewhere close to my cousin’s position.
[ . . . ]
See what I mean about honesty?
It’s only honesty, not necessarily right or accurate or
precise or becoming or nice or bright. As Joe Brainard might write
Poetry is the best policy.
Only I wrote that a while ago, not Joe, and I had something
else to say about that day when my first professional movie role
was screened and the friends who were having some trouble
with their lives or careers or acceptance of something so
obviously below their expectations for themselves and their arts
and what they know or think I can do and should, and the friends
who were at the time more secure in their own success and
financial support were as generous as could be with me,
knowing I’d made it over a hump that gave me a chance to
keep going, no easier, even more risky, but now known,
maybe the biggest hump of being grown up about ambitions.
How should I know, I’d say to you,
that Saturday morning, I knew I knew.
DUES, BLUES, & ATTITUDES
another fall in New York City
another beautiful sunset over New Jersey
another overwhelming emotional experience
impossible to express accurately with
the stupid language of my time and people
well, limited language then
and not “my people” but the ones who live and grew up here too
only the darkness and coolness sets in
and I’m fiercely pleased
as if
as if I did something wonderful
or the world really was
is wonderful I mean
of something beautiful and moving I am so central it seems
because I’m here caring about it and wanting to share that
not show it out or off but
reinforce the fact that it still happens and we got to be
at least me
as honest about that as about all the shit and grief and non-
belief that makes this year distinct from little else I never
could use to get through either
I mean the new wave post-post-modern punknik cold chic power
of negation and denial or
abusement and retaliation
or finessing the passé as blasé style and fashion
as though it really was politics
only most of us aren’t better off
for the fi
rst time in several generations
except those who
wait a minute, it gets away again, see how,
because I let it interfere when what was pulling me into
my life and the chances left to take and make was
the contentedness of this evening’s gift
the sky, the air, the atmosphere outside my window
despite the lack of a toilet, a rank hole where it had been
thanks to the landlord’s henchmen, black apologists for—
but, I’m alive and well and the world outside that I can see
and feel is beautiful in ways that made that word once meaningful
I mean for use with precision, like the paintings those first
gifted artists couldn’t stop when wandering into the western
mountains and wildernesses, only this is New Jersey industrial
landscape and Hudson river pollution and “Tribeca” development
and rip off and abuse and despite the fucking penalties of
wrong choices and fate to my various mates and ex-mates and
kids and friends and family and self and the shit I’ve seen
and been and created, it still feels so fucking nice to be
here watching that incredible gray fall sky return to burn
the dues and blues and attitudes from my not so different—
what do we call it now where the feelings originate or wait
to be discovered—I lived here too, I wore those clothes and
took some attitudes that rocked some boats and paid some dues,
I know it aint alright or nice or bright or new but I got to
acknowledge the good things, the fucking good things that keep
me, for one, here and wanting to stay and share it . . . if not with
you than with the me I always speak to when I do . . . I mean the me
in you.
THE NIGHT JOHN LENNON DIED
One warm night, when I was a kid,
we were all playing ringalario in
the high school field at the bottom
of my street when Mrs. Murphy, known
mostly for the time her hair turned
purple when she tried to die it, stuck
her head out the door and yelled across
the street to us, “Go on home now and be
quiet, Babe Ruth just died.” And we all
did go home where everything was somber
and serious and adult and strange,
worse than when one of the family died,
because then there were outbursts of
emotion as well as jokes and stories
and good drunken parties, but
the night Babe Ruth died, everyone
felt as sad as if it was a close close
friend or a sister or a brother,
but no one was really related so
there was no call for an actual Irish
wake or funeral party. I couldn’t help
remembering that night again, the
night John Lennon died. Nobody
threw a wake or a party where we
could all get drunk and high and
have a good cry together. We all
went home and wandered around our
rooms and heads looking for answers,
unable to sleep or forget or accept
or understand what had happened.
It had to be a mistake and it was,
a fucking senseless, horrible,
deadening mistake.
It’s hard to
recognize even the most familiar
things. I don’t know where I am
half the time, the other half I’m
flashing on some song or line or look
or attitude so close to my own
personal history I thought it was
mine. But it ain’t, cause it’s gone
with John and I feel like I got to
go do something now to spread a
little joy and loving and honest
fucking answers and questions about
the world I live in and the only times
we ever have, our own. I hope I’m
not alone.
FUCK ME IN THE HEART ACCEPTANCE!!!
Fuck me in the heart
in the acceptance
in the part
I fuck you in the heart with
when I fuck you in the fantasy
of childhood acceptance
of the cosmic connection
with our deaths
that fuck us crazy in the end.
Fuck the 1950s
til theyre over and over at last
and the best of the 1970s
that refused to give in to the past
and the worst of the 1960s
that I refuse to believe was all bombast and gesture
I still live that dream
in my fucking for pleasure
fucking guilt in the ass of a brain without hindsight
or quality control
or speed monitor
or check-in-the-mirror devices.
Fuck vices
fuck vice-like grips
on the imaginations that led us here
in their failure to fuck themselves silly.
Fuck silly
and dirty
and angry
and nice.
Fuck me in my past
and my dreams
and my lights
the ones that keep blinking
in back of my brain
that ignore all the warnings
to get back on the train
that I fucked
and I fucked
to get off in the first place,
and fuck all the ladies
and men who deserve it
I’m here
at your service
if you’ll only preserve it
the fucking I saw
in all your beginnings.
Big
innings
for
fucking
that’s the sport
I grew up with,
I don’t want to die
without fucking you all
in the ass
of your past
inhibitions.
CANT BE WRONG
(Coffee House Press 1996)
GOING HOME AGAIN
Last week I flew into Albany where
it was cold and there was snow on
the ground—I was met by my
daughter and son who drove me to
Vermont where they go to college
—she was 21 that day and I was
there to give her 21 little presents
to make up for the years when I was
so busted I couldn’t give her much,
or was so stoned I couldn’t get it
together on time—the delight in
her face when she realized after
the first one, when I pretended I
forgot something and pulled out
another and then another and so on
until she got that there were 21—
even my son got hip to the fun of
our little scene, despite all he’s
going through at 19 I thought he
might be able to avoid because he
doesn’t have to live the way I
thought I did when I was his age—
but maybe I didn’t have to either,
what do I know?—so I go down to
New York for some fun, I guess,
trying to avoid the social mess I
made the last time I stayed with
my kids when one of their friends
made it clear she thought I was
more than the dear old dad of a
friend and I didn’t resist—in
fact I insisted we could find a
place to be alone, like my
daughter’s r
oom when she wasn’t
home—but that isn’t the point
of this poem, this isn’t about
my most recent dating trends,
but something even harder to
comprehend, unless you can remember
a time when there were no hippies
no homeless no dozens of mixed
couples, black and white, walking
the streets like lovers, or even
just friends—and unless you were
living on those streets too,
looking for a way to get through
the night without a fight with some
thug and you, I mean me, just
looking for someone to hug and
not knowing it—this was before
Naked Lunch or Last Exit to
Brooklyn, long before Dylan and
John Doe and all those other artists
we admire for the truth started
lying about their names—I’m talkin’
about before Martin Luther King’s
“I Had a Dream” speech, before the
Cuban crisis and The Beatles,
a time when Dixie Peach could
still be found on the heads of
most Black people, who were still
called “colored” or “Negro” but
on the streets the term was “spade”
and I had one tattooed on my arm
in defiance of the Jersey whites
who kept me in constant fights
over my preference for Black girls
once I had discovered the lack of
bullshit in romancing them, unlike
their white counterparts there was
no time or reason to play games,
nobody was taking anybody home to
anybody’s mother, or the prom or
even the corner hangout—if we dug
each other it meant secret lovers
and that was it, hell even the
Black dudes were ready to pick up
sticks and hit you upside the head
for messing with Sapphire—but
somehow I survived and made it to
the streets of Greenwich Village
where a handful of perverts and
junkies and thieves and dreamers
created a community of lost souls
with room for me in it—and for
Pauline the 15-year-old lightskinned
runaway from Long Island City with
a body that everybody noticed even
when it became clear she was pregnant
—I remember thinking how brave
she was to be out there alone like
that—you got to remember there was
only a handful of us on the streets
then—runaways got arrested, and