you know, what I am, and I want to call it
“poems”
& I want the poems to fit
in your pocket and as easily lost
to turn up on washday with the half used
books of matches and lint
to be left in the bathroom to be read
by visitors taking a shit or trying to
I want these poems to be written now
while you’re listening, later, when
we’re both doing something else
maybe we’ll remember, maybe we won’t
and no one will ever test either of us on it
and our children will be spared
embarrassing questions about their parents
I want these poems to fly south
when they have to
to cover the ground when it is time
to be used to wrap sandwiches in
for the kids to take to school
I want a concert to be given with my poems
as the audience
I want them to die on their feet or
going down on a lover
I don’t want anyone
to take my poems to bed with them
I want everyone to take my poems to work
to read instead of working
I want my poems to meet themselves
on their way from me to you & be surprised
I never want my poems to be mistaken
for something to be judged or eaten
fucked or framed anthologized or
criticized, I just want them to be
taken for what they are, simply,
almost embarrassingly: possible
(broadside c. 1970)
STUPID RABBITS
(Morgan Press 1971)
So, the novels I forgot to write were really
frightened into the road like stupid rabbits
& this is their blood & bits of fur
HITCHHIKING TO ATLANTIC CITY
to marry my first black bride I was
taken for a ride in North Carolina
by 2 teenybop divorcees & their angel
a drunken truck driver
I lied
about my future while they fed me
full of J. W. Dant and bad jokes
about my future family, or theirs,
and opened up their narrow unlit
alley lives for me to smell & touch
& share
They laughed when I cried
& blamed it on an old street wound &
pretty soon we were all skunky drunk
laughing crying parking somewhere
dark to make our own bad jokes on
come stained upholstery so colorless
it was impossible to say whose bride
black why was sharing what with someone
LETTER TO JOHN COLTRANE
I believe in you
When you died Pharoah Sanders said: John Coltrane was a man of God
I thought yes, this is all true
like the first time I saw you there was nothing to say except:
John Coltrane is a big man I mean, a big man
I remember thinking: he’s too big god, he stands out
You walked among us as though you already weren’t there
J. C. is a serious man people said, your drinking days forgotten
He’s clean was the rumor
He’s thoroughbred was the word
He’s Trane was the fact
You said Giant Steps and they were taken
You said Blue Train and it was on
You said Ascension and there we were watching
Talk about a big man
November 1967
HARD RAIN
Met Bob Dylan
in The Fat Black Pussycat
same way my father met my mom:
workin.
We was always workin.
If we woke up sick an complained
fathered say: Eat some breakfast
then get a little exercise
workin.
If one of us met a girl n started stutterin . . .
sure.
Comin out a the Pacific
met Buddy Holly
soakin wet.
I don’t wear no glasses I said
my father wouldn’t like it.
Try to see me he said . . .
sure.
Workin comes close to prayin where I come from.
My father usta say three things: Work, work,
work.
Some people are like that.
I told my mom, god rest her soul
There’s a Rangoon in Illinois you aint heard of
place to go for tattoos so peoplell know who ya are.
Met Alan Ladd there
told me to go home.
Go home boy he said
getcherself a job.
Getcherself a father I said.
Where am I I said.
Rest yer soul I said.
Work I said, work, work . . .
Sure.
IN THE DISTANCE
In the distance called My Father
I rode my innocence down, rode it
down on its hands and knees like
the people whose dance created the world
What do we know about the world
or the distance we create for our personal atmosphere
What we know is the way we fall
when we fall off the little we ride
when we ride away from the things we’re given
to make us forget the things we gave up
How far is it to where my son
will break my bones and dance on them
May 1970
THE SOUTH
ORANGE SONNETS
(Some of Us Press 1972)
from THE SOUTH ORANGE SONNETS
1
In books it was the Lackawana Valley.
The Lackawana railroad ran through it
separating those on the hill from us.
Lackawana Place was the toughest block
in the neighborhood until 1952 when
the temptations and reputation moved
to Church Street where *THE PINK DEVILS*
had roses tattooed between their thumbs
and forefingers, wore delicate gold
crucifixes on chains around their
brown Italian necks, and carried porno
playing cards from Newark, the city
where parades got lost and statues
died. Newark, where we all had lived.
2
My brother brought the moon back from
Okinawa. I mean, there they learned of
the surrender three days late and then
they danced all night. My brother played
the saxophone. Junkman Willy did a one
step that most girls didn’t want to do.
They called him that for all the old cars
he worked on til he was old enough to
drive. He was a paddy cat like me and we
lived on Cabbage Hill til we were old
enough to live anywhere. We believed
Italians and Jews ran *THE SYNDICATE*
maybe the world. In West Orange a man
hung himself higher than he could reach.
3.
The girls liked to dance with Eddie
we believed. He came back from jail
with big muscles and, it was rumored
bleached blonde hair. He had a tattoo
with the name crossed out and dimples.
One girl’s father sent Eddie to school
in Las Vegas to learn to be a shill.
The girl’s father was a big man in Las
Vegas it was rumored. Eddie was a big
man in South Orange. While he was gone
I met an Italian girl with hair on her
chest
and poured beer out my side of
Junkman’s truck when nobody was looking.
After only two weeks Eddie came home.
4.
In East Orange Carol Robinson decided I
was her boyfriend. Her father found out
before I did. Told his friends and neigh-
bors how he didn’t want no white boy hang-
ing around his little girl. One asked me
not to pass the time at his house anymore
listening to his son’s Clifford Browns or
talking to his twin daughters. Walking
home that night three teenagers sitting
on a stoop on Halstead Street yelled: Hey
white boy, whatchu doin aroun here? You
know where you are? Where you from? When
I answered South Orange this fat girl said
Shoot, that muss be Carol Robs turkey.
5
Little Robert called himself a sporting man
at fourteen. Came by Charlie’s house talking
about being a gambling fool and losing a
hundred dollars a minute and who has got
the playing cards. A friend of Charlie’s wife
laughed and said Ain’t you too old for card
games now? Charlie’s wife made most men turn
around. When I was fourteen I watched her
walk by the store where I swept the floor.
Seven years later Charlie’s cousin told me I
danced too close to Charlie’s wife. My father
figured Charlie, Kenny, Bobby and the other
friends I loved were lazy cause they didn’t
have good jobs. Kenny didn’t even have a job.
6
In 1959 I thought of myself as *NEVER
FEAR* and liked to talk about a door
that when you walked through it you were
dancing. My father thought we had to be
up to no good out til two o’clock in the
morning. We rode around in Charlie’s car
and talked. We decided one difference
between white girls and black girls was
the way you danced with them. White girls
you held around the waist with your right
arm. You put the same arm over a black
girl’s shoulder. That was in 1959. Did you
ever have a woman’s cunt wrapped around
your head asked Eddie. That was in 1956.
7
One year our people refused to buy Christmas
cards that said *SEASONS GREETINGS* A year
later we christened the new homes on the hill
JEWSTEAD. Three years later we sang Guns for
the Arabs, bicycles and sneakers for the Jews.
Then a year came when the Jewish girls turned
soft and ripe and full of round things we
longed to hold. That was the year we all wanted
to be Jewish. We wanted to kiss the thing
they hung on their doors. We wanted to dip
our fingers into whatever holy water was theirs.
But most of all we didn’t want to wait to be
the forbidden goyim they would sneak down
from their hill three years later to sample.
9
When my mother died two Irish great aunts
came over from New York. The brassy one
wore her hat tilted and always sat with
her legs wide apart. At the wake she told
me loud You look like your grandfather
the cop if you ever get like him shoot
yourself. The other one waited til after
the funeral to pull my ear down to her
level and whisper You’re a good looking
young man but if you don’t shave off them
side boards people will mistake you for
a Puerto Rican. We had so many cousins
in our neighborhood everybody called my
mother Aunt Irene. Even the Italians.
10
My uncle shot himself before I was born.
My grandfather who carried an old petri-
fied potato in his pocket for his arthi-
ritis got up and walked out of the funeral.
His sons slipped out of their pews as
piously as they knew how and went to find
him. He was buttoning up his fly as they
came through the big oak doors of the
church and caught the reflection of the
sunlight on his piss. He used to open the
door of a fast moving vehicle which the
driver would hysterically beg to a stop
squeezing everything. He’d say It’s time
to shake a little water off the potatoes.
12
The Lackawana Railroad was an electric commuter
special that cut off the head of a ten year old
Boy Scout one summer. He was listening to the
tracks to hear if the train was coming. His
cousin saw it happen and was sick for a week.
He was seven. In bed when I was a kid listening
to the sound of the Lackawana rolling by I’d
dream of the places it would take me someday.
And it did. It took me to all the places it goes
to like Orange East Orange Maplewood Movies
Brick Church Newark and Hoboken. Sometimes
we jumped off halfway home to avoid paying.
One year somebody got a plate in his head from
jumping off onto something hard like my cousins.
14
The tree between the sidewalk and the curb
attracted me. The leaves turning up in the
breeze before a summer storm revealed a side
that glowed, flashed like the palms of a
dark woman shaping castles in the air. My
father didn’t like it. He’d ask why a boy sat
on the stoop staring at trees when he could
be watching TV learning the things a boy
should know to be well liked by the men who
could help him. Golfing terms, starting line
ups, some news. Too much thinking can ruin
you, he’d say. When we were alone my mother
would ask Don’t you think there might be
something wrong with having no white friends.
15
My cousin was an artist but no one knew.
They thought he was only a work of art
like a pinball machine made of marble.
When someone deliberately broke the first
two letters of the ESSEX HOUSE sign, my
cousin did the same with a new kids head.
He grew bigger than any cousin and more
gentle. Eddie no, I said, I never did
have a lady’s cunt wrapped around my head.
I knew Eddie was an artist when he ate
the aspirin. Girls from *THE KRAZY KITTENS*
played EDDIE MY LOVE eighteen times in a
row that night. Eddie looked at me and
said Whadja do, come out of a horses ass?
16
They say prospectors saved their scalps
by acting crazy. I acted as crazy as I
could when white guys asked me what it
was like with a, didn’t want to say it
but afraid to look like they didn’t want
to say it, said it: nigger. I hit them.
Or I told them Fine as 400 wine. Like
laying under that tree before a storm
watching the leaves turn over and shine.
Like getting it steady and nice. Like
the first time twice. Like standing in
the rain laughing. Like sitting at Broad
and Market, spitting at the moon and
hitting it. The word I wanted to marry.
17
There is some music you have to listen to.
In South Orange there were rich Catholics
rich Protestants and rich Jews. My cousin
became a cop. His brother was stabbed by
an Italian called Lemon Drop. Across the
street lived two brothers called Loaf and
Half a Loaf. My brother became a cop. On
St. Patrick’s Day 1958 I came home drunk. My
mother said He’s only fifteen. My father:
It had to happen once. My grandfather was
a cop. One cousin won a beauty contest at
thirteen. My sister married a cop. By 1959
I knew I was going to be a jazz musician.
My father joined AA before I was even born.
18
At first the world’s great heroes were FDR
Churchill and Uncle Joe Stalin. The block
hero was FLYING ACE who shot down Krauts
on a seven inch screen. One brother served
with the Navy Band, one with the US Army
Air Corps. Before TV we sat through Sunday
matinees with newsreel footage of Nazi war
crimes. The boarder in our house had been
a dough boy in World War I. We called him
uncle. My third brother worked on tanks in
Germany during the Korean thing. I joined
the Air Force on February eighth 1962. I
went AWOL July fourth 1962. For a long time
no one we knew ever went away a civilian.
19
There were people who didn’t need nick-
names. Love I’d say to myself walking
those streets under the old gas lights.
The woman on Valley Street who waited
after her friend went home. The eyes of
pretty Italian girls as their boyfriends
pulled up to the curb. The voice on the
phone from West Orange saying love the
first time saying What saying Wait saying
Say it again. Or like getting on the bus
to Newark six thirty in the morning
with a beautiful black girl in a party
dress and all the people going to work.
In 1960 you could star in South Orange.