comfortable anywhere used to make me
feel insecure, I’m getting over that,
I used to feel obliged to apologize
for or defend people whose goals I
shared even though I might not like
them or their tactics, I’m getting
over that too, I’ve learned to love
or at least appreciate a lot of things
I used to despise or ignore, I’ve had
trouble getting it up and trouble
keeping it down, I’m tired of a lot
of things but curious about more, I’m
tired of this but that’s history now.
March 1974
Washington DC
CHARISMA
(O Press 1976)
LISTEN
for Caitlin Lally
pianos in the clouds
showering us with music
of a kind
not often appreciated
and us here under the covers
MORE THAN
for Joan Manson
it was more than “the fifties”
you were more than “fabulous”
I was more than a “punk”
we had more than “young love”
that was more than “right”
and I remember more than
they said I would
SONNET FOR MY 33rd
Bridget Bardot
Abbott & Costello
Hound Dog
The Dickey Bird Song
The Girl Can’t Help It
T.S. Eliot
Cassius Clay
JFK
Thelonious Sphere Monk
On The Waterfront
Bird
Pope John XXIII
Ezra Pound
Clifford Brown
TESTIMONY
for Robert Slater
when he was young
they called him the carpetbagger
because whenever he went south
he fucked them up
now he can fuck them up
without even moving
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I cant sing too good
but I can write good
I cant play too good either
but I can write good
I cant last at anything too long
even writing
but when I do it
it’s something
and writing something
is always adding something
and that’s supposed to be good
I can make love okay
but I cant do it forever
or too long with the same person
unless I really convince myself it’s love
and then it’s good
but not always good even then
but when I write about it it’s great
and the writing is good
I’m not too good with languages
though I’m finally learning some Spanish
and I studied German, French, and Latin
but still, even English gives me trouble
I just go on speaking and writing
my brand of American
and the writing is good
sometimes it’s very good
I was never very good at sports
even indoor sports
not enough patience for pool or shuffleboard
but I can always write
and I write good
I’ve never been able to make much money
I haven’t tried too hard but
I’ve thought about it very hard
and tried some
but I’ve always been able to write
and write good
sometimes I wish I was a wealthy man
or a famous musician
or a great painter or something like that
but I never wished I was a writer
I just knew one day I was
and that I was good
and so I wrote
and keep reading what I write
and even when it’s terrible
I know it’s good
CATCH MY BREATH
(Salt Lick Press 1978)
NEED
I used to argue with my father
None could be more sincere than mine
want to do something different
no place
Viet Nam
that was later with my wife
Max Ernst David Smith etc. then
Father Knows Best had me scared
where was the USA big rocks & cars
long white highways & afternoon dark bars
& my neighborhood
nobody knew anything
especially if anyone else asked
my father never asked so why should I
I don’t know
I just did
& that would start the arguments until
somebody died of cancer or suicide
I got a job playing piano
washing dishes or recreational therapist
James Moody wrote Last Train From Overbrook
my father opened my mail when I was 21
and hadn’t lived at home for over three years
still muttering about the rubber in my wallet
when I was 15
or the address of the sweet black girl
when I was 15
or the way the priests wanted me out of school
when I was 15
or the noise I made re entering their atmosphere
when I was 15
or the guilt I felt among the civilized
when I was 15
or the nightly rituals of Bridget Bardot fantasies
when I was 15
my father was born in the last century
and if I’m allowed I’ll live into the next
that’s enough to forgive anyone for
from RUNNING AWAY
you all anxiously
tore the bouquets from your
wrists and tight little tits
In the morning the telephone wires
resembled hot nerves in a dying
Indian’s spine as he watches a
white man cut off his nuts for
an unusual tobacco pouch. This
[ . . . ]
seeing more ways in more ways
of seeing
and getting jacked up for it
EMPTY CLOSETS
1.
When it comes time.
Take it away, demand that could make a marshmallow loud.
Everywhere, children who didn’t want to go anywhere.
“I usta just wail on that mutha fucka.
Now that mutha fucka just wails on me.”
“IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL”
carrying a silo full of animals around in his arms.
“I don’t know what I want to be.”
The fallen parallel lines of white.
You break down in a grin. Leather,
the spider behind. Either. Yet and still.
“I was a fool who thought woman had to be in love with
somebody else to be worth anything to me. In fact
blew me away.”
It was a case of love at first sight
and the case was closed. And the pale old men say,
“loosen.”
Okay, touching and then opening the wounds
for the salt you always carry. This many times
I’ve been awake all night and we continue to act
as though we were sleeping. My heritage is
the way you look tonight.
Covering that black was. I got a job. Something forced home
and beat my head on the wall, a fragile, gnawed, paganism in
the back:
Mecca.
“Of course we are all one. Rocknroll music any KARATE! hah,
rubbers, the parking lot’s legs as miles on t
he kids. Be big,
be busy, be the walls.”
Your eyes and eyes. Outside the elevator one night.
Ready this time for liberation you know what that means.
Your name has come up again and again. This is
the Bob Dylan one this is the Janis Joplin one this is
the John Coltrane one this is the Charlie:
YOU CAN’T EVEN SPELL LEROI JONES NEW NAME???
Goodly inclinations. Stop it. Knowing what you care about.
D) Your kit.
Resting night loons behind your cock.
Try to do anything to us.
There’s something beautiful Mao.
For all?
The little good in everything.
White sisters are coming home with or without Ted Joans.
The fat black sparrow with way to marry a beautiful and
black woman on orders of the commander who wanted me.
On a lonely airstrip in the great NorthWest the dig it I
can kick your ass and commies all wear grey brain change
until you a white dog bite yourself there, up there.
Listening to Marion Brown shit I don’t know. He said son
I love to touch inside my cells.
“White and short and stocky ones.”
Round shoulders a new guy came. I walked up to the big
country boy. I never saw Nutsy, Andre, or Dolores again.
It was the year they discovered Jim Carroll.
“Everything is quiet. My hand feels pretty bad.”
Getting them together
because I love. And now it’s me.
2
July 2nd and suddenly ungrateful! Old one
we demand the sun on my ass. It comes out at night.
Half shit the rest sugar.
“I jus tellsem I don know what it mean
but I sure know what it do.”
“WORLD’S LARGEST PRAIRIE DOG 8,000 POUNDS”
Ted’s case.
He waspingly gruff embraces steel snow. Common stew whore.
One is enough.
No more annexing the gris-gris. Me they generally call
THE SHELF. They call him DRY the way your balls feel
when you been put away AGAIN. She forgives the future
when we take out each others’ eyes
to fill in the blanks. Blue gorges.
“Way uptown on a hundred, hanging from my action back, you’re
supposed to watch tv.”
Once a year the sharks would come to
singular execution of snow fields,
o, in piles behind the early fifties.
On top of that we move around,
gored silver following ourselves. Getting fucked.
JUST LET ME DO IT
(Vehicle Editions 1978)
VIOLETS
That Spring there were no violets . . .
only in the shops,
where, captive, they wilted too soon
and were too dear.
The Woolworth stores sold plastic ones:
everlasting,
not too expensive. I bought some;
you seemed delighted.
They’re here, still, beside your picture.
2: TALKING
Lee, it’s more than the organ music that
defines the organs inside my body / it’s
as though you were walking around the in
side of my eyes until you found yourself
IN HARLEM IN 1961
for Bambi
I didn’t think about it
I was in harlem with you
it was 1961 and we were
alone, in love, uptown
way uptown on a hundred
and thirty something street
heading downtown where
people didn’t stare, that’s
all the way down although
even there, on weekends
if you went out they
might look a little bit
longer than they would
not midtown times square
where out of state sailors
on leave left their spit
hanging from my action back
skinny shoulders three
button high front french
sport coat from klines on
the square in newark back
in jersey where the rest
of the squares didn’t want
me back no more, or you
saying white and black
don’t mix like sheep and
horses like cement and
fertilizer like your face
and their stomachs like
the way we walked down
that dark street after mid
night with our hands in
each other’s feeling fine
and these little kids not
more than twelve years out
on the street not more
than twenty strong stopped
us and asked me what the
fuck I was doin up there
out there walkin around
with you like there was
nothing to it but to do it
and I said what I’m doing
is walking on the street
with the woman I love and
I sounded a little afraid
not enough to look like I
wouldn’t be ready to go down
if I had to but enough to
let everybody know I wasn’t
any hero including myself
and you looked mad afraid
and smiling at the same time
and some one of the others
not the leader said, shit,
let the dude and his woman
alone man and they did
THEIR IMAGINATION SAFE
you, wing like across the bright animals
I taste the metal of my death, your tongue
(remember Sonny Rollins blowing with Thelonious Monk at the Five
Spot)
one foot stiffens with muscle cramp
on your tongue
that dark inside
we love to fill
but pray each day
will open up to someone new
& beautiful & loose like dreams
my mouth opens like a floor, walk around in it
flash cards flash: Open / Relax / Lie back / Wider /Relax / Be filled
we are fine together, one safe smell
in it the metal of what dies in us each day
the rinse of knowing who we are
what honor we can give
they are afraid to know
brother, stretch across my map your face & ass & toes
insert your A’s & B’s into my Y’s and Z’s
lie back again with me before we go
& go with me to where they can’t imagine
taste death & know what they cannot know
we are each other’s children
alchemists
midwives
peasants
in each others crevices creating seed from shit & loving it
(there are those who have never been afraid of the dark)
I am wide & divided as vulnerable as a lamb to be stroked or slaughtered
& you slaughter me with the stroke of your tongue & cheek at my cheek
& cheek & the reach of dark between
where is the machine invented to
capture this art
in our hearts brothers
in our hearts
SO
I wait and wonder
what I’d do
if someone said pick your 60 best poems.
Pick all of them? Or any?
Maybe commit suicide, but everyone would say
“It’s because he’s really gay,” or maybe
“really not gay.”
*
Read Anne Waldman and Terence Winch,
Bruce Andrew
s and Adrienne Rich, wonder what might happen
to me this summer if I go away, or stay here in Washington DC
where you can see Watergate live!
*
If you want to know the truth today’s my birthday
and though I often feel older, and sometimes appear younger
I’m 31, and like everything else that too can be fun
or a bummer, a drain on the cosmic energy, depending on what?
If you know the answer you win the future;
if you don’t the future is ours to lose or—
whatever happened to the old way of construction?
Well, one line still follows another, and my voice moves
between each space, and when I think of you I sweat,
or maybe just imagine myself like a cartoon troublemaker
big beads of perspiration jumping out from my skin as I
cringe behind the fence that the bully is about to
throw a bomb over, or drop an anvil over, or just put his
meaty fist through and right on into my scared shitless grin,
the analogy resting on our mutual vulnerability—
that’s poetry isn’t it?
*
Of course I don’t talk like this.
I talk like this.
*
And now it’s time to go back to THE HISTORY OF ROCK’N’ROLL
which means it’s my night to cook dinner for “the house”—
collective—and it’s gonna be smoked sausage cooked in peppers
and mushrooms and carrots, maybe some onions, and beans
for protein, or something nutritional. I picked the sausage
because it seemed to be looking at me in the Safeway,
not exactly the way I was looking at one of the cashiers,
a young man with curly blonde hair and nice build
who seemed to have a down home kind of friendliness,
or the woman with the little girl the same size as Miles,
who is a little smaller than Caitlin, both of whom were
pulling on my pants leg for pennies for gumballs as I watched
the curve of the woman’s arm as she placed each
well thought over item on the counter behind my
vibrational buying and didn’t even notice how much I fell in love
with her arm and felt guilty for objectifying a part of her
although she might all be like her arm and then I might
fall in love with all of her, but that would cause problems,