SCREAMS FROM THE BALCONY BY CHARLES BUKOWSKI

 

Table of Contents

 

I.

the smoking car

the world's greatest loser

the garbageman

girl in a miniskirt reading the bible

moyamensing prison:

notes upon the flaxen aspect:

funhouse

another academy

a day at the oak tree meet

rain

the colored birds

another lousy 10 percenter

making it

drunk ol' bukowski drunk

the poetry reading

slim killers

the last days of the suicide kid

bang bang

men in black passing my window

the poet's muse

somebody

story and poem

and the moon and the stars and the world

get the nose

my landlady and my landlord

bad night

hogs in the sky

the white poets  

the black poets

millionaires

poetry

the painter

the inquisitor

my friend william

300 poems

lifting weights at 2 a.m.

reality

earthquake

the good life at o'hare airport

the golfers

 

II.

the mockingbird

ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha

a fine day and the world looks good

vacancy

3:16 and one half...

the rat

hot

radio

ariel

the passing of a dark gray moment

consummation of grief

those sons of bitches

the hunt

the big fire

ww 2

ants

he wrote in lonely blood

six chink fishermen

burning

a sound in the brush

the wild

4th of july

carnival

99 degrees

happy new year

the shoelace

chilled green

life

 

III.

american matador

I saw an old-fashioned whore today

poem for barbara, poem for jane

short order

the dwarf

merry Christmas

marina

one with dante

an interesting night

a threat to my immortality

climax

a man's woman

tight pink dress

more or less, for julie

this is the way it goes and goes and goes

left with the dog

praying for a best seller

that one

have you ever kissed a panther?

2 carnations

man and woman in bed at ten p.m.

the answer

a split

power failure

snake in the watermelon

style

the shower

if we take

 

 

I

 

the world is full of shipping clerks

who have read

the Harvard Classics

a free 25 page booklet

 

dying for a beer dying

for and of life

 

on a windy afternoon in Hollywood

 

listening to symphony music from my little red radio

 

on the floor.

 

a friend said,

 

"all ya gotta do is go out on the sidewalk

and lay down

somebody will pick you up

somebody will take care of you."

 

I look out the window at the sidewalk

I see something walking on the sidewalk

she wouldn't lay down there,

 

only in special places for special people with special $$$$

and

 

special ways

 

while I am dying for a beer on a windy afternoon in

Hollywood,

 

nothing like a beautiful broad dragging it past you on the

sidewalk

 

moving it past your famished window

 

she's dressed in the finest cloth

 

she doesn't care what you say

 

how you look what you do

 

as long as you do not get in her

 

way, and it must be that she doesn't shit or

 

have blood

 

she must be a cloud, friend, the way she floats past us.

 

I am too sick to lay down

 

the sidewalks frighten me

 

the whole damned city frightens me,

 

what I will become

 

what I have become

 

frightens me.

 

ah, the bravado is gone

the big run through center is gone

on a windy afternoon in Hollywood

my radio cracks and spits its dirty music

through a floor full of empty beerbottles.

now I hear a siren

 

it comes closer

 

the music stops

 

the man on the radio says,

 

"we will send you a free 25 page booklet:

 

FACE THE FACTS ABOUT COLLEGE COSTS."

 

the siren fades into the cardboard mountains

 

and I look out the window again as the clasped fist of

 

boiling cloud comes down —

 

the wind shakes the plants outside

 

I wait for evening I wait for night I wait sitting in a chair

 

by the window —

 

the cook drops in the live

 

red-pink salty

 

rough-tit crab and

 

the game works

 

on

 

come get me.

 

 

the smoking car

 

they stop out front here

 

it looks as if the car is on fire

 

the smoke blazes blue from the hood and exhaust

 

the motor sounds like cannon shots

 

the car humps wildly

 

one guy gets out,

 

Jesus, he says, he takes a long drink from a

 

canvas water bag

 

and gives the car an eerie look.

 

the other guy gets out and looks at the car,

 

Jesus, he says,

 

and he takes a drink from a pint of whiskey,

 

then passes the bottle to his

 

friend.

 

they both stand and look at the car,

 

one holding the whiskey, the other the water bag.

 

they are not dressed in conventional hippie garb

 

but in natural old clothes

 

faded, dirty and torn.

 

a butterfly goes past my window

 

and they get back in the

 

car

 

and it bucks off in low

 

like a rodeo bronc

 

they are both laughing

 

and one has the bottle

 

tilted...

 

 

the butterfly is gone

 

and outside there is a globe of smoke

 

40 feet in circumference.

 

first human beings I've seen in Los Angeles

in 15 years.

 

 

the world's greatest loser

 

 

he used to sell papers in front:

 

"Get your winners! Get rich on a dime!"

 

and about the 3rd or 4th race

 

you'd see him rolling in on his rotten board

 

with roller skates underneath.

 

he'd propel himself along on his hands;

 

he just had small stumps for legs

 

and the rims of the skate wheels were worn off.

 

you could see inside the wheels and they would wobble

 

something awful

 

shooting and flashing

 

imperialistic sparks!

 

he moved faster than anybody, rolled cigarette dangling,

you could hear him coming

 

"god o mighty, what was that?" the new ones asked.

 

he was the world's greatest loser

but he never gave up

 

wheeling toward the 2 dollar window screaming:

 

"IT'S THE 4 HORSE, YOU FOOLS! HOW THE HELL YA

 

GONNA BEAT THE

 

4?"

 

up on the board the 4 would be reading

60 to one.

 

I never heard him pick a winner.

 

they say he slept in the bushes. I guess that's where he

 

died, he's not around any

 

more.

 

there was the big fat blonde whore

who kept touching him for luck, and

laughing.

 

nobody had any luck, the whore is gone

too.

 

I guess nothing ever works for us. we're fools, of course —

 

bucking the inside plus a 15 percent take,

but how are you going to tell a dreamer

there's a 15 percent take on the

dream? he'll just laugh and say,

is that all?

 

I miss those

sparks.

 

 

the garbageman

 

we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts

the garbageman said

dropping to one knee

 

and blowing the head away from the priest's

neck

 

and as the green bus stopped at the corner

a cripple got out and a witch and a little girl

with a flower.

 

we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts

 

the garbageman said

 

and he shot the cripple and the witch

 

but did not fire at the little girl,

 

then he ran down an alley

 

and climbed up on the roof of a garage,

 

reloaded

 

as the Goodyear Blimp sailed overhead

 

he pumped 6 shots, saying,

 

here are some unsolicited manuscripts,

 

and the blimp wavered, paused,

 

then began to nose down as 2 men parachuted

 

out

 

saying Hail Marys.

 

8 squad cars entered the area

 

and began to surround the garage

 

and the garbageman said,

 

we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts

 

and he got one cop,

 

and then they really began firing.

 

the garbageman stood up in the center of the sky,

 

threw his loaded rifle at them

 

and all the shells

 

and he said,

 

we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts,

and the first bullet got him in the chest,

spun him,

 

another in the back, one in the neck, and

 

he fell on top of the garage roof,

 

the blood rolling out on the tarpaper,

 

blood like syrup blood like honey blood like blood,

 

he said.

 

Holy Mary, we do not accept. . .

 

 

girl in a miniskirt reading the bible

outside my window

 

 

Sunday. I am eating a

 

grapefruit, church is over at the Russian

 

Orthodox to the

 

west.

 

she is dark

of Eastern descent,

 

large brown eyes look up from the Bible

 

then down, a small red and black

 

Bible, and as she reads

 

her legs keep moving, moving,

 

she is doing a slow rhythmic dance

 

reading the Bible. . .

 

long gold earrings;

 

2 gold bracelets on each arm,

and it's a mini-suit, I suppose,

the cloth hugs her body,

the lightest of tans is that cloth,

she twists this way and that,

long young legs warm in the sun. . .

 

there is no escaping her being

 

there is no desire to. . .

 

my radio is playing symphonic music

 

that she cannot hear

 

but her movements coincide exactly

 

to the rhythms of the

 

symphony...

 

she is dark, she is dark

she is reading about God.

 

I am God.

 

 

moyamensing prison :

 

we shot craps in the exercise yard while the

dummies played ball with a torn-up shirt

wound into a ball

 

once or twice a day we had to break it up

under a tommy gun from the tower —

some blank-faced screw pointing it at

us, but,

 

by god, through it we somehow played

 

and through some skill and

 

luck

 

I soon had all the money in the yard.

 

and in the morning and in the days that followed —

 

the screws, the sparrows, the shivs, the dips, the

 

strongarms, the looneys, the hustlers, the freaks,

 

the discarded dream-presidents of America, the cook,

 

in fact, all my critics, they all called me

 

"Mr. Bukowski," a kind of fleeting immortality

 

I guess,

 

but real as hogs' heads or dead flowers,

and the force of it

got to me there:

 

"Mr. Bukowski," ace-crapshooter,

money-man in a world of almost no

money,

immortality.

 

I didn't recite them Shelley, no,

 

and everything came to me after lights out:

 

slim-hipped boys I didn't want

 

steaks and ice cream and cigars which I did

 

want, and

 

shaving cream, new razorblades, the latest copy of the

New Yorker.

 

what greater immortality than Heaven in Hell,

 

and I continued to enjoy it until they

 

threw me out on the streets

 

back to my typewriter,

 

innocent, lazy, frightened and mortal

 

again.

 

 

notes upon the flaxen aspect:

 

 

a John F. Kennedy flower knocks upon my door and is

shot through the neck;

 

the gladiolas gather by the dozens around the tip of

India

 

dripping into Ceylon;

 

dozens of oysters read Germaine Greer.

 

meanwhile, I itch from the slush of the Philippines

to the eye of the minnow

 

the minnow being eaten by the cumulative dreams of

Simon Bolivar. O,

 

freedom from the limitation of angular distance would be

 

delicious.

 

war is perfect,

 

the solid way drips and leaks,

 

Schopenhauer laughed for 72 years,

 

and I was told by a very small man in a New York City

 

pawnshop

 

one afternoon:

 

"Christ got more attention than I did

but I went further on less.

 

well, the distance between 5 points is the same as the

distance between 3 points is the same as the distance

between one point:

 

it is all as cordial as a bonbon:

all this that we are wrapped

in:

 

eunuchs are more exact than sleep

 

the postage stamp is mad, Indiana is ridiculous

 

the chameleon is the last walking flower.

 

 

funhouse

 

I drive to the beach at night

in the winter

 

and sit and look at the burned-down amusement pier

wonder why they just let it sit there

in the water.

 

I want it out of there,

blown-up,

vanished,

erased;

 

that pier should no longer sit there

with madmen sleeping inside

the burned-out guts of the funhouse. . .

it's awful, I say, blow the damn thing up,

get it out of my eyes,

that tombstone in the sea.

 

the madmen can find other holes

to crawl into.

 

I used to walk that pier when I was 8

years old.

 

 

another academy

how can they go on, you see them

 

sitting in old doorways

 

with dirty stained caps and thick clothes and

 

no place to go;

 

heads bent down, arms on

 

knees they wait.

 

or they stand in front of the Mission

700 of them

quiet as oxen

 

waiting to be let into the chapel

 

where they will sleep upright on the hard benches

 

leaning against each other

 

snoring and

 

dreaming;

 

men

 

without.

 

in New York City

 

where it gets colder

 

and they are hunted by their own

 

kind, these men often crawl under car radiators,

 

drink the anti-freeze,

 

get warm and grateful for some minutes, then

die.

 

but that is an older

culture and a wiser

one;

 

here they scratch and

wait,

 

while on Sunset Boulevard the

 

hippies and yippies

 

hitchhike in

 

$50

 

boots.

 

out in front of the Mission I heard one guy say to

another:

 

"John Wayne won it."

 

"Won what?" said the other guy

 

tossing the last of his rolled cigarette into the

street.

 

I thought that was

rather good.

 

 

a day at the oak tree meet

 

Filet's Rule, the 12 horse around 12 to one,

that was the first race, they had a different

janitor in the men's room, and I didn't have the

2nd race either. Bold Courage, around 19 to one,

my Kentucky Lark got a dead ride from the boy

who stood up in the saddle all the way, which is

hardly a way to ride a 2 to one shot, and I

got a roast beef sandwich for $1.10, if you're going

to go broke you might as well eat well, and in the

3rd Grandby had to pull up to avoid Factional who

came over on him, the stewards argued for 15

minutes before allowing it to stand, and there I was

52 dollars down and the mountains were dry,

life was hardly worthwhile, and in the 4th, Aberion

Bob I think was the play but I went to Misty Repose

who got locked in the one hole at 6 furlongs and had

nothing left when he swung out. A. Bob won handily and

I was 67 dollars down, the coffee was a quarter and

the coffee girl looked like an x-prostitute, which

she probably wasn't, and then in the 5th, Christie's

Star took it at thirteen to one and I was 3rd, I think

with Bold Street, I can't beat those maiden races, and

I was 77 dollars down and bought a hot dog which cost

50 cents and was gone in 2 bites, and then I had to

go 20 win on Nearbrook, which won by 6 or 7 lengths

but at 4 to 5, so I am still 65 dollars down and the

mountains are still dry, but nobody is talking to me

or bothering me, there's a chance. I put 15 win on

Moving Express and 5 win on Choctaw Charlie and C.C.

comes in at eight to one, and then I am only 37 dollars

down, and we have the 8th race. Manta at 3 to 5

was a rather obvious bet, I looked for something to beat

her and came up with Hollywood Gossip. Manta went

on by, but I had been afraid of that and had only gone

5 win, I was 42 dollars down with one race to go, and

I put 20 win on Vesperal and ten win on Cedar Cross,

and Cedar Cross ran dead and Vesperal went wire to

wire, so that was 72 down before the race, and

you take the 84 dollar pay off and you've got 12 dollars

profit. There you go: behind for 8 races, winner in

the 9th. Nothing big, but bankroll intact. This comes.

 

my friends, out of years of training. There are thorough-

bred horses and thoroughbred bettors. What you do is

stay with your plays and let them come to you. Loving

a woman is the same way, or loving life. You've

got to work a bit for it. In a day or 2 I'll go again

and get off better. You'll see me that night having a

quiet drink at the track bar as the losers run for the

parking lot. Don't talk to me or bother me and I won't

bother you. All right?

 

 

rain

 

a symphony orchestra.

 

there is a thunderstorm,

 

they are playing a Wagner overture

 

and the people leave their seats under the trees

 

and run inside to the pavilion

 

the women giggling, the men pretending calm,

 

wet cigarettes being thrown away,

 

Wagner plays on, and then they are all under the

 

pavilion, the birds even come in from the trees

 

and enter the pavilion and then it is the Hungarian

 

Rhapsody #2 by Lizst, and it still rains, but look,

 

one man sits alone in the rain

 

listening, the audience notices him. they turn

 

and look, the orchestra goes about its

 

business, the man sits in the night in the rain,

 

listening, there is something wrong with him,

 

isn't there?

 

he came to hear the

 

music.

 

 

the colored birds

 

it is a highrise apt. next door

 

and he beats her at night and she screams and nobody stops it

 

and I see her the next day

 

standing in the driveway with curlers in her hair

and she has her huge buttocks jammed into black

slacks and she says, standing in the sun,

 

"god damn it, 24 hours a day in this place, I never go anywhere!"

 

then he comes out, proud, the little matador,

a pail of shit, his belly hanging over his bathing trunks —

he might have been a handsome man once, might have,

now they both stand there and he says,

 

"I think I'm goin' for a swim."

she doesn't answer and he goes to the pool and

jumps into the fishless, sandless water, the peroxide-codein

water,

 

and I stand by the kitchen window drinking coffee

trying to unboil the fuzzy, stinking picture —

after all, you can't live elbow to elbow to people without

wanting to

 

draw a number on them.

 

every time my toilet flushes they can hear it. every time they

go to bed I can hear them.

 

soon she goes inside and then comes out with 2 colored birds

in a cage. I don't know what they are. they don't talk, they

just move a little, seeming to twitch their tail-feathers and

shit, that's all they do.

she stands there looking at them.

 

he comes out: the little tuna, the little matador, out of the pool,

a dripping unbeautiful white, the cloth of his wet suit gripping,

"get those birds in the house!"

 

"but the birds need sun!"

 

"I said, get those birds in the house!"

 

"the birds are gonna die!"

 

"you listen to me, I said, GET THOSE BIRDS IN THE HOUSE!"

she bends and lifts them, her huge buttocks in the black slacks

looking so sad.

 

he slams the door behind them, then I hear it.

 

BAM!

 

she screams

 

BAM! BAM!

 

she screams

 

then: BAM!

 

and she screams.

 

I pour another coffee and decide that that's a new

 

one: he usually only beats her at

 

night, it takes a man to beat his wife night and

 

day. although he doesn't look like much

 

he's one of the few real men around

 

here.

 

 

another lousy 10 percenter

 

I have read your stuff with

sharp inter. . .

 

he said,

falling forward

and knocking over his wine.

 

get that bum

 

OUTA here! screamed my old

lady.

 

but ma, I said, he's my

agent'. got a joint in

Plaza Square !

 

well, kiss my bubs, she said.

 

(she poured wine

all around,

the bat.)

 

I've represented, he said,

 

raisen his head, somerset mawn, ben heck

 

and tomas carylillie.

 

an' as you might 'ave surmised, 'e said,

mah cut, daddy-o, is ten percent'.

 

'is haid fell

forshafts.

 

Ma? I asked, who's

forshafts?

 

Somerset Maun\ she answered,

yo hashole'.

 

 

making it

 

 

ignore all possible concepts and possibilities —

 

ignore Beethoven, the spider, the damnation of Faust —

 

just make it, babe, make it:

 

a house a car a belly full of beans

 

pay your taxes

 

fuck

 

and if you can't fuck

copulate.

 

make money but don't work too

hard — make somebody else pay to

make it — and

 

don't smoke too much but drink enough to

 

relax, and

 

stay off the streets

 

wipe your ass real good

 

use a lot of toilet paper

 

it's bad manners to let people know you shit or

could smell like it

if you weren't

careful.

 

 

drunk ol' bukowski drunk

 

I hold to the edge of the table

with my belly dangling over my

belt

 

and I glare at the lampshade

 

the smoke clearing

 

over

 

North Hollywood

 

the boys put their muskets down

lift high their fish-green beer

 

as I fall forward off the couch

kiss rug hairs like cunt

hairs

 

close as I've been in a

long time.

 

 

the poetry reading

 

at high noon

 

at a small college near the beach

sober

 

the sweat running down my arms

a spot of sweat on the table

I flatten it with my finger

blood money blood money

 

my god they must think I love this like the others

 

but it's for bread and beer and rent

 

blood money

 

I'm tense lousy feel bad

 

poor people I'm failing I'm failing

 

a woman gets up

walks out

slams the door

 

a dirty poem

 

somebody told me not to read dirty poems

here

 

it's too late.

 

my eyes can't see some lines

I read it

out —

 

desperate trembling

lousy

 

they can't hear my voice

and I say,

 

I quit, that's it. I'm

finished.

 

and later in my room

there's scotch and beer:

the blood of a coward.

 

this then

 

will be my destiny:

 

scrabbling for pennies in dark tiny halls

reading poems I have long since become tired

of.

 

 

and I used to think

 

that men who drove busses

 

or cleaned out latrines

 

or murdered men in alleys were

 

fools.

 

 

slim killers

 

there are 4 guys at the door

all 6 feet four

and checking in at

around 210 pounds,

slim killers,

come in, I say,

 

and they walk in with their drinks

 

and circle the old man —

 

so you're Bukowski, eh?

 

yeh, you fucking killers, what do you

 

want?

 

well, we don't have a car

 

and Lee needs a ride to this nightspot

 

in Hollywood.

 

let's go, I say.

 

we get into my car

 

all of us drunk, and

 

somebody in back says,

 

we've been reading your poetry a long time,

 

Bukowski, and I say,

 

I've been writing it a long time,

kid. we dump Lee at the nightspot

then stop off for enough beer and cigars

to demolish the

stratosphere.

 

back at my place I sit with the killers and

we drink and smoke,

it is somehow enjoyable.

 

I find I can outdrink and outsmoke them

but I realize that in areas such as fights on

the front lawn

my day is done.

 

the motherfuckers are just getting too young and

too big.

 

after they pass out

 

I give each of them a pillow and a blanket

 

and make sure all the cigars are

 

out.

 

in the morning they were just 3 big kids

untrapped, a couple of them

 

heaving in the bathroom,

an hour later

they were gone.

 

readers of my poems

I can't say that

I disliked them.

 

the last days of the suicide kid

 

1 can see myself now

 

after all these suicide days and nights,

being wheeled out of one of those sterile rest homes

(of course, this is only if I get famous and lucky)

by a subnormal and bored nurse. . .

there I am sitting upright in my wheelchair. . .

almost blind, eyes rolling backward into the dark part of my

skull

looking

 

for the mercy of death. . .

 

"Isn't it a lovely day, Mr. Bukowski?"

 

"O, yeah, yeah.

 

the children walk past and I don't even exist

and lovely women walk by

with big hot hips

 

and warm buttocks and tight hot everything

praying to be loved

and I don't even

exist. . .

 

"It's the first sunlight we've had in 3 days,

 

Mr. Bukowski."

 

"Oh, yeah, yeah."

 

there I am sitting upright in my wheelchair,

myself whiter than this sheet of paper,

bloodless,

 

brain gone, gamble gone, me, Bukowski,

gone...

 

"Isn't it a lovely day, Mr. Bukowski?"

 

"O, yeah, yeah. . ." pissing in my pajamas, slop drooling out of

my mouth.

 

2 young schoolboys run by —

 

"Hey, did you see that old guy?"

 

"Christ, yes, he made me sick!"

 

after all the threats to do so

 

somebody else has committed suicide for me

 

at last.

 

the nurse stops the wheelchair, breaks a rose from a nearby

bush,

 

puts it in my hand.

 

I don't even know

 

what it is. it might as well be my pecker

for all the good

it does.

 

 

bang bang

 

absolutely sesamoid

 

said the skeleton

 

shoving his chalky foot

 

upon my desk,

 

and that was it,

 

bang bang,

 

he looked at me,

 

and it was my bone body

 

and I was what remained,

 

and there was a newspaper

 

on my desk

 

and somebody folded the newspaper

and I folded,

 

I was the newspaper

under somebody's arm

and the sheet of me

had eyes

 

and I saw the skeleton

watching

 

and just before the door closed

 

I saw a man who looked

 

partly like Napoleon,

 

partly like Hitler,

 

fighting with my skeleton,

 

then the door closed

 

and we went down the steps

 

and outside

 

and I was under

 

the arm

 

of a fat little man

who knew nothing

and I hated him

for his indifference

to fact, how I hated him

as he unfolded me

in the subway

and I fell against the back

of an old woman.

 

 

5 men in black passing my window

 

5 men in black passing my window

it's Sunday

 

they've been to church.

 

5 men in black passing my window;

they're between 40 and 60

each with a little smile on his face

like a tarantula.

 

they're without women;

 

I am too.

 

look at them,

 

it's the way they walk by fives —

no two together,

not speaking,

just the little smiles.

 

each has done his horrible thing

during the week —

 

fired a stockboy, stolen from a partner;

cowardly horrible little men

passing my window.

 

5 men in black with little

smiles.

 

I could machinegun them

 

without feeling

 

banal

 

bury them without a tear:

death of all these things

Springtime.

 

 

the poet's muse

 

there was one

 

made a thousand dollars

 

one day

 

in a town no larger than

El Paso

 

jumping taxies between

universities and ladies'

clubs.

 

hell, you can't blame him;

I've worked for $16 a week,

quit, and lived a month on

that.

 

his wife is suing for divorce

and wants $200 a week

alimony.

 

he has to stay famous and

 

keep

 

talking.

 

I see his work

everywhere.

 

 

somebody

 

god I got the sad blue blues,

this woman sat there and she

said

 

are you really Charles

Bukowski?

 

and I said

 

forget that

I do not feel good

I've got the sad sads

all I want to do is

fuck you

 

and she laughed

 

she thought I was being

 

clever

 

and O I just looked up her long slim legs of heaven

I saw her liver and her quivering intestine

I saw Christ in there

jumping to a folk-rock

 

all the long lines of starvation within me

rose

 

and I walked over

 

and grabbed her on the couch

 

ripped her dress up around her face

 

and I didn't care

 

rape or the end of the earth

 

one more time

 

to be there

 

anywhere

 

real

 

yes

 

her panties were on the

floor

 

and my cock went in

 

my cock my god my cock went in

 

I was Charles

Somebody.

 

 

story and poem

look, he said, that story,

everybody knew it was me.

 

by god, I said, are you still

hacking at that?

 

I thought you were going to write a

story exposing me?

what happened to that?

 

you didn't have to write that

story about me!

 

forget it, I said, it's not

important.

 

he leaped and slammed the door;

 

the glass didn't break

 

but the curtain rod and curtain

 

fell.

 

I tried to finish a one-act play

gave up

 

and went to bed.

the phone rang.

 

listen, he said, when I came over

I had no idea I'd act like

that.

 

it's o.k., I said,

relax.

 

I leaned back to sleep and I

thought,

 

now I'll probably write a poem about

him.

 

there seems to be no way out, I thought,

everybody is always angry about the truth

even though they claim to

believe in it.

 

I slept and wrote the poem

in the morning.

 

 

and the moon and the stars and the world:

 

long walks at

night —

 

that's what's good

 

for the

 

soul:

 

peeking into windows

 

watching tired

 

housewives

 

trying to fight

 

off

 

their beer-maddened

husbands.

 

 

get the nose

 

comfrock, you motherfuck

get up off your crazy knees

and I'll belt you down

again —

 

what's that?

 

you say I eat stem pipes?

 

I'll kill you!

 

stop crying, god damn.

 

all right, we dumped your car into the sea

 

and raped your daughter

 

but we are only extending the possibilities of a working

 

realism, shut up!, I said

 

any man must be ready for anything and

 

if he isn't then he isn't a

 

man a goat a note or a plantleaf,

 

you shoulda known the entirety of the trap, asshole,

 

love means eventual pain

 

victory means eventual defeat

 

grace means eventual slovenliness,

 

there's no way

 

out. . .you see, you

 

understand?

 

hey, Mickey, hold his head up

want to break his nose with this pipe. . .

god damn, I almost forgot the

nose!

 

death is every second, punk.

 

the calendar is death, the sheets are death, you put on your

 

stockings: death, buttons on your shirt are death.

 

lace sportshirts are death, don't you smell it? temperature is

 

death, little girls are death, free coupons are death, carrots are

 

death, didn't you

 

know?

 

o.k.. Mack, we got the nose.

 

no, not the balls, too much bleeding.

 

what was he when ? oh, yeah, he used to be a cabby

 

we snatched him from his cab

 

right off Madison, destroyed his home, his car, raped his

 

12 year old daughter, it was beautiful, burned his wife with

 

gasoline.

 

look at his eyes

 

begging mercy...

 

 

my landlady and my landlord

 

56, she leans

forward

in the kitchen

2:25 a.

m.

 

same red

sweater

holes in

elbows

 

cook him something to

 

EAT

 

he says

 

from the

 

same red

 

face

 

3 years ago

we broke down a tree

 

fighting

 

after he caught me

 

kissing

 

her.

 

beer by the

quarts

 

we drink

 

bad beer

by the

quarts

 

she gets up

and

 

begins to

fry

 

something

 

all night

we sings songs

songs from 1925 a.

d. to

 

d.

 

1939 a.

 

we talk about

short skirts

Cadillacs the

 

Republican Administration

 

the depression

 

taxes

 

horses

 

Oklahoma

 

 

here

 

you son of a bitch,

she says.

 

drunk

 

I lean forward and

eat.

 

 

bad night

 

Bartenders are human too

and when he reached for the baseball bat

the little Italian hit him in the face

with a bottle

 

and several whores screamed.

 

I was just coming out

 

of the men's room

 

when I saw the bartender

 

get off the floor

 

and open the cigar box

 

to get the gun,

 

and I turned around

 

and went out back,

 

and the Italian

 

must have argued poorly

 

because I heard the shot

 

just as I got

 

the car door open.

 

I drove down the alley

and turned East on 7th st.,

and I hadn't gone a block

before a cop pulled me over.

 

You trying to get killed?

he asked. Turn your lights

on.

 

He was a big fat one and he

kept pushing his helmet

further and further

on the back of his head.

 

I took the ticket and then

drove down to Union. I

parked outside the Reno Hotel

and went downstairs

to Harry's.

 

It was quiet there, only

a big redhead, bigger

than the cop.

 

She called me Honey

and I ordered 2.

 

 

hogs in the sky

 

the territory of the diamond and the territory of the

cross and the territory of the spider and the territory of

the butcher

 

divided by the territory of you and me

subtracted from the territory of mathematical

reality

 

multiplied by those tombstones in the

moonlight

 

just going on

 

is a greater gut-miracle than the life-death cycle

itself, I mean

 

going on against uselessness —

 

that's different than living,

 

say, the way a fly lives;

 

the brain gives us enough light to know

 

that living is only an artful sacrifice

 

at best, at worst, it's

 

hogs in the sky.

 

the territory of the darning needle

 

the territory of the mustard jar

 

the territory of mad dogs and love gone stale

 

the territory of you and me

 

each evening bent like the point of a thumb tack

that will no longer stick

in

 

each kiss a hope of returning to the first kiss

each fuck the same

 

each person nailed against diminishing

returns

 

we are slaves to hopes that have run to

 

garbage

 

as old age

 

arrives on schedule.

 

the territory of meeting and leaving

the territory of you and me

death arrived on schedule on a

 

Sunday afternoon, and,

as always,

 

it was easier than we thought

it would be.

 

 

the white poets

 

the white poets usually knock quite early

 

and keep knocking and ringing

 

ringing and knocking

 

even though all the shades are down;

 

finally I arise with my hangover

 

figuring such persistency

 

must mean good fortune, a prize of some

 

sort — female or monetary,

 

"aw right! aw right!" I shout

 

looking for something to cover my ugly

 

naked body, sometimes I must vomit first,

 

then gargle; the gargle only makes me vomit again.

 

I forget it — go to the door —

 

"hello?"

 

"you Bukowski?"

 

"yeh. come in."

 

we sit and look at each other —

he very vigorous and young —

latest blooming clothes —

all colors and silk —

face like a weasel —

 

"you don't remember me?" he

asks.

 

"no."

 

"I was here before, you were rather short, you didn't like my

poems."

 

"there are plenty of reasons for not liking

poems."

 

"try these."

 

he put them on me. they were flatter than the paper they were

typed

 

upon, there wasn't a tick or a

flare, not a sound. I'd never read

less.

 

"uh," I said, "uh-uh."

 

"you mean you don't LIKE

them?"

 

"there's nothing there — it's like a pot of evaporated piss."

 

he took the papers, stood up and walked

 

around, "look, Bukowski. I'll put some broads from Malibu on

 

you, broads like you've never

 

seen."

 

"oh yeah, baby?" I asked.

 

"yeah, yeah," he

said.

 

and ran out the

door.

 

his Malibu broads were like his

poems: they

never arrived.

 

 

the black poets

 

the black poets

young

 

come to my door —

 

"you Bukowski?"

 

"yeh. come in."

 

they sit and look around at the

destroyed room

and at

me.

 

they hand me their poems.

 

I read

them.

 

"no," I say and hand them

back.

 

"you don't like

them?"

 

"no."

 

'"roi Jones came down to see us at our

workshop..."

 

"I hate," I say,

 

"workshops."

 

". . .Leroi Jones, Ray Bradbury, lots of big

boys. . .they said this stuff was

good..."

 

"it's bad poetry, man. they are powdering your

ass."

 

"there's this big film-writer too. he started the whole

idea: Watts Writers' Workshop."

 

"ah, god, don't you seel they are tickling your

assholes! you should have burned the whole town

 

down! I'm sick of it!"

 

"you just don't understand

the poems..."

 

"I do, they are rhymers, full of

platitudes, you write bad

poetry."

 

"look muthafucka, I been on the radio, I been printed in the L.A.

Times'."

 

"oh?"

 

"well, that happened to

you?"

 

"no."

 

"o.k., muthafucka, you ain't seen the last of

me!"

 

I suppose I haven't, and it's useless to tell you that I am not

 

anti-black

 

because

 

somehow

 

that's when the whole subject becomes

sickening.

 

 

millionaires

 

you

 

no faces

no faces

at all

 

laughing at nothing —

let me tell you

 

1 have drunk in skidrow rooms with

 

imbecile winos

 

whose cause was better

 

whose eyes still held some light

 

whose voices retained some sensibility,

 

and when the morning came

 

we were sick but not ill,

 

poor but not deluded,

 

and we stretched in our beds and rose

 

in the late afternoons

 

like millionaires.

 

 

poetry

 

the bus driver grins while sweating in the heat

 

of the plateglass windshield,

 

he doesn't have a chance —

 

only Hollywood Boulevard, an impossible sun

 

and an impossible timetable,

 

there are so many without a chance.

 

I realize that there is very little chance

for any of

 

us. poetry won't save us or a job won't save us,

 

a good job or a bad

 

job.

 

we take a little bit and hang onto that until it is

gone.

 

gongs ring, dances begin, there are holidays and

celebrations. . .

 

we try to cheat the bad dream. . .

 

poetry, you whore, who will go to any man and then

 

leave him...

 

the bus driver has Hollywood Boulevard

I sit next to a fat lady who lays her dead thigh

against me.

 

there is a tiny roll of sweat behind one of the bus driver's

 

ears, he is ashamed to brush it

 

away.

 

the people look ahead or read or look out their

windows.

 

the tiny roll of sweat begins to roll

it rolls along behind the ear

then down the neck,

then it's

gone.

 

Vine street, says the bus driver,

 

this is Vine

 

street.

 

he's right, at last, what a marvelous thing.

 

I get off at Vine Street. I need a drink or something

 

to eat. I don't care about the bus

 

anymore, it is a

 

rejected poem. I don't need it

 

anymore.

 

there will be more busses.

 

I decide upon something to eat

 

with a drink as

 

openers.

 

I walk out of the dark and into the dark

 

and sit down and

 

wait.

 

 

the painter

 

he came up on the porch

with a grinning subnormal type

and they stood there

drunk on wine.

 

the painter had his coat wrapped around something,

then pulled the coat away —

it was a policeman's helmet

complete with badge.

 

"gimme 20 bucks for this," he said.

 

"fuck off, man," I said, "what do I want with a

cop's derby?"

 

"ten bucks," he said.

 

"did you kill him?"

 

"5 bucks..."

 

"what happened to that 6 grand you made

at your art show last month?"

 

"I drank it. all in the same bar."

 

"and I never got a beer," I said.

 

"2 bucks..."

 

"did you kill him?"

 

"we ganged him, punched him around a bit. . . "

"that's chickenshit. I don't want the headpiece."

"we're 18 cents short of a bottle, man. .."

 

I gave the painter 35 cents

 

keeping the chain on the door, slipping it to him

 

with my fingers, he lived with his mother,

 

beat his girlfriend regularly

 

and really didn't paint that

 

well, but I suppose a lot of obnoxious characters

 

work their way into

 

immortality.

 

I'm working on it myself.

 

 

the inquisitor

 

in the bathtub rereading Celine's

Journey to the End of the Night

the phone rings

and I get out

grab a towel.

 

some guy from SMART SET,

 

he wants to know what's in my mailbox

 

how my life has been

 

going.

 

I tell him there isn't anything in the

 

mailbox or the

 

life.

 

he thinks that I'm holding

back. I hope that

I am.

 

 

my friend william

 

my friend William is a fortunate man:

he lacks the imagination to suffer

 

he kept his first job

his first wife

 

can drive a car 50,000 miles

without a brake job

 

he dances like a swan

 

and has the prettiest blankest eyes

 

this side of El Paso

 

his garden is a paradise

 

the heels of his shoes are always level

 

and his handshake is firm

 

people love him

 

when my friend William dies

 

it will hardly be from madness or cancer

 

he'll walk right past the devil

and into heaven

 

you'll see him at the party tonight

 

grinning

 

over his martini

 

blissful and delightful

as some guy

fucks his wife in the

bathroom.

 

 

300 poems

 

look, he said, I've written

300 poems in 2

months,

 

and he handed me the

stack and I

thought

 

00 oo.

 

a young girl

walked up

 

and handed him a plate of

 

corn and meat

 

in his cottage

 

by the beach

 

and the sea rolled in

 

and I turned the

 

white

 

pages.

 

I've been drinking

 

he said

 

and writing

 

and the young girl said

 

is there anything else

 

1 can get

you?

 

he was rich and I was poor

 

and the sea rolled in

 

and I turned the

 

white

 

pages.

 

what do you think?

 

he asked?

 

and I said,

 

well, some of

 

these...

 

but I didn't

 

finish.

 

later I walked

outside. I walked down

the sand to where the sand got

wet and I looked at the water and

the moon

 

and then I turned around

and I walked up to the

boardwalk and I thought,

oo oo.

 

 

lifting weights at 2 a.m.

 

queers do this

or is it that you're

afraid to die?

biceps, triceps, forceps,

what are you going to do

with muscles?

 

well, muscles please the ladies

and keep the bullies

at bay —

so

 

what?

 

is it worth it?

 

is it worth the collected works

of Balzac?

 

or a 3 week vacation

in Spain?

 

or, is it another way of

suffering?

 

if you got paid to do it,

you'd hate it.

 

if a man got paid to make love,

he'd hate it.

 

still, one needs the

 

exercise —

 

this writing game:

 

only the brain and soul get

 

worked-out.

 

quit your bitching and

 

do it.

 

while other people are

sleeping

 

you're lifting a mountain

with rivers of poems

running off.

 

 

reality

 

my little famous bleeding elbows

my knotty knees (especially) and

even my balls

hairy and wasted.

 

these blue evenings of walking past buildings

where Jews pray beautifully about seasons I

know nothing of

and would leave me alone

 

with the roaches and ants climbing my dying body

in some place

too real to touch.

 

 

earthquake

 

Americans don't know what tragedy is —

 

a little 6.5 earthquake can set them to chattering

 

like monkeys —

 

a piece of chinaware broken,

 

the Union Rescue Mission falls down —

 

6 a.m.

 

they sit in their cars

they're all driving around —

where are they going?

 

a little excitement has broken into their

canned lives

 

stranger stands next to stranger

chattering gibberish fear

anxious fear

anxious laughter. . .

 

my baby, my flowerpots, my ceiling

my bank account

 

this is just a tickler

a feather

 

and they can't bear it. . .

 

suppose they bombed the city

 

as other cities have been bombed

 

not with an a-bomb

 

but with ordinary blockbusters

 

day after day,

 

every day

 

as has happened

 

in other cities of the world?

 

if the rest of the world could see you today

their laughter would bring the sun to its knees

and even the flowers would leap from the ground

like bulldogs

 

and chase you away to where you belong

 

wherever that is,

 

and who cares where it is

 

as long as it's somewhere away from

 

here.

 

 

the good life at o'hare airport

 

3 hour wait at the airport in

Chicago, surrounded by killers

I found a table alone

and had a scotch and water

when 4 preachers sat down,

and look here, said one of them,

looking at a newspaper,

here's a guy drunk, ran through a

wall, killed one person, injured 4.

if I was him, said another.

 

I'd commit suicide.

 

I ordered a large beer

 

and sat there reading my own novel.

 

look here, said the one with the paper,

 

here's a guy, no, two guys,

 

tried to hijack a liquor truck,

 

they were so dumb they didn't even know

 

it was only carrying wine, didn't even

 

break the seal, bound the driver

 

and then stopped for coffee, the driver

 

leaned on the horn and a cop car came by

 

and that was it. they went in and got

 

those 2 guys.

 

any 2 guys that dumb, said another,

 

they sure have it coming.

 

look sweetie, said another to the waitress,

 

we don't want anything to drink, we don't drink,

 

but we could sure use 4

 

coffees, and haven't I seen you someplace before,

hee hee hee?

 

give me another beer, I told the

 

waitress. I drink, and I've never seen you anyplace

 

before.

 

the waitress came back with 4 cups of coffee

 

and the beer, and I sat there reading my own novel

 

as the 4 preachers sat there

 

whirling their spoons around their cups,

 

clink clink clink

 

and I thought, this isn't a bad novel

 

this isn't a bad novel

 

at all, but the next one is going to be

 

better, and I lifted my old beer and finished it,

 

and then drank some of the new

 

one, and clink clink clink

 

went the spoons against the cups

 

and one of the preachers coughed

 

and everybody was unhappy but

 

me.

 

 

the golfers

 

driving through the park

 

I notice men and women playing golf

 

driving in their powered carts

 

over billiard table lawns,

 

they are my age

 

but their bodies are fat

 

their hair grey

 

their faces waffle batter,

 

and I remember being startled by my own face

 

scarred, and mean as red ants

 

looking at me from a department store mirror

 

and the eyes mad mad mad

 

I drive on and start singing

 

making up the sound

 

a war chant

 

and there is the sun

 

and the sun says, good, I know you,

 

and the steering wheel is humorous

 

and the dashboard laughs,

 

see, the whole sky knows

 

I have not lied to anything

 

even death will have exits

 

like a dark theatre.

 

I stop at a stop sign and

 

as fire burns the trees and the people and the city

 

I know that there will be a place to go

 

and a way to go

 

and nothing need ever be

 

lost.

 

 

II

 

spider on the wall:

why do yon take

so long ?

 

 

the mockingbird

 

the mockingbird had been following the cat

all summer

 

mocking mocking mocking

 

teasing and cocksure;

 

the cat crawled under rockers on porches

 

tail flashing

 

and said something angry to the mockingbird

which I didn't understand.

 

yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway

 

with the mockingbird alive in its mouth,

 

wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping,

feathers parted like a woman's legs,

 

and the bird was no longer mocking,

 

it was asking, it was praying

 

but the cat

 

striding down through centuries

would not listen.

 

I saw it crawl under a yellow car

with the bird

 

to bargain it to another place,

summer was over.

 

 

ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha

 

monkey feet

 

small and blue

 

walking toward you

 

as the back of a building falls off

 

and an airplane chews the white sky,

 

doom is like the handle of a pot,

 

it's there,

 

know it,

 

have ice in your tea,

marry,

 

have children, visit your

dentist,

 

do not scream at night

even if you feel like screaming,

count ten

 

make love to your wife,

or if your wife isn't there

if there isn't anybody there

count 20,

 

get up and walk to the kitchen

 

if you have a kitchen

 

and sit there sweating

 

at 3 a.m. in the morning

 

monkey feet

 

small and blue

 

walking toward you.

 

 

a fine day and the world looks good

 

someday the lion will

walk in

 

he'll grab an arm

just above the elbow

my old arm

 

my wrinkled dice-shooting arm

and

 

I'll scream

 

in my bedroom

 

I won't understand at all

 

and he'll be

 

too strong for me,

 

and people will walk in —

 

a wife, a girlfriend, a bastard son,

 

a stranger from down the street

 

and a

 

doctor

 

and

 

they will

watch

 

and the lion won't bother them

yet,

 

and then my arm will be

gone

 

the doctor will put the

stethoscope to my chest

ask me to cough

then

 

he will turn to the others and

say

 

there's a chance

but I think he's going

under — shock and loss of

blood.

 

hell, I know that,

and now the lion has my

other arm

I try to knee him

 

his tail knocks a picture off the wall

 

a picture of a Dutch windmill and a

pond

 

it is a fine day

 

the world looks good

 

I feel I'd like to be

 

swimming or fishing or sleeping

 

under a tree

 

but the lion will not

 

let go

 

then

 

my other arm is

gone

 

the people kneel to

pray

 

all but the

doctor

 

the lion is clawing at my

chest

 

trying to get at the

heart

 

I ask the doctor to light me a

cigarette and

he does

 

then the

priest walks

in

 

the lion does not bother the priest

yet

 

I'd heard about the

lion

 

about how sometimes he was fast or sometimes he was

slow

 

I knew he usually preferred older people

although sometimes he even ate

 

babies or young men and

girls

 

 

god o mighty! save me! save me

I scream

 

but the people do not

move

 

they let the lion

eat me

 

the priest mumbles incantations I do not

understand

 

the doctor turns his back and looks

out the window

 

it is the month of July

 

with the taste of butter in the air

 

and I am rapidly becoming a

 

keepsake thing

 

as before my eyes I see the

 

moth, butcherbird, dove, vulture and

 

angel

 

burning

 

the lion eats my heart

 

and the doctor puts the sheet over my

 

head

 

and it is early in the

 

morning

 

very early in the

 

morning

 

and decent people are still

in bed

 

most of them asleep with bad breath

and very few of them making

love

 

and most of them

not like me

yet

 

 

vacancy

 

sun-stroked women

without men

 

on a Santa Monica monday;

the men are working or in jail

or insane;

 

one girl floats in a rubber suit,

waiting...

 

houses slide off the edges of cliffs

 

and down into the sea.

 

the bars are empty

 

the lobster eating houses are empty;

 

it's a recession, they say,

 

the good days are

 

over.

 

you can't tell an unemployed man

 

from an artist any more,

 

they all look alike

 

and the women look the same,

 

only a little more desperate.

 

we stop at a hippie hole

in Topanga Canyon. . .

and wait, wait, wait;

 

the whole area of the canyon and the beach

 

is listless

 

useless

 

VACANCY, it says, PEOPLE WANTED.

 

the wood has no fire

the sea is dirty

the hills are dry

the temples have no bells

love has no bed

 

sun-stroked women without men

one sailboat

life drowned.

 

 

3:16 and one half...

 

here I'm supposed to be a great poet

and I'm sleepy in the afternoon

here I am aware of death like a giant bull

charging at me

 

and I'm sleepy in the afternoon

 

here I'm aware of wars and men fighting in the ring

 

and I'm aware of good food and wine and good women

 

and I'm sleepy in the afternoon

 

I'm aware of a woman's love

 

and I'm sleepy in the afternoon,

 

I lean into the sunlight behind a yellow curtain

I wonder where the summer flies have gone

I remember the most bloody death of Hemingway

and I'm sleepy in the afternoon.

 

some day I won't be sleepy in the afternoon

some day I'll write a poem that will bring volcanoes

to the hills out there

 

but right now I'm sleepy in the afternoon

 

and somebody asks me, "Bukowski, what time is it?"

 

and I say, "3:16 and a half."

 

I feel very guilty, I feel obnoxious, useless,

 

demented, I feel

 

sleepy in the afternoon,

 

they are bombing churches, o.k., that's o.k.,

 

the children ride ponies in the park, o.k., that's o.k.,

 

the libraries are filled with thousands of books of knowledge,

 

great music sits inside the nearby radio

 

and I am sleepy in the afternoon,

 

I have this tomb within myself that says,

ah, let the others do it, let them win,

let me sleep,

wisdom is in the dark

sweeping through the dark like brooms.

 

I'm going where the summer flies have gone,

try to catch me.

 

 

the rat

 

with one punch, at the age of 16 and 1/2,

 

I knocked out my father,

 

a cruel shiny bastard with bad breath,

 

and I didn't go home for some time, only now and then

 

to try to get a dollar from

 

dear momma.

 

it was 1937 in Los Angeles and it was a hell of a

Vienna.

 

I ran with these older guys

 

but for them it was the same:

 

mostly breathing gasps of hard air

 

and robbing gas stations that didn't have any

 

money, and a few lucky among us

 

worked part-time as Western Union messenger

 

boys.

 

we slept in rented rooms that weren't rented —

and we drank ale and wine

with the shades down

being quiet quiet

 

and then awakening the whole building

with a fistfight

 

breaking mirrors and chairs and lamps

and then running down the stairway

just before the police arrived

some of us soldiers of the future

 

running through the empty starving streets and alleys of

 

Los Angeles

 

and all of us

 

getting together later

 

in Pete's room

 

a small cube of space under a stairway, there we were,

 

packed in there

 

without women

 

without cigarettes

 

without anything to drink,

 

while the rich pawed away at their many

 

choices and the young girls let

 

them.

 

the same girls who spit at our shadows as we

walked past.

 

it was a hell of a

Vienna.

 

3 of us under that stairway

were killed in World War II.

 

another one is now manager of a mattress

company.

 

me? I'm 30 years older,

 

the town is 4 or 5 times as big

 

but just as rotten

 

and the girls still spit on my

 

shadow, another war is building for another

 

reason, and I can hardly get a job now

 

for the same reason I couldn't then:

 

I don't know anything, I can't do

anything.

 

sex? well, just the old ones knock on my door after

midnight. I can't sleep and they see the lights and are

curious.

 

the old ones, their husbands no longer want them,

their children are gone, and if they show me enough good

leg (the legs go last)

 

I go to bed with

them.

 

so the old women bring me love and I smoke their cigarettes

as they

talk talk talk

 

and then we go to bed again and

 

I bring them love

 

and they feel good and

 

talk

 

until the sun comes

up, then we

sleep.

 

it's a hell of a

Paris.

 

 

hot

 

I was up under the attic and it was almost summer

and I sat around drinking wine

and watching the hot pigeons suffer and fuck

on the hot roof

 

and I listened to sounds on my radio and

drank the wine

 

and I sat there naked and sweating

 

and wishing I were back in the journalism class

 

where everybody was a

 

genius.

 

it was even hot when I got thrown out of there

 

for non-payment of rent and I signed on with a

 

track gang going West — the windows wouldn't open

 

and the seats and sides of the cars were 100 years old with

 

dust, they gave us cans of food but no openers

 

and we busted the cans against the side of the seats

 

ate raw hash, raw lima beans

 

the water tasted like candlewick

 

and I leaped out under a line of trees in the middle of

 

Texas, some small town, and the police found me asleep

 

on a park bench and put me in a cell with only a crapper,

 

no water, no sink, and they questioned me about robberies and

 

murders,

 

under a hot light

 

and getting nothing

 

they drove me to the next town 17 miles away

the big one kicked me in the ass

and after a good night's sleep

I went into the local library

 

where the young lady librarian seemed to take an interest in

my

 

reading habits

 

and later we went to bed

 

and I woke up with teethmarks all over me and I said,

 

Christ, watch it, baby, you might give me

cancer!

 

you're an idiot, she said.

 

I suppose that I

was.

 

 

radio

 

strange eyes in my head

 

I'm the coward and the fool and the clown

 

and I listen to a man telling me that I can get a

 

restaurant guide and an expanding cultural events calendar

 

I'm just not here today

 

I don't want restaurants and expanding cultural events

I want an old shack in the hills

rent free

 

with enough to eat and drink until I die

 

strange eyes in my head

strange ways

 

no chance

 

 

ariel

 

oh my god, oh my dear god

that we should end up

on the end of a rope

in some slimy bathroom

far from Paris,

far from thighs that care,

our feet hanging down

above the simplicity

of stained tile,

telephone ringing,

letters unopened,

dogs pissing in the street. . .

 

greater men than I

 

have failed to agree with Life.

 

I wish you could have met my brother, Marty:

vicious, intelligent, endearing,

doing

quite well.

 

 

the passing of a dark gray moment

 

Standing here,

doing what?

as exposed as an azalea

to a bee.

 

Where's the axman,

where's it done?

 

They tiptoe round

on rotting wood,

peeking into shelves.

Summertime!

 

Where's the sun,

where's the sea?

 

The god's are gone!

 

Everything hums

with humble severity. . .

they wipe their faces

with cotton and rags

— and wait for morning.

 

Where's the fire,

where's the burn?

 

Rain-spouts\ and rats

printing dirge-notes in ashes. . .

a voice plows my brain:

 

"the gods are dead."

 

Where's the time,

where's the place?

 

Somewhat eased, extinguished,

I listen behind me

to my bird eating seed,

hoping he'll chitter

and peep some pink

back into white elbows.

 

I love that bird,

 

the simple needing of seed, so clear:

 

A god can be anything

that's needed right away.

 

The sound of aircraft overhead

winging a man. . .

stronger now, not yet pure,

but moving away the dread.

 

 

consummation of grief

 

I even hear the mountains

 

the way they laugh

 

up and down their blue sides

 

and down in the water

 

the fish cry

 

and all the water

 

is their tears.

 

I listen to the water

 

on nights I drink away

 

and the sadness becomes so great

 

I hear it in my clock

 

it becomes knobs upon my dresser

 

it becomes paper on the floor

 

it becomes a shoehorn

 

a laundry ticket

 

it becomes

 

cigarette smoke

 

climbing a chapel of dark vines. . .

 

it matters little

 

very little love is not so bad

or very little life

 

what counts

is waiting on walls

I was born for this

 

I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

 

 

those sons of bitches

 

the dead come running sideways

 

holding toothpaste ads,

 

the dead are drunk on New Year's eve

 

satisfied at Christmas

 

thankful on Thanksgiving

 

bored on the 4th of July

 

loafing on Labor Day

 

confused at Easter

 

cloudy at funerals

 

clowning at hospitals

 

nervous at birth;

 

the dead shop for stockings and shorts

and belts and rugs and vases and

coffeetables,

 

the dead dance with the dead

the dead sleep with the dead

the dead eat with the dead.

 

the dead get hungry looking at hogs' heads.

 

the dead get rich

the dead get deader

 

those sons of bitches

 

this graveyard above the ground

 

one tombstone for the mess,

 

I say:

 

humanity, you never had it

from the beginning.

 

 

the hunt

 

by god, it was a long day

 

the 3 horse broke down

 

the cook burned his hand,

 

e. pitts was recalled from the sandlots

 

because the regular back had a

 

hamstring,

 

and the grunion ran again

 

through the oily sea

 

to plant eggs on shore and be caught

 

by unemployed drunks

 

with flopping canvas hats

 

and no woman at all.

 

offshore you could see the lights of a

 

passing yacht

 

with a party on board,

 

lots of girls and jokes and the

 

rest,

 

and they put the 3 horse in

 

the truck, carried him away from the

 

crowd and shot

 

him, little things like that and other

things

 

are what sometimes create unemployed drunks

 

with flopping canvas hats,

 

sans woman,

 

trying to grab for

 

grunion.

 

 

the big fire

 

I'm on fire like the cactus in the desert

I'm on fire like the palms of an acrobat

I'm on fire like the fangs of the spider

 

I'm on fire with you and me

 

I'm on fire walking into a drugstore

I'm on fire I'm on fire

 

the girl hands me my change and

laughs at me

 

I'm on fire in my bed alone

I'm on fire with you

 

I'm on fire reading a book

 

about Trotsky, Hitler, Alexander the Great,

 

anybody at all, any walking living dead

 

human once upon the

 

earth

 

I'm on fire looking at the grass

 

I'm on fire looking at birds sitting on telephone wires

I'm on fire answering the phone —

 

I leap straight up when it rings

I am burning

 

I'm on fire looking at velvet

I'm on fire looking at a sleeping cat

 

I am a helpless burning thing

among other helpless burning things

 

I lay on my left side and look at the tombstones

 

then I lay on my right side and look at the tombstones —

 

they are all

 

burning

 

I'm on fire putting a stamp on an envelope

 

I'm on fire wrapping garbage into a newspaper

 

I'm on fire with heroes and dwarfs and poverty and hope

 

I'm on fire with love and anger

 

I'm on fire like a bat hanging upsidedown

 

like a bellboy hating the rich and smiling at their tips

 

I'm on fire in a supermarket

watching a most womanly woman

bend over to pick up some potato salad

 

I'm on fire like a scissors cutting the eyes out of the sky

I'm on fire like onehundredthousand monkeys boiled into one

heart

 

and sobbing through centuries of

hopelessness

 

I'm on fire like a clean sharp knife in a kitchen drawer

 

I'm on fire like a beggar in India

a beggar in New York

a beggar in Los Angeles. . .

the smoke and burning rises

and the ash is crushed under. . .

 

I'm on fire like the circus that went away

 

the champion who quit on one knee

 

all burning

 

all alone

 

all one

 

ash

 

I'm on fire like a dirty bathtub in a lonely roominghouse

I'm on fire like the roach I kill with my shoe

 

I'm on fire with men and woman and animals

who are being tortured and mutilated in dark and

isolated places

 

I'm on fire with the armies and anti-armies

I'm on fire with the man I hate most in the world

 

I'm on fire without a chance

 

the fat is in the fire, the lamb is over it

the sacrifice seems forever

the enduring seems forever

 

the sun is on fire...

 

and the glazed horizon is red

and the weeping

and the weeping

and you and me

 

the sun is burning everything:

 

the dogs, the clouds, the icecream

 

the end

 

the end of the stairway

the end of the ocean

the last scream

 

the bug in the jar

spouts into flame

and the inside of the skull

gives up

at last

 

the smoke blows

away.

 

 

ww 2

 

since fact is an artifice of fiction

 

let's call this fiction so like all good boys and girls

 

we can relax

 

i was in frisco a dandy place with lakes or something i could see the gold

bridge and it wasn't teeth from my window enough to drink almost always

enough to drink

 

i wrote the old man down in l.a. you might as well get a story ready for your

god damned neighbors because i am not going to yr war

 

if it were not for the war the last war you would not be here i would not have

met your mother and you would not have been born

 

SON, YOUR COUNTRY IS AT WAR ! ! ! !

 

the fact that i was born because of circumstances of war

 

did not seem to me a proper argument to create further circumstances

 

i went out and got drunk properly

 

then the next morning i went down to the draft board

 

a boy fainted when they took blood out of his arm and i looked at the

needle dip into my vein and watched the red of me run up into the tube

and felt rugged

 

they looked up my ass

 

and then i went in to see the sike

 

u have yr shorts on backwards he told me

i got up and switched them

 

he sat there looking at me

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF PICASSO?

 

at first i said all right now not much do you write or paint?

yes

 

and?

 

and what? I ASKED IF YOU WROTE OR PAINTED, leave me alone i told

him

 

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN PUBLISHED? PAINTINGS HUNG?

 

nothing accepted

nothing accepted anywhere

do you believe in the war? he asked no i said

ARE YOU WILLING TO GO TO WAR? he asked no i said

WHY DON'T YOU BE A CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR? because i said

i am not sure there is a God

 

NEXT WEDNESDAY NIGHT WE ARE HAVING A MEETING, A PARTY

FOR DOCTORS, WRITERS AND ARTISTS I WANT YOU TO BE

THERE I AM INVITING YOU WILL YOU COME?

 

no

 

all right he said u don't have to go

u mean i asked the party or the war?

 

either one he said you didn't think we'd understand did you?

no

 

he wrote something on a slip of paper and folded it and stuck it to my card

with a paperclip give them this, up the line

 

he had written a hell of a lot on the slip as i walked i managed to lift the edge

of the slip but all i cd see was

 

HIDES AN EXTREME,

 

SENSITIVITY UNDER A POKER FACE

 

which was news to me

 

and then some guy in a uniform screamed at me

ALL RIGHT SON UNCLE SAM DOESN'T WANT YOU

 

and i walked out into

 

the clear and beautiful air

 

are you going to war my landlady asked me no i said bad heart

that's too bad i'm sorry she said and i went upstairs and poured

a good one

 

bad heart bad heart bad heart have u done the wrong thing

maybe u ought to go maybe you ought to go and walk right into it

hell, friend they turned you down uncle sam does not want you

you are insane

 

i smiled and poured another one

 

i don't know how much later but some time later i am sitting in another cheap

room philly i am drinking a bottle of port have a record player and i am

listening to the 2nd movement of brahms' 2nd symphony

when there is a knock on the door

it is a very polite knock

 

and since i do not know anybody much i figure it is either

one of the whores down at the corner in love with me

 

or somebody come to give me the nobel prize

 

and i opened the door and 2 big men were there and one of them said F.B.I.

and the other one said yr under arrest

 

i went over and took the needle out of brahms' arm

we want to question u they said downtown

all right

 

u better put on a coat you might be gone some time

 

 

we walked down the stairs and out into the street and got into the car and it

seemed as if each window had a face hanging out of it and there was another

guy in the back and he said keep one hand on each knee and don't move them

 

we drove along a while and then

 

i reached up to scratch my nose

 

WATCH THAT HAND! one of them screamed

this guy is pretty casual another one said

i think we got a good one yep i think we got a good one

 

oh lord oh christ i thought i wonder what i done

i wonder what i done

 

they took me into a room that was mostly empty except for pictures

photos on the walls

 

you see those one of them pointed voice most serious

yes i said

 

those are men who died in the service of the fbi

 

they took me into another room where a man

sat behind his desk with his shirtsleeves rolled up

 

BUKOWSKI?

 

yes

 

HENRY C. JR.?

yes

 

WHERE THE HELL'S YOUR UNCLE JOHN?

 

my what?

 

WHERE THE HELL'S YOUR UNCLE JOHN?

 

i thought he meant i had some

kind of secret thing i was murdering people with

 

YOUR UNCLE: JOHN BUKOWSKI!

 

oh hell john he's dead

 

NO WONDER we can't find the son of a bitch!

 

WHY DID YOU DODGE THE DRAFT?

 

i'm 4f

 

4f eh?

 

psycho yes

 

why did you move without notifying your draft board?

i didn't bother jesus i thought it was over

why did you move?

 

i got kicked out for being drunk all the time

landlady said i got blood on the sheets

 

WHY DIDN'T YOU NOTIFY YOUR DRAFT BOARD?

 

look are you guys crazy i only moved around the corner 80 yards away gave

the post office my forwarding address if i wanted to hide i could do better than

that

 

NOW WE DIDN'T BEAT YOU, DID WE?

 

no

 

AND WE DIDN'T PUT HANDCUFFS ON YOU, DID WE?

 

no

 

WE ARE GOING TO HAVE TO HOLD YOU FOR FURTHER INVESTIGA-

TION....

 

they took me down to a small cell with toilet and sink

 

no bunk no chair i stood by the window and looked out the bars

it was Saturday morning and it was one of the main downtown

streets and it was sunny it looked good ouside people

walking along easily unnervous a record shop speakered its

music onto the street i did not feel good you only begin to

miss the simple life after it is taken away from u after u go

into a hospital and u are on a bed maybe to die or go back

or in a jail never knowing when or if you'll get out

that's when you think that's when the sunshine looks good

that's when just walking down to the corner to buy a paper

is something like beethoven's 9th

 

i was transferred to a prison a much larger prison the next day

they put me in a cell with a little fat man who looked like

a businessman

 

he put out his hand: I am Courtney Taylor

public enemy number one

 

i shook his hand

 

what are you in for? he asked

 

they say i'm a draft dodger

 

listen he said there's just one thing we don't like around here

one kind we have no use for and that's the draft dodger

honor among thieves

eh?

 

what do you mean?

 

I mean u fucker,

 

leave me alone

leave me alone

 

if u want to kill yourself i'll tell you how he said

 

i don't want to hear it i said

 

all you do is take that bucket over there fill it with water

 

take your shoe off put your foot in it but first bring down

 

the overhead light i'll hold you on my shoulders and you can work

 

the screws loose from the pipe then u bend it down take the

 

globe out stick your finger in the hole yr foot in the bucket

 

and yr out of here

 

it sounded good to me but there was something grotesque and embarrassing

about it somehow so i decided not to do it

 

i stretched out on the bunk and pretty soon i felt things

biting me bedbugs

 

look i said do u gamble?

 

what do u mean?

 

i mean i said let's bet a nickel a bed bug i bet i can catch

more than u

 

they don't really come out till lights out he said

u mean it gets worse i asked

 

multiply by 30,

 

have u told the guard?

 

the screw? i'll tell him again

 

HEY SCREW SCREW !!! WE GOT BUDBUGS IN HERE ! GET

THESE GOD DAMNED BEDBUGS OUT OF HERE HEY SCREW !

 

nobody showed up

 

we began playing 21 blackjack and 5 minutes later the screw

walked in

 

let's not have so much screaming and you bastards probably

brought those things in here with you

 

i got hot in a crapgame in the exercise

yard and stayed hot 3, 4, 5 days and began to feel better i was

making more money than i ever made on the outside we were always

hungry there but after lights out the cook would come down with

jello and whipcream and coffee and bits of tenderloin and i'd slip

him a dollar or 2 and my public enemy friend stopped talking about

the evils of celling with a 4f and just when we were beginning to

enjoy our nickel a bedbug bets Taylor being a swindler of grand

order couldn't resist breaking some of his in half but i being

poetaster and counter of tombstones feeling the blade against my

whimpering brain i i was more agile. . .and so psycho and public

enemy number one pinched out the souls of bedbugs while the world

grabbed its balls in more agony: ww 2

 

and we forgot in our small dying to acknowledge the small nobility

of whatever it was

 

BUTTT as i wuz saying

 

just as we were beginning to

enjoy our bedbugs they rushed us out of the cell

 

5 or 6 days after

 

the original complaint to fumigate

 

and they put me in with a polack

 

or something

 

old old old

 

he tore up my bedsheet the first time

i went to exercise yard to make a clothesline out of it

 

and i have a very sensitive skin despite my poker face

and the wool blankets only those who can't stand rough wool will

know what i mean and so i told the old man

 

he was always on the crapper

 

puffiing on an empty pipe and all these makeshift makeshit

clotheslines hanging about dripping polack stockings and rags

 

(forget my name i am a Prussian nobleman) (this is fiction)

isn't it) (i am getting a little bored with this and could use a

hot piece of ass as what man cd not?)

 

he wuz always on the crapper

 

puffing and saying

 

TARA BUBU EAT TARA BUBU SHEET

TARA BUBU EAT TARA BUBU SHEET

 

over and over

then he'd laugh

 

he was telling me the facts of life but all i could feel

 

as the bluebirds were driven away from the white cliffs of dover

 

was that wool blanket against me all and everywhere

 

LISTEN YOU OLD FUCK i told him I'VE KILLED TWO MEN ALREADY

AND I'D JUST AS SOON KILL U AS SCRATCH MY ASS !!!

 

and the old idiot just laughed at me and for a moment i saw it

it was possible why not my hands about that wrinkled morgue of

flesh hoo says u can't kill what's already dead the eyes pop out

the tongue the lungs reach for air like kittens chasing a roll of

yarn but it was too ugly i don't think what got Dos in

Crime and Punishment was that a single man could not judge what to

eradicate but that he COULD and KNEW IT and it was easier to turn

it over to God because you would finally have to eradicate

everything including self (though u usually began with self and

by eradicating self you eradicated the rest) and that would make God

a failure and that would not do because if you eliminate God

you have to come down to self and Self built in 20 or 30 or 60 years

cannot match a 2000 year backlog of root and tradition and so Dos

did the wise thing in admitting that he could be wrong although he

felt right and i let the old man shit and spew tara bubu and slept

in wool blankets

they broke up the crap game from the tower

the screw pointed his m.g. down

 

the guy with the dice was taking too big a chunk from

 

each pot and the losers were getting hot I guess i should have

 

said it to the old man that way but one guy said to the furnisher

 

of dice DON'T PUT YOUR HAND IN THERE AGAIN UNTIL I TELL

 

UTO

 

and that was that until the screw got busy pointed his

steel nose

 

they came back for me and put me in some kind of room

they were making out a report

 

they asked me how to spell some words

like Andernach and so forth

 

i had a long red beard by then

 

and they asked me why

 

and i said

 

have you ever had the end cell where they

pass out one razorblade at the first cell and that same razor blade is

used by the last man in the last cell, and have you ever celled with an

old man whose only joy in life is eating and shitting and shaving and

wd u take 1/3 of his joy by taking the blade and shaving FIRST?

besides i use this red beard to fight the wool blankets with

 

i believe the kid is psycho one of them said

 

anyhow 3 or 4 days later

 

they let me out

 

only first i had to go through another physical for the army

but once again

 

i couldn't get past the sike

and that same day

 

when they let me out

 

even before i tried to get

 

a room i lay down in that park outside the philly library

 

i got on

 

my back and i felt little grass bugs crawling upon me and i let them

crawl they were beautifully clean

 

and i let the clouds come down

into my head but the sky was a bad color it hurt my eyes it was all

not good i began to fill up with sadness

 

and i heard some girls come by

talking and laughing and one of them tripped over my ankle

 

and she said OOOh OOOH and then laughed

 

and i glared

 

up at them outa my red wool beard and one of them said

OOOOOH I WANT HIM !!!

 

and then i fell back and went back to the clouds

 

until later

 

clambering up out of the misery of the tomb

 

i sat upon a park bench watching traffic go by

 

and then it came a long caravan of trucks

 

filled with good young soldiers who only wanted to live

 

and i was young and watching and for a moment i loved them the crowd

 

but once again they turned on me and from the first truck

 

came a hissing and a cursing and then a booing a racket of vile hate

 

they wanted me with them and the whole avenue filled with hot sound

 

and more trucks came by slowly and it was an opera it was an

 

opera of condemnation, but i had not wanted war never will and

 

the gods the gods the dice had been good and i waved an arm

 

and smiled somebody screamed YOU BASTARD GET OFF YOUR

 

DEAD ASS !

 

but i did not i watched them go where they were going

i imagine the one who fainted he was in there too

 

we were all

 

very young i was young they were young

 

but i imagine

 

war being swine mob being swine

i was not as young as they

 

 

ants

 

1 used to be a great

traveler, even without

money, some cities I'd say in 2

 

weeks, some 3 days. . .for years I went through the

cities, sometimes coming up against the same one

 

2 or 3 times.

 

now I'm here. . .not only the same city. . .

the same apartment. . .for ten years. . .

ten years...

 

the last person in here before me was

 

crazy, they carried her off

 

screaming

 

in a big white

 

sheet, and I moved

 

in.

 

it's all right. . .there have been various

jobs, various women, various

ways...

 

one bungles through, it seems. . .

but it's the ants here,

 

the ants here are crazy, they keep building nests

in the bathtub drain. . .in the water basin

drain...

 

it's delicious and sanitary and ugly:

 

I turn on the hot water tap

and watch them go spinning to a

burning drowning hell. . .

it's neat...

 

but they keep coming back. . .

 

more and more ants. . .

 

the ants come back faster than the women.

 

today I was about to do in a new

 

batch, both tub and water basin,

 

the phone rang,

 

it was my friend Danny, he said,

listen, you are the only real man I know. I'm

going to kill myself. . .

go, I said, ahead...

 

she left me, he said, she left me like that,

hardly any notice. . .1 really loved

her. (he began to cry.)

 

 

listen, I said, meeting a bitch is an accident,

having one leave you is a basic reality,

be glad you're coming up against

basic reality. . .

 

thanks, he said (sobbing), and hung

up.

 

I went back to the ants and turned on both water

 

taps at

 

once.

 

I burned and drowned them good.

 

Then the phone rang,

 

listen, he said, I'm going to do it,

 

I'm really going to do it.

 

I hung up.

 

 

he wrote in lonely blood

 

sitting here

typing

 

at a friend's house

I find a black book by the typer:

 

Jeffers': Be Angry at the Sim.

 

I think of Jeffers often,

 

of his rocks and his hawks and his

 

isolation.

 

Jeffers was a real loner,

yes, he had to write.

 

I try to think of loners who don't break out

at all

 

in any fashion,

 

and I think, no, that's not strong,

somehow, that's dead.

 

Jeffers was alive and a loner and

 

he made his statements.

 

his rocks and his hawks and his isolation

 

counted.

 

he wrote in lonely blood

a man trapped in a corner

but what a corner

fighting down to the last mark

 

"I've built my rock," he sent the message to

the lovely girl who came to his door,

 

"you go build yours."

 

this was the same girl who had screwed Ezra,

and she wrote me that Jeffers sent her away

like that.

 

BE ANGRY AT THE SUN.

 

Jeffers was a rock who was not dead,

his book sits to my left now as I type.

 

I think of all his people crashing down

hanging themselves, shooting themselves,

taking poisons...

 

locked away against an unbearable humanity.

Jeffers was like his people:

he demanded perfection and beauty

and it was not there

 

in human form, he found it in non-human

 

forms. I've run out of non-human forms,

I'm angry at Jeffers, no,

 

I'm not. and if the girl comes to my door

I'll send her away too. after all,

who wants to follow old

Ez?

 

 

six chink fishermen

 

the other night

 

under a new moon

 

with the cuckoo clocks wound

 

tight

 

they stopped 6 Chinese fishermen

on skidrow

San Pedro

 

with 28 million dollars worth of

shit

 

in their boots.

 

they say it was an old dwarf

 

on a houseboat

 

who painted butterflies

 

on the sleeping body of his wife

 

in their pitiful

 

dream.

 

Artists, they say, sell out cheapest and most

quickly.

 

meanwhile, a fat man in Hong Kong

hearing,

 

decided to do away with Art,

and

 

while irritated

 

just to make Mr. Justice

 

soil his new clean sheets

 

he dialed a number

 

and arranged

 

the assassination of the

 

next-to-last

 

American

 

hero.

 

 

burning

 

and the pleasures of the past,

 

remembering the Goose Girl at Hollywood Park

 

1950,

 

red coats and trumpets

 

and faces cut with knives and mistakes;

 

I am ready for the final

retreat;

 

I have an old-time kerosene burner,

candles, 22 cans of Campbell's soup

and an 80 year old uncle in Andernach,

Germany

 

who was once the burgermeister of that

town I was born in

so long ago.

 

I ache all over with the melody of pain

and people knock at my door

come in and drink with me

and talk,

 

but they don't realize I've quit,

 

have cleaned up the kitchen

 

chased the mice out from under the bed

 

and am making ready

 

for the tallest flame of them all.

 

I look at buildings and clouds and ladies,

 

I read newspapers as my shoelaces break,

 

I dream of matadors brave and bulls brave

and people brave and cats brave and

can openers brave.

 

my uncle writes me in trembling hand:

 

"How is your little girl,

 

and is your health good? You didn't answer

 

my last letter..."

 

"Dear Uncle Heinrich," I answer,

 

"my little girl is very clever and pretty and

also good. I hope that you are

 

happy and well. I enclose a photo

of Marina. Answer when you are

able. Things here are the same as they

have always

been.

 

Love,

 

Henry"

 

 

a sound in the brush

 

the sorrow of Scibelli,

friend,

 

as he turned at a sound in the brush

and was bayonetted

 

by a man 5 feet tall who didn't even know

his name,

 

who then sliced his jugular vein,

took the gold from his teeth,

both ears,

 

then opened his wallet

 

and tore up the photo of a soft-faced

 

girl named

 

simply, "Laura,"

 

who was waiting in Kansas City

 

for an earless, tooth-ravished

 

bloody

 

Scibelli

 

who just happened to die a little earlier

 

than most of the rest of us,

 

also for

 

Cause

 

Unknown.

 

 

the wild

 

once in lockup, being fingerprinted and photographed, all

that,

 

I dropped ashes from my cigarette on the floor

and the cop got mad, he said,

 

"by god, where the hell do you think you are?"

"County jail," I said, and he said, "All right, wise guy, now you

 

walk down

 

that corridor and then

 

take a left."

 

I walked on down

 

took my left and

 

here it came —

 

they had this beast of a thing

 

in a huge cellblock, alone, alone,

 

and there were wires across the bars

 

it was the L.A. County drunktank

 

and it was their pet

 

the thing saw me

 

came running

 

and threw itself snarling against the bars and wire

wanting to kill me, and I stood there and watched it,

then spoke:

 

"Cigarette? how about a smoke?"

 

the thing rattled the wire and snarled a few more times

 

and I pulled out a smoke.

 

the thing grinned at me and I poked a cigarette through the

wire

 

put it in his lips and lit him

up.

 

"I dislike them too," I said.

 

the thing grinned and bobbed its head

 

yes.

 

the cop came and took me away

and put me in a cell with

5 less living.

 

 

4th of july

 

it's amazing

 

the number of people who can't feel

pain.

 

put 40 in a room

 

squeezed against each other

 

hours of lethargic talk

 

and they don't

 

faint

 

scream

 

go mad or even

wince.

 

it appears as if they are waiting for

something that will never

arrive.

 

they are as comfortable as chickens or

pigs in their pens.

 

one might even consider it wisdom

if you can overlook the faces

and the conversation.

 

when the 4th is over

 

and they go back to their separate holes

 

then the sun will kiss me hello

 

then the sidewalks will look good again.

 

back in their cages

 

they'll dream of the next great

 

holiday.

 

probably Labor Day

smashing together on the freeways

talking together

40 in a room,

 

cousins, aunts, sisters, mothers, brothers, uncles,

sons, grandfathers, grandmothers, wives, husbands,

lovers, friends, all the rest,

 

40 in a room

 

talking about nothing,

 

talking about themselves.

 

 

carnival

 

he got drunk and went to sleep

 

in his bed

 

and the fire started

 

and he layed in there

 

burning

 

until a friend in the next room

smelled it

and ran in

 

and tried to pull him out of the fire

by his arms

 

and the skin rolled right off the arms

 

and he had to grab again

 

deeper

 

near the bone,

 

and he got him out and up

 

and the guy started screaming

 

and running blind,

 

he hit some walls

 

finally made 2 doorways

 

and with half a dozen men trying

 

to hold him

 

he broke free

 

and ran into the yeard

 

screaming

 

still running

 

he ran right into some barbed wire

and tangled in the barbed wire

screaming

 

and they had to go up

and get him loose

from the wire

 

he lived for 3 nights and 3

days

 

drinking and smoking

are bad for the

health.

99 degrees

 

September after Labor Day,

 

99 degrees in Burbank, Calif.

 

I am looking at a fly

 

a small brown fly on a yellow curtain;

 

the Mexicans would be wise enough to sleep under trees

 

on a day like this

 

but Americans are stricken with ambition

they will survive as powerful and unhappy

neurotics,

 

right now my tax money is dropping bombs

on starving people in Asia

as I fight the small fly that has arrived from the

curtain by my elbow;

 

I swing and miss the fly,

neurotic American me,

 

the boys who pilot those planes are nice boys, gentle,

they kill apathetically

with honor and grace,

without hate.

 

I know one, he is now a prof who teaches American

Literature at a university in Oregon,

 

I've been drunk with him and his wife, several times,

so he teaches me,

that's nice.

 

99 degrees in Burbank

and as I sit here

 

any number of things are happening,

mostly unhappy things

 

like swearing mechanics with hangovers climbing under cars

and drunken dentists pulling teeth and cursing

and bald-headed surgeons making too much of a mess,

and the editor of Time magazine backing his car out of the

driveway

 

after an argument with his wife;

it's 99 degrees in Burbank

and there's a jet overhead,

 

1 don't think it will bomb me,

 

those Asians don't have enough tax money,

 

the only clever Asians are the ones who claim they are

 

Supremely Blessed, speak good English,

 

grow grey thick beards plus a heavenly smile topped by

 

shining eyes and

 

charge $4 admit at the Shrine to

 

teach placidity and non-ambition

 

and screw half the intellectual girls in the city.

 

it's 99 degrees in Burbank

 

and those who will survive will survive

 

and those who will die will die,

 

and most will dry up and look like toads eating hamburger

sandwiches at noon,

 

I don't know what to do —

send money and the way,

be kind to me,

 

I like it

 

effortless, sweet and easy, remember,

 

I never bombed

anybody, I

can't even kill this

 

fly-

 

 

happy new year

 

I have them timed —

 

first the nurse will arrive in her nice

 

yellow automobile — 4:10 p.m. —

 

she always shows me a lot of

 

leg — and I always look —

 

then think —

 

keep your leg, baby.

 

then, after that,

 

there's the man who arrives

 

and takes his bulldog

 

out to crap

 

about the time I'm out to mail

my letters. We test each other,

never speak — I live without working,

he works without

living;

 

I can see us some day

battling on his front lawn —

he screaming, "you bum!"

and myself screaming back:

 

"lackey! slave!"

as his bulldog chews my leg

and the neighbors pelt me

with stones.

 

I guess I better get interested in

Mexican jumping beans

and the Rose Bowl

Parade.

 

 

the shoelace

 

a woman, a

tire that's flat, a

disease, a

 

desire; fears in front of you,

fears that hold so still

you can study them

like pieces on a

chessboard...

 

it's not the large things that

 

send a man to the

 

madhouse, death he's ready for, or

 

murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood. . .

 

no, it's the continuing series of small tragedies

 

that send a man to the

 

madhouse...

 

not the death of his love

 

but a shoelace that snaps

 

with no time left. . .

 

the dread of life

 

is that swarm of trivialities

 

that can kill quicker than cancer

 

and which are always there —

 

license plates or taxes

 

or expired driver's license,

 

or hiring or firing,

 

doing it or having it done to you, or

 

constipation

 

speeding tickets

 

rickets or crickets or mice or termites or

 

roaches or flies or a

 

broken hook on a

 

screen, or out of gas

 

or too much gas,

 

the sink's stopped-up, the landlord's drunk,

the president doesn't care and the governor's

crazy.

 

lightswitch broken, mattress like a

porcupine;

 

$105 for a tune-up, carburetor and fuel pump at

Sears Roebuck;

 

and the phone bill's up and the market's

down

 

and the toilet chain is

broken,

 

and the light has burned out —

 

the hall light, the front light, the back light,

 

the inner light; it's

 

darker than hell

 

and twice as

 

expensive.

 

then there's always crabs and ingrown toenails

and people who insist they're

your friends;

 

there's always that and worse;

leaky faucet, Christ and Christmas;              

 

blue salami, 9 day rains,

 

50 cent avocados

and purple

liverwurst.

 

or making it

 

as a waitress at Norm's on the split shift,

 

or as an emptier of

 

bedpans,

 

or as a carwash or a busboy

or a stealer of old lady's purses

leaving them screaming on the sidewalks

with broken arms at the age of

80.

 

suddenly

 

2 red lights in your rear view mirror

 

and blood in your

 

underwear;

 

toothache, and $979 for a bridge

 

$300 for a gold

 

tooth,

 

and China and Russia and America, and

long hair and short hair and no

hair, and beards and no

faces, and plenty of zigzag but no

pot, except maybe one to piss in and

the other one around your

gut.

 

with each broken shoelace

 

out of one hundred broken shoelaces,

 

one man, one woman, one

 

thing

 

enters a

 

madhouse.

 

so be careful

when you

bend over.

 

 

chilled green

 

what is it?

 

an old woman, fat, yellow dress,

torn stockings

sitting on the curbing

with a little boy.

 

98 degrees at 3 in the afternoon

 

it seems

 

obscene.

 

but look, they are calm,

almost happy,

they eat the green jello

and the red roses shine.

 

 

life

 

to be eaten by a hog with

bad breath

 

as the lemons swing in the wind

yellow and ours.

 

 

Ill

 

lovers everywhere

clutch like asparagus

leaves

 

 

american matador

 

of course, he still gets his choice

after the bullfights,

but like with any other man

the special one comes along,

you can feel it in the stomach

when they get you there,

and the girl said,

 

"It's either bullfighting or me."

 

he turned on love

 

to look at the face of death.

 

you can see him at Tijuana

working close to the horn

taking chance after

chance, he's been gored

a number of times.

 

and you wonder if the thing is

 

working at his stomach

 

as he fights

 

getting him in closer

 

than he should

 

the sword is pointed

in the sunlight,

it goes in:

love.

 

 

i saw an old-fashioned whore today

 

at the Thrifty drugstore

 

buying a 5th of gin and a 5th of vodka

 

she was a dyed blond

 

and she was relaxed in a black and white striped dress

that fell just below knee-length

and her breasts were large

and she was a little bit fat

 

and the salesgirl who served her showed disgust

 

but the whore was used to all that

 

and waited for her change

 

and for the bottles to be bagged

 

and when the whore walked out

 

she walked out easily

 

and people looked up from their magazines

and the boys around the newsstand looked

and the people parking their cars looked

and I walked behind her

and I looked

 

and she got into a green car

pooltable green

lit a cigarette,

 

and I'm sure she drove off to someplace

magic

 

where people were always laughing and

 

the music was always playing

 

and the drinks were good

 

and the furniture and rugs were nice

 

and the mountains were tall

 

and there were 3 German shepherds on the lawn,

 

and when she made love you knew it

 

and the price was not a lifetime,

 

the blue cigarette smoke curling in the black

 

ashtray a little wet with beer and mix,

 

she'd roll you with the security of a leopard

 

getting a deer,

 

and you ought to see her in the bathtub

singing an aria from one of those

Italian operas.

 

 

poem for barbara, poem for jane

 

poem for barbara, poem for jane,

poem for f ranees, poem for

all or any of them

 

 

the fish ate the flower

and the tombs whistled

Dixie

 

as you told me you didn't care

anymore

 

old men in the pawnshops of the world

 

looked around and killed themselves in my mind

 

when you said you

 

didn't care

 

anymore

 

the day I saw you with your new

lover

 

you and your new lover

 

walking down my boulevards

 

past the butcher shop

 

past the liquor store

 

past the real estate

 

agency

 

ha ha

 

suddenly I didn't care

anymore

 

I went into the store and I bought

 

a figurine of a fawn

 

a small cactus

 

a box of shrimp

 

a pair of green gloves

 

a paring knife

 

some incense

 

pepper milk eggs

 

a fifth of

 

whiskey

 

and a roadmap of lower

Texas

the clerk put it all in a bag

it bulged and was heavy and

at last I knew that I had

something.

 

 

short order

 

I took my girlfriend to your last poetry reading,

she said.

 

yes, yes? I asked.

 

she's young and pretty, she said.

 

and? I asked.

 

she hated your

 

guts.

 

then she stretched out on the couch

 

and pulled off her

 

boots.

 

I don't have very good legs,

she said.

 

all right, I thought, I don't have very good

poetry; she doesn't have very good

legs.

 

scramble two.

 

 

the dwarf

 

we'd had our icecream cones

been scared by a dog

picked flowers

held hands in the sunlight.

 

my little girl is 6

 

and as good a girl as can

 

be.

 

we walked back to my place

where two ladies were moving

out of the apartment

next door.

 

one was a dwarf,

quite squat

with short trunk-like

legs.

 

"Hank, what's wrong with that

woman?"

 

I'm sorry, little lady,

that my child didn't know

that there wasn't anything

wrong with you.

 

 

merry Christmas

 

There I am

 

hungover, I've just made it in

 

and sit next to the mother of my child;

 

she sits there old and grey,

 

I sit there old and greying. . .

there's a 6 year old daughter,

it's Christmas at Edison Grammar School,

December 17th,

 

1 p.m.

 

I sit mostly with women.

 

ah, there's a guy, and there's a guy. . .

 

what's the matter with those bums?

 

no jobs? too

 

bad.

 

first there's something. . .

they need 5 nominations for the

P.T.A. board.

 

4 old dames nominate each other,

 

like sneaky Hitlers.

 

nobody wants the 5th nomination. . .

 

"Will everybody in favor of the nominations

being closed, please Yea in the

affirmative?"

 

there's a dog in there. . .somebody

 

steps on his

 

tail:

 

"YEA-IKE!" he goes...

 

everybody laughs, the nominations are closed.

Jesus Christ,

by a dog...

 

o.k., trot them on.

 

no wait, the orchestra, tiny little people with

 

tiny little violins, most serious little

 

people, they are the string section.

 

they play "Christmas Songs" under the direction

 

of Mr. Plepler and Mr. Mettler.

 

Mettler? oh well, it's not

very good.

 

"Five Little Christmas Bells," courtesy A.M. & P.M.

Kindergarten,

 

has been changed to "Rocking The Child."

 

no reason is

 

given.

 

the dog has been

kicked out. I am still there

with hangover.

 

next the Kindergartens sing

 

"Jingle Bells." they've been taught by

 

Mrs. Bowers, Miss Lemon, Miss Lieberman.

 

I check my program. . .

how much longer?

 

I notice that the children are black, white,

oriental, brown. . .it's integration

but it's easy, they show us how easy.

 

2nd, 3rd, 4th grades. . .

 

"Twelve Days of Christmas," they hold up paintings,

take them down; up down, up down, and back to

the Partridge in the Pear Tree,

they've done it. perfect, even with the

mistakes, courtesy Mrs. La Brache, Mrs. Bitticks.

next comes

 

"Pine Cones and Holly Berries," not so

good.

 

now here are the 5th and 6th graders. . .

 

"Santa and the Mouse" . . .

 

it's garbled, nobody can hear what they are

 

saying, it's under the direction of

 

Mr. Doerflinger. and he flings 'em.

 

he sits them down and sits right down with them

 

and all you can hear is

 

Mr. Doerflinger's beautiful voice.

 

Doerflinger seems everywhere, there he is in the center.

 

there he is showing his

 

buttocks, he likes to leap and run

 

about, he sings and sings and gives his 5th and 6th

 

graders the minor parts to back his

 

singular chorus. I try to force myself to get jealous

 

of Doerflinger but I

 

can't. I'm very happy that I am not

 

Mr. Doerflinger. a woman across the aisle turns to me:

 

"He has a beautiful voice," she says.

 

"Yes," I smile back,

 

"he has."

 

"Christmas Tree," 3rd, 4th, 5th graders,

then, of course, we have

"Deck the Halls."

courtesy of Mrs. Homes.

 

o, my god, it's the 1st and 2nd graders

now! I'm nervous as shit.

 

I'm sick, I

 

don't know what to

 

do. I've done time, lain in alleys drunk,

 

slept with 50 women, I can't take

 

it. . .the mother of my child seems

 

quite calm. I'm the

 

coward. . .where is she?

 

all of a sudden they bring them through the

 

back door —

 

they've been bringing them

through the front,

what's going on?

 

there's my kid, she's walking

past, "hi!" I say, "hi!"

she smiles and puts a finger to her

lips, "shhh..."

 

they file onto the

 

platform. 1st and 2nd graders,

 

c/ o Mr. Games, Miss McCormick, Mrs. Nagata, Mrs.

 

Samarge. o.k.

 

"Too Fat for the Chimney" . . .

not too good,

 

but she keeps looking at me and grinning.

 

singing, waving;

 

I smile back, wave, all

grins. . .the old jailbird. . .

then "Toy Trains."

 

much better, we applaud, they file out in order,

 

each waiting their

 

turn.

 

she's gone...

somewhere.

 

the remainder of the program loses

 

some meaning,

 

except a very sexy young

 

chicano teacher

 

in a yellow dress

 

comes out and sings

 

"Silent Night"

 

in Spanish.

 

meanwhile Mr. Doerflinger is seen running about,

 

in this door, out that

 

one, showing his buttocks,

 

racing across the stage in some

 

great

 

urgency...

 

"Doerflinger," says somebody,

he will not be forgotten by

anybody, he will not allow himself to be,

especially by the ladies.

 

it goes on.

 

"Let There Be Peace On Earth"

 

we all sing together, the last number on the

 

program.

 

taxpayers forget Christmas, remember instead how nice your

children are.

 

we get back to the mother's apartment

 

and there is a notice that they will shut off

the gas that

 

day. the mother claims no previous

 

notice has been

 

received.

 

I drive them down to 5th street

in Santa Monica

to the gas co.

 

I wave

 

goodbye, they stand on the corner.

 

my daughter has a hole

 

in her black

 

tights,

 

right

 

knee...

 

"Let there be peace on earth

And let it begin with me.

 

Let there be peace on earth.

 

The peace that was meant to be.

 

With God as our Father,

 

Brothers all are we —

 

Let me walk with my brother

In perfect harmony."

 

 

marina

 

majestic, magic

infinite

 

my little girl is

sun

 

on the carpet —

out the door

picking a

flower, ha!,

an old man,

battle-wrecked,

emerges from his

chair

 

and she looks at me

but only sees

love,

 

ha!, and I become

quick with the world

and love right back

just like I was meant

to do.

 

 

one with dante

 

I have lost it in Paradise Valley

 

with 4 women sitting in a kitchen

 

talking and laughing about men and love and life and

 

sex,

 

I have lost it in Paradise Valley

I have lost the word and the way and the light,

 

4 women sitting in the kitchen

drinking gallons of

coffee, and now

I sit in front of a window

looking at the desert,

one with Dante,

 

I wonder what the Paradise Valley ladies want,

these 3 sisters and a friend.

 

through this small window,

 

I see children dogs cattle horses flies sand

chickens ducks,

 

I hear the names of men now from the kitchen

and the girls laugh, and

I wonder, what am I

doing here?

 

these girls. . .this continual examination of the senses

and the ideas and the reasons and the facts and the

moods

 

destroys, destroys...

 

I have lost it in Paradise Valley,

you have to lose it somewhere:

 

I chose Arizona; although the love

last night was

 

good, I am lost in the desert

I have given it up.

 

 

an interesting night

 

my girlfriend

 

she started smashing

 

all my bottles

 

my whiskey bottle and my

 

beer bottles,

 

meanwhile

 

yelling and screaming,

then she ran

out the door.

 

3 police arrived 5 minutes

later,

 

one holding shotgun,

and they asked

various questions,

one of them being:

what do you

do?

 

I'm a writer,

 

I said.

 

the cop smirked at

me, walked over to the

typewriter,

 

picked up some papers

and started

reading.

 

it was my 2,000 word essay

on the meaning of

suicide.

 

he didn't seem much

interested.

 

after they left

1 went all the way to

Altadena

 

and slept with a fine

22 year old girl

 

some pot

3 cats

 

3 homosexuals

a 7 year old boy

a dog, and

a 24 by 20 photo

of me

 

hanging over the fireplace,

 

looking

 

wise.

 

 

a threat to my immortality

 

she undressed in front of me

keeping her pussy to the front

while I layed in bed with a bottle of

beer.

 

where'd you get that wart on

your ass? I asked.

 

that's no wart, she said,

that's a mole, a kind of

birthmark.

 

that thing scares me, I said,

let's call

it off.

 

I got out of bed and

walked into the other room and

sat on the rocker

and rocked.

 

she walked out. now, listen, you

 

old fart, you've got warts and scars and

 

all kinds of things all over

 

you. I do believe you're the ugliest

 

old man

 

I've ever seen.

 

forget that, I said, tell me some more

 

about that

 

mole on your butt.

 

she walked into the other room

 

and got dressed and then ran past me

 

slammed the door

 

and was

 

gone.

 

and to think,

 

she'd read all my books of

poetry too.

 

I just hoped she wouldn't tell

anybody that

I wasn't pretty.

 

 

climax

 

I was somewhere. . .somewhere in Europe

 

act II, scene II

 

Siegfried...

 

the whole building shook

 

there was flame

 

world ending,

 

bodies hurled through air

 

like mad

 

clowns...

 

the orchestra quit

 

playing.

 

"It's the BOMB! THE

BOMB!" somebody

 

screamed, the bomb the bomb the bomb

the bomb.

 

I grabbed a fat blonde

tore her dress away,

gotterdammerung\

 

"I don't want to

die!" said the

 

blonde, the whole opera house was

 

coming down, blood on the

 

floor, more flame.

 

smoke, smoke, screaming, it was

 

terrible. I stuck it

 

in.

 

 

a man's woman

 

the dream of a man

is a whore with a gold tooth

and a garter belt,

perfumed

 

with false eyebrows

 

mascara

 

earrings

 

light pink panties

salami breath

high heels

 

long stockings with a very slight

run on back of left stocking,

a little bit fat,

a little bit drunk,

 

a little bit silly and a little bit crazy

 

who doesn't tell dirty jokes

 

and has 3 warts on her back

 

and pretends to enjoy symphony music

 

and who will stay a week

 

just one week

 

and wash the dishes and cook and fuck and suck

 

and scrub the kitchen floor

 

and not show any photos of her children

 

or talk about her x-husband or husband

 

or where she went to school or where she was born

 

or why she went to jail last time

 

or who she's in love with,

 

just stay one week

 

just one week

 

and do the thing and go and never come

back

 

for that one earring on the dresser.

 

 

tight pink dress

 

I read where this 44 year old soprano of some fame

 

fell out of a 4 story window

 

and killed herself, well, I suppose this is all right

 

for sopranos of some fame, but

 

I think that 8 stories is more

 

reasonable.

 

I know this woman, a sister of the mother of my

 

child, some years back

 

her husband divorced her

 

and she jumped out of a 4 story window

 

and broke both legs

 

and other assorted parts.

 

maybe that soprano just wasn't as tough as she was;

 

well, Helen got over the broken leg and parts,

 

and she came around one day to my place in a nice tight

 

pink dress, and we were alone but

 

nothing happened, I didn't want it to,

 

and we talked

 

and now she is really married to something,

one of the most obnoxious souls

that I know...

 

"he plays the flute," says the mother of my child,

 

"they get along..."

 

he came to see me one time and I ran him out the door:

he packed death around with him like breath chasers.

I've advised her to go 12 stories high

when this one fails. . .

 

I should have taken her the day she arrived in her

tight pink dress. . .

this guy and his flute. . .

he probably shits flutes. . .

 

and Helen with all that money, you think she might have

done better.

 

 

more or less, for julie:

 

on the Hammond or through the bomb-shadowed window,

 

through steak turned blue with the rot of drunken days,

 

through signature and saliva

 

through Savannah,

 

dark running streets like veins

 

caught in a juniper brush, through love spilled

 

behind a broken shade on an October day;

 

through forms and windows and lines,

 

through a book by Kafka stained with wine,

 

through wives and friends and jails,

 

standing young once

 

hearing Beethoven or Bruckner,

 

or even riding a bicycle,

 

young as that,

 

impossible,

 

coming across the bridge

 

in Philadelphia

 

and meeting your first whore,

 

falling on the ice, drunk and numbed,

 

you picking up she, she picking up he,

 

until at last, laughing across all barriers,

 

no marriage was ever more innocent or blessed,

 

and I remember her name and yes her eyes,

 

and a small mole on her left shoulder,

 

and so we go down, down in sadness, sadness,

 

sitting in a grease-stained room

 

listening to the corn boil.

 

 

this is the way it goes and goes and goes

 

"All your writing about pain and suffering is

a bunch of bullshit ." —

 

just because I told you that rock music

hurts my head

 

just because we have slept and awakened and

eaten together

 

just because we've been in cars and at racetracks

together

 

in parks in bathtubs in rooms

together

 

just because we've seen the same swan and the same

dog at the same time

 

just because we've seen the same wind blow the same

curtain

 

you have suddenly become a literary critic

 

just because you have sculpted my head

and read my books

 

and told me of your loves and your flirtations and

your travels

 

just because I know the name of your daughter

 

and have changed a flat tire for you

 

you have suddenly become a literary critic

 

just because you've had 3 poems accepted by a mimeo mag

just because you're writing a novel about your own madness

just because you shake your ass and have long brown hair

you have suddenly become a literary critic

 

just because I have fucked you 144 times

you have suddenly become a literary critic

 

well, then, tell me,

 

of all these writers... who's pain is real?

 

what? yes, I might have

 

guessed — your pain is

 

real, so, in the best interest of us all

 

wave goodbye to the living who have lost the strength

 

to weep, and

 

as white ladies in pink rooms put on

blue and green earrings,

wave goodbye to me.

 

 

left with the dog

 

men in white t-shirts (unbothered

by life) are walking their

dogs

outside

 

as I watch a professional basketball

game on

t.v. and

 

I have no interest

 

in who will win but I do notice

 

a lady in the grandstand crossing

 

her legs (my editor phoned me last night at 10:15 p.m. and

 

found me asleep —

 

maybe that's why he has to

 

print the unpublished works of

 

Gertrude Stein).

 

very bad

 

symphony music now

 

(I mean bad for me)

 

the violin sings of dank life and the

 

grave and I am a student of

 

both.

 

here now

 

my love has gone looking

for an apartment in Venice,

 

California and

 

she has left me with her

 

dog (a not quite immaculate creature named

 

Stubby

 

who sits behind my chair listening to a violin and

a typewriter).

 

they say

 

fire-eaters, traffic cops, boxers and

clerks in department stores

sometimes know the

truth. (I do what I

can.)

 

the best one can settle for

is an afternoon

 

with the rent paid, some food in the refrigerator,

 

and death something like

 

a bad painting by a bad painter

 

(that you finally buy because there's not

 

anything else

 

around).

 

my love has gone looking for an apartment

in Venice, California across the top of the sky

something marches upsidedown;

 

 

praying for a best seller

 

waiting for my novelist friend to put the

 

word down

 

she sits in the kitchen

 

thinking about the madhouse

 

thinking about her x-husband

 

while I entertain her 3 year old child

 

who is now in the bathtub;

 

well, listen, I guess after a madhouse or

 

2 you need a few breaks. . .

 

my novelist friend may be crazy now

 

or she wouldn't be in the same house

 

with me,

 

or maybe I'm the one who's crazy:

she's told me a couple of times she's going to

cut off my balls if I do this thing or

that thing.

 

well, taking a chance with my balls on the line

that way

 

it had better be a good novel

 

or at least a bad one that is a best seller.

 

I sit here rolling cigarette after cigarette

 

while listening to her

 

type.

 

I suppose that for each genius launched

5 or 6 people must suffer for

it

 

them

 

him

 

her.

 

very well.

 

 

that one

 

your child has no name

your hair has no color

your face has no flesh

your feet have no toes

your country has ten flags

 

your voice has no tongue

your ideas slide like snakes

your eyes do not match

 

you eat bouquets of flowers

throw poisoned meat to the dogs

 

I see you linger in alleys with a club

I see you with a knife for anybody

I see you peddling a fishhead for a heart

 

and when the sun comes churning down

 

you'll come walking in from the kitchen

 

with a drink in your hand

 

humming the latest tune

 

and smiling at me in your red tight dress

 

extraordinary...

 

 

have you ever kissed a panther ?

 

this woman thinks she's a panther

 

and sometimes when we are making love

 

she'll snarl and spit

 

and her hair comes down

 

and she looks out from the strands

 

and shows me her fangs

 

but I kiss her anyhow and continue to love.

 

have you ever kissed a panther?

 

have you ever seen a female panther enjoying

 

the act of love?

 

you haven't loved, friend.

 

you with your squirrels and chipmunks

 

and elephants and sheep.

 

you ought to sleep with a panther

 

you'll never again want

 

squirrels, chipmunks, elephants, sheep, fox,

 

wolverines,

 

never anything but the female panther

 

the female panther walking across the room

 

the female panther walking across your soul,

 

all other love songs are lies

 

when that black smooth fur moves against you

 

and the sky falls down against your back,

 

the female panther is the dream arrived real

 

and there's no going back

 

or wanting to —

 

the fur up against you,

 

the search over

 

and you are locked against the eyes of a panther.

 

 

2 carnations

 

my love brought me 2 carnations

my love brought me red

my love brought me her

my love told me not to worry

my love told me not to die

 

my love is 2 carnations on a table

while listening to Schoenberg

on an evening darkening into night

 

my love is young

 

the carnations burn in the dark;

 

she is gone leaving the taste of almonds

 

her body tastes like almonds

 

2 carnations burning red

as she sits far away

now dreaming of china dogs

tinkling through her fingers

 

my love is ten thousand carnations burning

 

my love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment

 

on the bough

 

as the cat

 

crouches.

 

 

man and woman in bed at 10 p.m.

 

I feel like a can of sardines, she said.

 

I feel like a band-aid, I said,

 

I feel like a tuna fish sandwich, she said.

 

I feel like a sliced tomato, I said.

 

I feel like it's gonna rain, she said.

 

I feel like the clock has stopped, I said.

 

I feel like the door's unlocked, she said.

 

I feel like an elephant's gonna walk in, I said.

 

I feel like we ought to pay the rent, she said.

 

I feel like we oughta get a job, I said.

 

I feel like you oughta get a job, she said.

 

I don't feel like working, I said.

 

I feel like you don't care for me, she said.

 

I feel like we oughta make love, I said.

 

I feel like we've been making too much love, she said.

I feel like we oughta make more love, I said.

 

I feel like you oughta get a job, she said.

 

I feel like you oughta get a job, I said.

 

I feel like a drink, she said.

 

I feel like a 5th of whiskey, I said.

 

I feel like we're going to end up on wine, she said.

 

I feel like you're right, I said.

 

I feel like giving up, she said.

 

I feel like I need a bath, I said.

 

I feel like you need a bath too, she said.

 

I feel like you ought to bathe my back, I said.

 

I feel like you don't love me, she said.

 

I feel like I do love you, I said.

 

I feel that thing in me now, she said.

 

I feel that thing in you now too, I said.

 

I feel like I love you now, she said.

 

I feel like I love you more than you do me, I said.

 

I feel wonderful, she said, I feel like screaming.

 

I feel like going on forever, I said.

 

I feel like you can, she said.

 

I feel, I said.

 

I feel, she said.

 

 

the answer

 

she runs into the front room from outside

laughing,

 

well, you always wanted a CRAZY woman,

didn't you?

hahahaha, ha.

 

you've always been fascinated with CRAZY women,

haven't you?

hahahaha, ha.

 

sit down, I say, I have the coffee water

on.

 

we sit by the kitchen window on a Los Angeles

 

Sunday,

 

and I say,

 

see that man walking by?

 

yes, she says.

 

know what he's thinking?

 

I ask.

 

what's he thinking?

she asks.

 

he's thinking, I say, he's thinking

that he wants a loaf of bread for

breakfast.

 

a loaf of bread for breakfast?

 

yes, can you imagine some crazy son of a bitch

 

wanting a loaf of bread for

 

breakfast?

 

I can't imagine it.

 

I get up and pour the coffees, then

we look at each

 

other, something has gone wrong the

night before and we want to find out

if it was her upset stomach

or my diarrhea

or something worse.

 

we lift our coffees, touch them in toast,

our eyes spark the question

 

and we sit by a kitchen window on a Los Angeles

 

Sunday,

 

waiting.

 

 

a split

 

death, he said, let it come,

it was after the races,

zipper on pants broken,

 

$80 winner

out one woman

 

he drove through stop signs and

red lights

 

at 70 m.p.h. on a side street

 

and then he heard the noise —

 

he was smashing through a barricade of

 

street obstructions

 

boards and lights flying

 

things jumping on the hood,

 

the car was thrown against the curbing

 

and he straightened it just in time

 

to miss a parked car,

 

he was drunk but it was the first time in

 

35 years he had hit anything,

 

and he ran up a dead end street,

 

turned, came on out,

 

took two rights

 

and 5 minutes later he was inside his

 

apartment. He got on the phone

 

and an hour later there were 14 people

 

drinking with him,

 

all but the right one,

 

and the next day he was sick

 

and she was there

 

and she said she had lost her purse out of

town ($55 and all her i.d.), 100 miles out of town,

she had gotten tired of waiting for him to phone

or not to phone;

 

she said, let's not have any more splits, I can't

bear them,

 

and he vomited, and she said,

 

all you want to do is kill yourself.

 

he said, all right, no more splits,

 

but he knew it would happen again and again

 

right down to the last split,

 

and he got up and cleaned his mouth and washed

and got back into bed with her

 

and she held him like a baby,

 

and he thought, hell, what kind of man am I?

 

and then he didn't care

 

and they kissed

 

and it was all right until

 

next time.

 

 

power failure

 

was all set to write an immortal poem,

it was 9:30 p.m.,

 

had taken me all day to get the juices

properly aligned,

 

I sat down to the typewriter

 

reached for the keys and then

 

all the lights in the neighborhood went out.

 

she was working on her novel.

 

well, she said, we might as well go to

 

bed.

 

we went to bed.

 

since we had fucked 5 times in 2 nights

we decided it might be a better time to

tell eerie stories.

 

she told me one about the 2 sisters lost in the woods

who came upon the madman's house, but it was

cold and dark and he was nowhere about

so they decided to go in, and one sister slept in

one bed and the other slept in the other,

and later in the night one sister was awakened by

this squeeking sound

 

and she looked up and here was the madman

rocking back and forth in this rocker

with her sister's head in his lap,

and I told one

 

about how these two bums were in a skidrow room

and one bum sat on the floor and stuck his hand in his

mouth and ate his hand and then his arm and then ate the

other hand and soon ate himself up while the other bum

watched, and then the other bum sat on the floor and did

the same thing, and the story ends with this neon sign

blinking color off and on across the vacant floor. . .

well, we went to sleep

 

and then we were awakened when all the lights came on

 

plus the radio and the t.v.,

 

and I said, oh god, life is back again,

 

and she said, well, we might as well sleep now,

 

and so I got up and turned everything off

 

and we closed our eyes

 

and she thought, there goes my immortal novel,

and I thought, there goes my immortal poem.

 

everything depends upon some type of electricity,

the street lights kept me awake for 30 minutes,

then I dreamed that I ate matchsticks and lightbulbs

for a living and I was the best in my trade.

 

 

snake in the watermelon

 

we french kissed in the bathtub

 

then got up and rode the merrygoround

 

I fell over backwards in the chair

 

then we ate 2 cheese sandwiches

 

watered the plants and

 

read the New York Times.

 

the essence is in the action

 

the action is the essence,

 

between the moon and the sea and the ring

 

in the bathtub

 

the tame rats become more beautiful

 

than long red hair,

 

my father's hands cut steak again

 

1 roller skate before pygmies with green eyes,

 

the snake in the watermelon shakes the shopping cart,

 

we entered between the sheets which were as

 

delicious as miracles and walks in the park,

 

the hawk smiled daylight and nighttime,

 

we rode past frogs and elephants

 

past mines in mountains

 

past cripples working ouija boards,

 

she had toes on her feet

 

1 had toes on my feet

 

we rode up and down and away

 

around,

 

it was sensible and pliable and holy

 

and felt very good

 

very very good,

 

the red lights blinked

 

the zepplin flew away

 

the war ended,

 

we stretched out then

 

and looked at the ceiling

 

a calm sea of a ceiling,

 

it was all right,

 

then we got back in the bathtub together

and french kissed

some more.

 

 

style

 

style is the answer to everything —

a fresh way to approach a dull or a

dangerous thing,

to do a dull thing with style

is preferable to doing a dangerous thing

without it.

 

Joan of Arc had style

 

John the Baptist

 

Christ

 

Socrates

 

Caesar,

 

Garcia Lorca.

 

style is the difference,

a way of doing,

a way of being done.

 

6 herons standing quietly in a pool of water

or you walking out of the bathroom naked

without seeing

me.

 

 

the shower

 

we like to shower afterwards

 

(I like the water hotter than she)

 

and her face is always soft and peaceful

 

and she'll wash me first

 

spread the soap over my balls

 

lift the balls

 

squeeze them,

 

then wash the cock:

 

"hey, this thing is still hard!"

then get all the hair down there, —

the belly, the back, the neck, the legs,

 

I grin grin grin,

and then I wash her. . .

first the cunt, I

 

stand behind her, my cock in the cheeks of her ass

I gently soap up the cunt hairs,

wash there with a soothing motion,

 

I linger perhaps longer than necessary,

 

then I get the backs of the legs, the ass,

 

the back, the neck, I turn her, kiss her,

 

soap up the breasts, get them and the belly, the neck,

 

the fronts of the legs, the ankles, the feet,

 

and then the cunt, once more, for luck. . .

 

another kiss, and she gets out first,

 

toweling, sometimes singing while I stay in

 

turn the water on hotter

 

feeling the good times of love's miracle

 

I then get out...

 

it is usually mid-afternoon and quiet,

 

and getting dressed we talk about what else

 

there might be to do,

 

but being together solves most of it,

 

in fact, solves all of it

 

for as long as those things stay solved

 

in the history of woman and

 

man, it's different for each

 

better and worse for each —

 

for me, it's splendid enough to remember

 

past the marching of armies

 

and the horses that walk the streets outside

 

past the memories of pain and defeat and unhappiness:

 

Linda, you brought it to me,

when you take it away

do it slowly and easily

 

make it as if I were dying in my sleep instead of in

my life, amen.

 

 

if we take —

 

if we take what we can see —

 

the engines driving us mad,

 

lovers finally hating;

 

this fish in the market

 

staring upward into our minds;

 

flowers rotting, flies web-caught;

 

riots, roars of caged lions,

 

clowns in love with dollar bills,

 

nations moving people like pawns;

 

daylight thieves with beautiful

 

nighttime wives and wines;

 

the crowded jails,

 

the commonplace unemployed,

 

dying grass, 2-bit fires;

 

men old enough to love the grave.

 

These things, and others, in content

show life swinging on a rotten axis.

 

But they've left us a bit of music

and a spiked show in the corner,

a jigger of scotch, a blue necktie,

a small volume of poems by Rimbaud,

a horse running as if the devil were

twisting his tail

 

over bluegrass and screaming, and then,

love again

 

like a streetcar turning the corner

 

on time,

 

the city waiting,

 

the wine and the flowers,

 

the water walking across the lake

 

and summer and winter and summer and summer

 

and winter again.