Burning in Water, Drowing in Flame (12 page)

the weather is hot on the back of my watch

which is down at Finkelstein’s

who is gifted with 3 balls

but no heart, but you’ve got to understand

when the bull goes down

or the whore, the heart is laid aside for something else,

and let’s not over-rate obvious decency

for in a crap game you may be cutting down

some wobbly king of 6 kids

and a hemorrhoid butt on his last unemployment check,

and who is to say the rose is greater than the thorn?

not I, Henry,

and when your love gets flabby knees and prefers flat shoes,

maybe you should have stuck it into something else

like an oil well

or a herd of cows.

I’m too old to argue,

I’ve gone with the poem

and been k.o.’d with the old sucker-punch

round after round,

but sometimes I like to think of the Kaiser

or any other fool full of medals and nothing else,

or the first time we read Dos

or Eliot with his trousers rolled;

the weather is hot on the back of my watch

which is down at Finkelstein’s,

but you know what they say: things are tough all over,

and I remember once on the bum in Texas

I watched a crow-blast, one hundred farmers with one hundred shotguns

jerking off the sky with a giant penis of hate

and the crows came down half-dead, half-living,

and they clubbed them to death to save their shells

but they ran out of shells before they ran out of crows

and the crows came back and walked around the pellets and

stuck out their tongues

and mourned their dead and elected new leaders

and then all at once flew home to fuck to fill the gap.

you can only kill what shouldn’t be there,

and Finkelstein should be there and my watch

and maybe myself, and I realize that if the poems are bad

they are supposed to be bad and if they are good

they are likewise supposed to be—although there is a minor

fight to be fought,

but still I am sad

because I was in this small town somewhere in the badlands,

way off course, not even wanting to be there,

two dollars in my wallet, and a farmer turned to me

and asked me what time it was

and I wouldn’t tell him,

and later they gathered them up for burning

as if they were no better than dung with feathers,

feathers and a little gasoline,

and from the bottom of one pile

a not-quite-dead crow smiled at me.

it was 4:35 p.m.

wha’, what did you expect? a schoolboy lisping Donne? or

some more practical lover filling you with the stench of Life?

I’m a fool and no gentleman: I walked the Brooklyn Bridge

with Crane in pajamas, but suicide fails as you get older:

there’s less and less to kill.

so among the skin and lambchops, the sick neckties of

other closets, I scheme schemes round as oranges

filled with the music of my crafty mumbling.

Brooke? no. I am a monkey with an olive lost in the

circus sand of your laughter, circus apes, circus tigers,

circus madmen of finance screwing their secretaries before

the 5:15…and what did
you
expect?

a pink-cheek dribbling Picasso colors on your dry brain?

so, the room was blue with the smoke of my boiling, hell,

a senseless sea

and I fell fingers sotted to the last pinch of your juice,

fell through the thorned vines cursing your name,

no gentleman

no gentleman,

kissed-off love like snake-bite,

the veranda buzzed with flies, buzzed with flies

and lies, and your red mouth screamed,

your lamps screamed

breaking like overdue bills:

DRUNK! DRUNK AGAIN!
O, YOU IDIOT!

so, Yeats, Keats, teats…nothing but an apricot!

wha’, what happened to Spain? my boy Lorca?

the revolution? must join the brigade!

lemme outa here!

I suppose so.

I was living in an attic in Philadelphia

it became very hot in the summer and so I stayed in the

bars. I didn’t have any money and so with what was almost left

I put a small ad in the paper and said I was a writer

looking for work…

which was a god damned lie; I was a writer

looking for a little time and a little food and some

attic rent.

a couple of days later when I finally came home

from somewhere

the landlady said, there was somebody looking for

you. and I said,

there must be some mistake. she said,

no, it was a writer and he said he wanted you to help him write

a history book.

oh, fine, I said, and I knew with that I had another week’s

rent—I mean, on the cuff—

so I sat around drinking wine on credit and watching the

hot pigeons

suffer and fuck on my hot roof.

I turned the radio on real loud

drank the wine and wondered how I could make a history book

interesting but true.

but the bastard never came back,

and I had to finally sign on with a railroad track gang

going West

and they gave us cans of food but no

openers

and we broke the cans against the seats and sides of

railroad cars a hundred years old with dust

the food wasn’t cooked and the water tasted like

candlewick

and I leaped off into a clump of brush somewhere in

Texas

all green with nice-looking houses in the

distance

1 found a park

slept all night

and then they found me and put me in a cell

and they asked me about murders and

robberies.

they wanted to get a lot of stuff off the books

to prove their efficiency

but I wasn’t
that
tired

and they drove me to the next big town

fifty-seven miles away

the big one kicked me in the ass

and they drove off.

but I lucked it:

two weeks later I was sitting in the office of the city hall

half-asleep in the sun like the big fly on my elbow

and now and then she took me down to a meeting of the council

and I listened very gravely as if I knew what was happening

as if I knew how the funds of a halfass town were being

dismantled.

later I went to bed and woke up with teethmarks all over

me, and I said, Christ, watch it, baby! you might give me

cancer! and I’m rewriting the history of the Crimean War!

and they all came to her house—

all the cowboys, all the cowboys:

fat, dull and covered with dust.

and we all shook hands.

I had on a pair of old bluejeans, and they said

oh, you’re a writer, eh?

and I said: well, some think so.

and some still think so…

others, of course, haven’t quite wised up yet.

two weeks later they

ran me out

of town.

I wait on life like a pregnancy, put the stethoscope to

the gut

but all I hear now is

the piano slamming its teeth through areas of my

brain

(somebody in this neighborhood likes

Gershwin which is too bad

for

          me)

and the woman sits behind me

sits there sits there

and keeps lighting cigarettes

and now the nurses leave the hospital near here

and they wear dresses that are naked in the sun

to cheer the dead and the dying and the doctors

but it does not help

me

if I could rip them with moans of delight it

would neither add or take away

anything

now now

            a horn blows a tired

summer like a gladiola given up and leaning against a

house and

the bottles we have emptied would strangle the

sensibilities…of God

now I look up and see my face in the mirror:

if I could only kill the man who killed the

man

more than coffeepots and cheroots have done me

in more than myself has done me

in

madness comes like a mouse out of the cupboard and

they hand me a photograph of the

moon

the woman behind me has a daughter who falls in love

with men in beards and sandals and berets

who smoke pipes and carefully comb their hair and

play chess and talk continually of the

soul and of Art

this is good enough: you’ve got to love

something

now the landlord waters outside dripping the

plants with false rain

Gershwin is finished now it sounds like

Greig

o, it’s all so common and hard! impossible!

I do wish somebody would go blackberry

wild

but no

I suppose it will be the

same: a beer and then another

beer and then another

beer

maybe then a halfpint of

scotch

three cigars—smoke smoke yes smoke

under the electric sun of night

hidden here in these walls with this woman and her

life while

the police are taking the drunks off the

streets

I do not know how much longer I can

last

but I keep thinking

ow! my god!

the

gladiola will straighten hard and

full of

color like an

arrow pointing at the

sun

Christ will shudder like

marmalade

my cat will look like Gandhi once

looked

everything everything

even the tiles in the men’s room at the

Union Station will be

true

all those mirrors there

finally with faces in them

        roses

    forests

no more policemen

            no more

me.

it is justified

all dying is justified

all killing all death all

passing,

nothing is in vain

not even the neck

of a fly,

and a flower

passes through the armies

and like a small boy

bragging,

lifts up its

color.

I had boils the size of tomatoes

all over me

they stuck a drill into me

down at the county hospital,

and

just as the sun went down

everyday

there was a man in a nearby ward

he’d start hollering for his friend Joe.

JOE! he’d holler, OH JOE! JOE! J O E!

COME GET ME, JOE!

Joe never came by.

I’ve never heard such mournful

sounds.

Joe was probably working off a

piece of ass or

attempting to solve a crossword puzzle.

I’ve always said

if you want to find out who your friends are

go to a madhouse or

jail.

and if you want to find out where love is not

be a perpetual

loser.

I was very lucky with my boils

being drilled and tortured

against the backdrop of the Sierra Madre mountains

while that sun went down;

when that sun went down I knew what
I
would do

when I finally got that drill in my hands

like I have it

now.