The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (5 page)

 

the reason for the riot was we kept getting beans

and a guard grabbed a colored boy who threw his on the floor

and somebody touched a button

and everybody was grabbing everybody;

I clubbed my best friend behind the ear

somebody threw coffee in my face

(what the hell, you couldn’t drink it)

and I got out to the yard

and I heard the guns going

and it seemed like every con had a knife but me,

and all I could do was pray and run

and I didn’t have a god and was fat from playing

poker for pennies with my cellmate,

and the warden’s voice started coming over the cans,

and I heard later, in the confusion,

the cook raped a sailor,

and I lost my shaving cream, a pack of smokes

and a copy of
The New Yorker;

also 3 men were shot,

a half dozen knifed,

35 put in the hole,

all yard privileges suspended,

the screws as jittery as L.A. bookies,

the prison radio off,

real quiet,

visitors sent home,

but the next morning

we did get our mail—

a letter from St. Louis:

Dear Charles, I am sorry you are in prison,

but you cannot break the law,

and there was a pressed carnation,

perfume, the looming of outside,

kisses and panties,

laughter and beer,

and that night for dinner

they marched us all back down

to the beans.

 

 

neither does this mean

the dead are

at the door

begging bread

before

the stockpiles

blow

like all the

storms and hell

in one big love,

but anyhow

I rented a 6 dollar a week

room

in Chinatown

with a window as large as the

side of the world

filled with night flies and neon,

lighted like Broadway

to frighten away rats,

and I walked into a bar and sat down,

and the Chinaman looked at my rags

and said

no credit

and I pulled out a hundred dollar bill

and asked for a cup of Confucius juice

and 2 China dolls with slits of eyes

just about the size of the rest of them

slid closer

and we sat

and we

waited.

 

 

a poem is a city filled with streets and sewers

filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,

filled with banality and booze,

filled with rain and thunder and periods of

drought, a poem is a city at war,

a poem is a city asking a clock why,

a poem is a city burning,

a poem is a city under guns

its barbershops filled with cynical drunks,

a poem is a city where God rides naked

through the streets like Lady Godiva,

where dogs bark at night, and chase away

the flag; a poem is a city of poets,

most of them quite similar

and envious and bitter…

a poem is this city now,

50 miles from nowhere,

9:09 in the morning,

the taste of liquor and cigarettes,

no police, no lovers, walking the streets,

this poem, this city, closing its doors,

barricaded, almost empty,

mournful without tears, aging without pity,

the hardrock mountains,

the ocean like a lavender flame,

a moon destitute of greatness,

a small music from broken windows…

 

 

a poem is a city, a poem is a nation,

a poem is the world…

and now I stick this under glass

for the mad editor’s scrutiny,

and night is elsewhere

and faint gray ladies stand in line,

dog follows dog to estuary,

the trumpets bring on gallows

as small men rant at things

they cannot do.

 

 

the hunter goes by my window

4 feet locked in the bright stillness of a

yellow and blue

night.

 

 

cruel strangeness takes hold in wars, in

gardens—

the yellow and blue night explodes before

me, atomic, surgical,

full of starlit

devils…

 

 

then the cat leaps up on the

fence, a tubby dismay,

stupid, lonely,

whiskers like an old lady in the

supermarket

and naked as the

moon.

 

 

I am temporarily

delighted.

 

 

Idle in the forest of my room

with tungsten trees, owl boiling coffee,

webs cowled in gold over windows

staring outward into hell;

cigarette breath: statues of perfection,

not stuffed or whirled in cancers

of ranting;

engines and wheels crawl to gaseous

ends along the sabre-tooth;

my trees climb with monkey-rhyme,

climb out through the ceiling

breaking TV antennas and

the dull howl of canned laughter,

canned humor, canned death;

idle, idle in this forest,

calla lilies, grass, stone,

all nighttime level peace

of no bombers or faces,

and I dream the stone dream,

the grass dream,

the river running through my

fingerbones

one hundred and fifty years away,

leaving shots of grit and gold

and radium,

lifted and turned

by dizzied fish

and dropped,

raising flecks of sand

in my sleep…

The owl spits his coffee,

my monkeys chit the gibberish plan,

and my walls,

my walls help endure the seizing.

 

 

through the venetian blinds I saw a fat man in a brown coat

(with a head I can only describe as like a marshmallow)

drag the casket from the hearse: it was battleship gray

with all-yellow flowers.

they put it on a roller that was hidden in purple drape

and the marshmallow-man and one pin-crisp bloodless woman

walked for
him
up the incline…and!—

gore-bell-horror-sheer-sheen-world-ending-moment!—

almost losing IT there, once—

I could see the body rolling out

like one loose dice in a losing game—the arms waving

windmills and legs kicking autumn footballs.

 

 

they made it into the church

and I remained outside

opening my brain to living sunlight.

 

 

in the room with me she was singing and rolling her

long golden hair. (this is true Arturo, and that is what

makes it so simple.)

“I just saw them take in a body,”

I fashioned to her.

 

 

it’s autumn, it’s trees, it’s telephone wires,

and she sings some song I can’t understand, some High Mass

of Life.

 

 

she went on singing but I wanted to die

I wanted yellow flowers like her golden hair

I wanted yellow-singing and the sun.

this is true, and that is what makes it so strange:

I wanted to be opened and untangled, and

tossed away.

 

 

the service was bad

and the bellboy kept bringing in towels

at the wrong moment.

drunk, I finally clubbed him along

the side of the head.

he was a little man and he fell

like an October leaf,

quite done,

and when the fuzz came up

I had the sofa in front of the door

and the chain on,

the 2nd movement of Brahms’ First Symphony

and had my hand halfway up the ass

of a broad old enough to be my grandmother

and they broke the god damned door,

pushed the sofa aside;

I slapped the screaming chippy

and turned and asked,

what seems to be the trouble, gentlemen?

and some young kid who had never shaved

brought his stick down against my head

and in the morning I was in the prison ward

chained to my bed

and it was hot,

the sweat coming down through the white

senseless sheet,

and they asked all sorts of silly questions

and I knew I’d be late for work,

which worried me immensely.

 

 

swans die in the Spring too

and there it floated

dead on a Sunday

sideways

circling in current

and I walked to the rotunda

and overhead

gods in chariots

dogs, women

circled,

and death

ran down my throat

like a mouse,

and I heard the people coming

with their picnic bags

and laughter,

and I felt guilty

for the swan

as if death

were a thing of shame

and like a fool

I walked away

and left them

my beautiful swan.

 

 

things are good as I am not dead yet

and the rats move in the beercans,

the papersacks shuffle like small dogs,

and her photographs are stuck onto a painting

by a dead German and she too is dead

and it took 14 years to know her

and if they give me another 14

I will know her yet…

her photos stuck over the glass

neither move nor speak,

but I even have her voice on tape,

and she speaks some evenings,

her again

so real she laughs

says the thousand things,

the one thing I always ignored;

this will never leave me:

that I had love

and love died;

a photo and a piece of tape

is not much, I have learned late,

but give me 14 days or 14 years,

I will kill any man

who would touch or take

whatever’s left.

 

 

he died a suicide in a Detroit hotel room

on skid row

and he was stiff when they found him,

rat poison…

I was managing the place then,

trying to collect rents and

emptying the trash,

and I stood there and watched them put the needle in him,

his eyes were wide open and one of them slid his eyes

shut, and then the needle began to take hold,

he had died stiff upright in the chair

and he began to loosen up

and they found a couple of letters from his sister

in another city, threw him on the stretcher and took him

down the stairs. the sheets were still kinda clean

so I just made the bed over again, cleaned out the dresser,

and when I walked out, all the winos were in the hall

in their pants and dirty undershirts, needing shaves and something to

drink, and I told them: “all right, all you monkeys

clear the god damned halls! you hurt my eyesight!”

“a man died, sir. he was our friend,” one of them said.

it was Benny the Dip. “all right, Benny,” I told him,

“you’ve got one night left in here to get up the rent!”

you should have seen the rest of them disappear:

death doesn’t matter a damn when you need a place to sleep.