looking into the sky
little insects whirling above my head
the breathing of white air
just breathing and waiting.
life becomes difficult:
being ignored
and ignoring.
everything turns into white air
the head fills with white air
and as invisible women sit in rooms
with successful bright-eyed young men
conversing brilliantly about everything
your sex drive
vanishes and it really
doesn’t matter.
you don’t want food
you don’t want shelter
you don’t want anything.
sometimes you die
sometimes you don’t.
as I drive past
the young man on the bus stop bench
I am comfortable in my automobile
I have money in two different banks
I own my own home
but he reminds me of my young self
and I want to help him
but I don’t know what to do.
today when I drove past again
he was gone
I suppose finally the world wasn’t
pleased with him being there.
the bench still sits there on the corner
advertising something.
for they had things to say
the canaries were there, and the lemon tree
and the old woman with warts;
and I was there, a child
and I touched the piano keys
as they talked—
but not too loudly
for they had things to say,
the three of them;
and I watched them cover the canaries at night
with flour sacks:
“so they can sleep, my dear.”
I played the piano quietly
one note at a time,
the canaries under their sacks,
and there were pepper trees,
pepper trees brushing the roof like rain
and hanging outside the windows
like green rain,
and they talked, the three of them
sitting in a warm night’s semicircle,
and the keys were black and white
and responded to my fingers
like the locked-in magic
of a waiting, grown-up world;
and now they’re gone, the three of them
and I am old:
pirate feet have trod
the clean-thatched floors
of my soul,
and the canaries sing no more.
silly damned thing anyhow
we tried to hide it in the house so that the
neighbors wouldn’t see.
it was difficult, sometimes we both had to
be gone at once and when we returned
there would be excreta and urine all
about.
it wouldn’t toilet train
but it had the bluest eyes you ever
saw
and it ate everything we did
and we often watched tv together.
one evening we came home and it was
gone.
there was blood on the floor,
there was a trail of blood.
I followed it outside and into the garden
and there in the brush it was,
mutilated.
there was a sign hung about its severed
throat:
“we don’t want things like this in our
neighborhood.”
I walked to the garage for the shovel.
I told my wife, “don’t come out here.”
then I walked back with the shovel and
began digging.
I sensed
the faces watching me from behind
drawn blinds.
they had their neighborhood back,
a nice quiet neighborhood with green
lawns, palm trees, circular driveways, children,
churches, a supermarket, etc.
I dug into the earth.
upon reading an interview with a
best-selling novelist in our metropolitan
daily newspaper
he talks like he writes
and he has a face like a dove, untouched by
externals.
a little shiver of horror runs through me as I read
about
his comfortable assured success.
“I am going to write an important novel next year,” he says.
next year?
I skip some paragraphs
but the interview goes on for two and one-half pages
more.
it’s like milk spilled on a tablecloth, it’s as soothing as
talcum powder, it’s the bones of an eaten fish, it’s a damp
stain on a faded necktie, it’s a gathering hum.
this man is very fortunate that he is not standing
in line at a soup kitchen.
this man has no concept of failure because he is
paid so well for it.
I am lying on the bed, reading.
I drop the paper to the floor.
then I hear a sound.
it is a small fly buzzing.
I watch it flying, circling the room in an irregular
pattern.
life at last.
harbor freeway south
the dead dogs of nowhere bark
as you approach another
traffic accident.
3 cars
one standing on its
grill
the other 2 laying
on their sides
wheels turning slowly.
3 of them
at rest:
strange angles
in the dark.
it has just
happened.
I can see the still
bodies
inside.
these cars
scattered like toys
against the freeway
center
divider.
like spacecraft
they have landed
there
as you
drive past.
there’s no
ambulance yet
no police
cars.
the rain began
15 minutes
ago.
things occur.
volcanoes are
1500 times more
powerful than
the first a
bomb.
the dead dogs of
nowhere
those dogs keep
barking.
those cars
there like that.
obscene.
a dirty trick.
it’s like
somebody dying
of a heart
attack
in a crowded
elevator
everybody
watching.
I finally
reach my street
pull into
the driveway.
park.
get out.
she meets me
halfway
to the door.
“I don’t know
what to do,”
she says, “the
stove
went out.”
schoolyards of forever
the schoolyard was a horror show: the bullies, the
freaks
the beatings up against the wire fence
our schoolmates watching
glad that they were not the victim;
we were beaten well and good
time after time
and afterwards were
followed
taunted all the way home where often
more beatings awaited us.
in the schoolyard the bullies ruled well,
and in the restrooms and
at the water fountains they
owned and disowned us at will
but in our own way we held strong
never begged for mercy
we took it straight on
silently
we were toughened by that horror
a horror that would later serve us in good stead
and then strangely
as we grew stronger and bolder
the bullies gradually began to back off.
grammar school
jr. high
high school
we grew up like odd neglected plants
gathering nourishment where we could
blossoming in time
and later when the bullies tried to befriend us
we turned them away.
then college
where under a new regime
the bullies melted almost entirely away
we became more and they became much less.
but there were new bullies now
the professors
who had to be taught the hard lessons we’d learned
we glowed madly
it was grand and easy
the coeds dismayed at our gamble
and our nerve
but we looked right through them
to the larger fight waiting out there.
then when we arrived out there
it was back up against the fence
new bullies once again
deeply entrenched by society
bosses and the like
who kept us in our place for de cades to come
so we had to begin all over again
in the street
and in small rooms of madness
rooms that were always dim at noon
it lasted and lasted for years like that
but our former training enabled us to endure
and after what seemed like
an eternity
we finally found the tunnel at the end of the light.
it was a small enough victory
no songs of braggadocio because
we knew we had won very little from very little,
and that we had fought so hard to be free
just for the simple sweetness of it.
but even now we still can see the grade school janitor
with his broom
and sleeping face;
we can still see the little girls with their curls
their hair so carefully brushed and shining
in their freshly starched dresses;
see the faces of the teachers
fat folded forlorn;
hear the bell at recess;
see the grass and the baseball diamond;
see the volleyball court and its white net;
feel the sun always up and shining there
spilling down on us like the juice of a giant tangerine.
and we did not soon forget
Herbie Ashcroft
our principal tormentor
his fists as hard as rocks
as we crouched trapped against the steel fence
as we heard the sounds of automobiles passing but not stopping
and as the world went about doing what it does
we asked for no mercy
and we returned the next day and the next and the next
to our classes
the little girls looking so calm and secure
as they sat upright in their seats
in that room of blackboards and chalk
while we hung on grimly to our stubborn disdain
for all the horror and all the strife
and waited for something better
to come along and comfort us
in that never-to-be-forgotten
grammar school world.
in the lobby
I saw him sitting in a lobby chair
in the Patrick Hotel
dreaming of flying fish
and he said “hello friend
you’re looking good.
me, I’m not so well,
they’ve plucked out my hair
taken my bowels
and the color in my eyes
has gone back into the sea.”
I sat down and listened
to him breathe
his last.
a bit later the clerk came over
with his green eyeshade on
and then the clerk saw what I knew
but neither of us knew
what the old man knew.
the clerk stood there
almost surprised,
taken,
wondering where the old man had gone.
he began to shake like an ape
who’d had a banana taken from his hand.
and then there was a crowd
and the crowd looked at the old man
as if he were a freak
as if there was something wrong with him.
I got up and walked out of the lobby
I went outside on the sidewalk
and I walked along with the rest of them
bellies, feet, hair, eyes
everything moving and going
getting ready to go back to the beginning
or light a cigar.
and then somebody stepped on
the back of my heel
and I was angry enough to swear.
sex
I am driving down Wilton Avenue
when this girl of about 15
dressed in tight blue jeans
that grip her behind like two hands
steps out in front of my car
I stop to let her cross the street
and as I watch her contours waving
she looks directly through my windshield
at me
with purple eyes
and then blows
out of her mouth
the largest pink globe of
bubble gum
I have ever seen
while I am listening to Beethoven
on the car radio.
she enters a small grocery store
and is gone
and I am left with
Ludwig.
a clean, well-lighted place
the old fart, he used his literary reputation
to reel them in one at a time,
each younger than the last.
he liked to meet them for luncheon and
wine
and he’d talk and listen to them
talk.
what ever wife or girlfriend he had at the moment
was made to
understand that this sort of thing made him
feel “young again.”
and when the luncheons became more
than luncheons
the young ladies vied to bed down with
this
literary
genius.
in between, he continued to write,
and late at night in his favorite bar
he liked to talk about writing and his amorous
adventures.
actually, he was just a drunk
who liked young ladies,
writing itself,
and talking about writing.
it wasn’t a bad life.
it was certainly more interesting than
what most men were
doing.
at one time he was probably the
most famous writer in the
world.
many tried to write like he did
drink like he did
act like he did
but he was the original.
then life began to
catch up with him.
he began to age quickly.
his large bulk began to wither.
he was growing old
before his time.
fin
ally it got to where he couldn’t
write anymore,
“it just wouldn’t come”
and the psychiatrists couldn’t
do anything for him but only
made it worse.
then he took his own cure,
early one morning,
alone
just as his father had done
many years
before.
a writer who can’t write any
more is dead
anyhow.
he knew that.
he knew that what he was
killing was already
dead.
and then the critics
and the hangers-on
and the publicists
and his heirs
moved in
like vultures.
something for the touts, the nuns,
the grocery clerks and you…
we have everything and we have nothing
and some men do it in churches
and some men do it by tearing butterflies
in half
and some men do it in Palm Springs
laying it into butterblondes
with Cadillac souls
Cadillacs and butterflies