Burning in Water, Drowing in Flame (11 page)

kool enough to die but not

kill I take my doctor’s green

pill

drink tea

as the sharks swim through vases of

flowers

ten times around they go

twenty

searching for my sissy

heart

in a freak May night in

Los Angeles

Sunday

somebody playing

Beethoven

I sit behind pulled shades

in ambush

as ambitious men with new automobiles and

new blondes

command the streets

I sit in a rented room

carving a wooden rifle

drawing pictures of naked ladies

bulls

love affairs

old men

on the walls with children’s

crayons

it is up to each of us to live in

whatever way we can

as the generals, doctors, policemen

warn and torture

us

I bathe once a day

am frightened by cats and

shadows

sleep hardly at all

when my heart stops

the whole world will get quicker

better

warmer

summer will follow summer

the air will be lake clear

and the meaning

too

but meanwhile

the green pill

these greasy floors off the

avenue and

down there a plot of worms of worms of

worms

and up here

no nymph blonde

to love me to sleep while I am

waiting.

it’s unfortunate, and simply not the style, but I don’t care:

girls remind me of hair in the sink, girls remind me of intestines

and bladders and excretory movements; it’s unfortunate also that

ice-cream bells, babies, engine-valves, plagiostomes, palm trees,

footsteps in the hall…all excite me with the cold calmness

of the gravestone; nowhere, perhaps, is there sanctuary except

in hearing that there were other desperate men:

Dillinger, Rimbaud, Villon, Babyface Nelson, Seneca, Van Gogh,

or desperate women: lady wrestlers, nurses, waitresses, whores

poetesses…although,

I do suppose the breaking out of ice-cubes is important

or a mouse nosing an empty beercan—

two hollow emptinesses looking into each other,

or the nightsea stuck with soiled ships

that enter the chary web of your brain with their lights,

with their salty lights

that touch you and leave you

for the more solid love of some India;

or driving great distances without reason

sleep-drugged through open windows that

tear and flap your shirt like a frightened bird,

and always the stoplights, always red,

nightfire and defeat, defeat…

scorpions, scraps, fardels:

x-jobs, x-wives, x-faces, x-lives,

Beethoven in his grave as dead as a beet;

red wheel-barrows, yes, perhaps,

or a letter from Hell signed by the devil

or two good boys beating the guts out of each other

in some cheap stadium full of screaming smoke,

but mostly, I don’t care, sitting here

with a mouthful of rotten teeth,

sitting here reading Herrick and Spenser and

Marvell and Hopkins and Bronte (Emily, today);

and listening to the Dvorak
Midday Witch

or Franck’s
Le Chasseur Maudit,

actually I don’t care, and it’s unfortunate:

I have been getting letters from a young poet

(very young, it seems) telling me that some day

I will most surely be recognized as

one of the world’s great poets.
Poet!

a malversation: today I walked in the sun and streets

of this city: seeing nothing, learning nothing, being

nothing, and coming back to my room

I passed an old woman who smiled a horrible smile;

she was already dead, and everywhere I remembered wires:

telephone wires, electric wires, wires for electric faces

trapped like goldfish in the glass and smiling,

and the birds were gone, none of the birds wanted wire

or the smiling of wire

and I closed my door (at last)

but through the windows it was the same:

a horn honked, somebody laughed, a toilet flushed,

and oddly then

I thought of all the horses with numbers

that have gone by in the screaming,

gone by like Socrates, gone by like Lorca,

like Chatterton…

I’d rather imagine our death will not matter too much

except as a matter of disposal, a problem,

like dumping the garbage,

and although I have saved the young poet’s letters,

I do not believe them

but like at the

diseased palm trees

and the end of the sun,

I sometimes look.

in the Valkerie Mountains

among the strutting peacocks

I found a flower

as large as my

head

and when I reached in to smell

it

I lost an ear lobe

part of my nose

one eye

and half a pack of

cigarettes.

I came back

the next day

to hack the damned thing

down

but found it so

beautiful I

killed a

peacock

instead.

I walked off the job again

and the police stopped me

for running a red light at Serrano Ave.

my mind was rather gone

and I stood in a patch of leaves

ankle-deep

and kept my head turned

so they couldn’t smell the liquor

too much

and I took the ticket and went to my room

and got a good symphony on the radio,

one of the Russians or Germans,

one of the dark tough boys

but still I felt lonely and cold

and kept lighting cigarettes

and I turned on the heater

and then down on the floor

I saw a magazine with my photo

on the cover

and I walked over and picked it up

but it wasn’t me

because yesterday is gone

and today is only catsup

and racing hounds

and sickness

and women some women

momentarily as beautiful

as any of the cathedrals,

and now they play Bartok

who knew what he was doing

which meant he didn’t know what he was doing,

and tomorrow I suppose I will go back

to the fucking job

like a man to a wife with four kids

if they’ll have me

but today I know that I have gotten out of

some kind of net,

30 seconds more and I would have been dead,

and it is important to recognize

one should recognize

that type of moment

if he wants to continue

to avail the gut and the sacked skull of a

flower a mountain a ship a woman

the code of the frost and the stone

everything lapsing into a sense of moment

that cleans like the best damn soap on the market

and brings Paris, Spain, the groans of Hemingway,

the blue madonna, the new-born bull,

a night in a closet with red paint

right down in on you,

and I hope to pay the ticket

even though I did not (I think) run the red light

but

they said I did.

if you’re a man, Los Angeles is where you hang it up and

battle; or if you’re a woman, and you’ve got enough leg and

the rest, you sail it against a mountain backdrop so

when you grow grey you can hide in Beverly Hills

in a mansion so nobody can see how you’ve decayed.

so we moved here—and what do we come up against

except a religious maniac in the next shack who

drinks cheap wine and has visions and plays his radio

as loudly as possible, my god!

I know all the spirituals now!

I know how very much I have sinned and I realize I must die

and I’ve got to get ready…

but I could use a little sleep first

just a little sleep and peace of silence.

I open the window and there he is

out on the lawn

dancing to a hymn

a spiritual

a whatever.

he has on a pair of red bathing trunks

he’s well-tanned and drunk on wine

but his movements are hard and awkward—

he’s too fat

a walnut-like man, distorted and shapeless at

55.

and he waves his arms in the sun and the birds fly up

frightened

and then he whirls back into his doorway.

but the view from the street here is good—

there are Japanese and old women and young girls and

beggars.

we have large palms

plenty of birds

and the parking’s not bad…

but our religious maniac does not work

he’s too clever to work

and so we both lie around

listen to his radio

drink

and I wonder which of us will get to hell first—

him with his bible or me with my Racing Form

but if I’ve got to hear him down there I know I’m going to have to

have some help, and the next dance will be mine.

right now I wish I had something to sell so I could hide in a place

with walls twelve feet high

with moats

and high-yellow mamas.

but it looks like some long days and nights ahead,

as always.

at the least I can only hope for the weakening of a

radio tube,

and at the most for his death,

which we are both praying and

ready for.

he packaged it up neatly in different sections

sending the legs to an aunt in St. Louis

the head to a scoutmaster in Brooklyn

the belly to a cross-eyed butcher in Des Moines,

the female organs were sent to a young priest in Los Angeles;

the arms he threw to his dog

and he kept the hands to use as nut-crackers, and all the

leftover and assorted parts

like breasts and buttocks he boiled into a soup

which strangely

tasted better than she ever had.

he spent the money in her purse

he bought good French wine, frijoles, a pound of grass

and two parakeets; he bought the collected works of

Keats, a 5 foot square red bandana, a scissors with

ivory handles, and a box of candy for his

landlady.

then he drank and ate and slept for three days and nights

and when the police came

he seemed very friendly and calm

and all the way to the station house

he talked of the weather, the color of the mountains,

various things like that, he didn’t seem like that kind of killer

at all.

it was very strange.

the boys come up

the boys climb up the

brown pole

as the waterheater gurgles

in Spanish

the boys climb the

brown pole—

Charlemagne fought for this

Il Duce
was tilted from his car

skinned like a bear

and hung

upsidedown

for this—

the boys climb up

the brown pole

3 or 4 of

them;

we have just moved in

this building,

the paintings still

unpacked, the letters from

England and Chicago and

Cheyenne and

New Orleans,

but the beer’s on

and there are 5 oranges

and 4 pears on the table

so life’s not

bad

except somebody wanted

$15 to

turn on the gas;

the boys climb the phonepole

to leap onto the

bluegreen

garage roofs

and I stand naked

behind a curtain,

smoking a cigar,

and impressed

impressed as I can be

as if

the Virgin Mary

was dancing

outside;

and through the window

to the North

I can see 2 men

feeding

45 pigeons

and the pigeons

walk in separate circles

of 8 or 10

as if tied together

by a revolving string,

and it is 3 o’clock

in the afternoon and

a good cigar.

Cicero fought for this,

Jake LaMotta and

Waslaw Nijinsky,

but somebody stole

our guitar

and I haven’t taken my

vitamins

for weeks.

the boys run on the

greenblue roofs

as to the North the

pigeons rise;

it is desperately

holy

and I blow out

grey and quiet

smoke.

then a woman in a red coat,

evidently an official,

some matron of

learning

decides that

the sky needs

cleaning:

Hey!!!
you boys get

                DOWN

from there!

it is beautiful as

deer

running from the

hunter.

Agrippina fought for this,

even Mithridates,

even William Hazlitt.

there is nothing to do

now

but unpack.