Burning in Water, Drowing in Flame (16 page)

some people never go crazy.

me, sometimes I’ll lie down behind the couch

for 3 or 4 days.

they’ll find me there.

it’s Cherub, they’ll say, and

they pour wine down my throat

rub my chest

sprinkle me with oils.

then, I’ll rise with a roar,

rant, rage—

curse them and the universe

as I send them scattering over the

lawn.

I’ll feel much better,

sit down to toast and eggs,

hum a little tune,

suddenly become as lovable as a

pink

overfed whale.

some people never go crazy.

what truly horrible lives

they must lead.

my father was a practical man.

he had an idea.

you see, my son, he said,

I can pay for this house in my lifetime,

then it’s mine.

when I die I pass it on to you.

now in your lifetime you can acquire a house

and then you’ll have two houses

and you’ll pass those two houses on to your

son, and in his lifetime he acquires a house,

then when he dies, his son—

I get it, I said.

my father died while trying to drink a

glass of water. I buried him.

solid mahogany casket. after the funeral

I went to the racetrack, met a high yellow.

after the races we went to her apartment

for dinner and goodies.

I sold his house after about a month.

I sold his car and his furniture

and gave away all his paintings except one

and all his fruit jars

(filled with fruit boiled in the heat of summer)

and put his dog in the pound.

I dated his girlfriend twice

but getting nowhere

I gave it up.

I gambled and drank away the money.

now I live in a cheap front court in Hollywood

and take out the garbage to

hold down the rent.

my father was a practical man.

he choked on that glass of water

and saved on hospital

bills.

twitching in the sheets—

to face the sunlight again,

that’s clearly

trouble.

I like the city better when the

neon lights are going and

the nudies dance on top of the

bar

to the mauling music.

I’m under this sheet

thinking.

my nerves are hampered by

history—

the most memorable concern of mankind

is the guts it takes to

face the sunlight again.

love begins at the meeting of two

strangers. love for the world is

impossible. I’d rather stay in bed

and sleep.

dizzied by the days and the streets and the years

I pull the sheets to my neck.

I turn my ass to the wall.

I hate the mornings more than

any man.

there are beasts in the salt shaker

and airdromes in the coffeepot.

my mother’s hand is in the bag drawer

and from the backs of spoons come

the cries of tiny tortured animals.

in the closet stands a murdered man

wearing a new green necktie

and under the floor,

there’s a suffocating angel with flaring nostrils.

it’s hard to live here.

it’s very hard to live here.

at night the shadows are unborn creatures.

beneath the bed

spiders kill tiny white ideas.

the nights are bad

the nights are very bad

I drink myself to sleep

I have to drink myself to sleep.

in the morning

over breakfast

I see them roll the dead down the street

(I never read about this in the newspapers).

and there are eagles everywhere

sitting on the roof, on the lawn, inside my car.

the eagles are eyeless and smell of sulphur.

it is very discouraging.

people visit me

sit in chairs across from me

and I see them crawling with vermin—

green and gold and yellow bugs

they do not brush away.

I have been living here too long.

soon I must go to Omaha.

they say that everything is jade there

and does not move.

they say you can stitch designs in the water

and sleep high in olive trees.

I wonder if this is

true?

I can’t live here much longer.

listen, man, don’t tell me about the poems you

sent, we didn’t receive them,

we are very careful with manuscripts

we bake them

burn them

laugh at them

vomit on them

pour beer over them

but generally we return

them

they are

so

inane.

ah, we believe in Art,

we need it

surely,

but, you know, there are many people

(most people)

playing and fornicating with the

Arts

who only crowd the stage

with their generous unforgiving

vigorous

mediocrity.

our subscription rates are $4 a year.

please read our magazine before

submitting.

if you can’t stand the heat, he says, get out of the

kitchen. you know who said that?

Harry Truman.

I’m not in the kitchen, I say, I’m in the

oven.

my editor is a difficult man.

I sometimes phone him in moments of doubt.

look, he answers, you’ll be lighting cigars with ten dollar

bills, you’ll have a redhead on one arm and a blonde

on the other.

other times he’ll say, look, I think I’m going to hire

V.K. as my associate editor. we’ve got to prune off

5 poets here somewhere. I’m going to leave it up

to him. (V.K. is a very imaginative poet who believes I’ve

knifed him from N.Y.C. to the shores of Hawaii.)

look, kid, I phone my editor, can you speak German?

no, he says.

well, anyhow, I say, I need some good new tires, cheap.

so you know where I can get some good new tires, cheap?

I’ll phone you in 30 minutes, he says, will you be in

in 30 minutes?

I can’t afford to go anywhere, I say.

he says, they say you were drunk at that reading

in Oregon.

ugly gossips, I answer.

were you?

I don’t

remember.

one day he phones me:

you’re not hitting the ball anymore. you are hitting the

bottle and fighting with all these

women. you know we got a good kid on the bench,

he’s aching to get in there

he hits from both sides of the plate

he can catch anything that ain’t hit over the wall

he’s coached by Duncan, Creeley, Wakoski

and
he can
rhyme,
he knows

images, similes, metaphors, figures, conceits,

assonance, alliteration, metrics, yes

metrics like, you know—

iambic, trochaic, anapestic, spondaic,

he knows caesura, denotation, connotation, personification,

diction, voice, paradox, rhetoric, tone
and

coalescence…

holy shit, I say, hang up and take a good hit of

Old Grandad. Harry’s still alive

according to the papers. but I decide rather than

getting new tires to get

a set of retreads instead.

92 years old

his tooth has been bothering him

had to get it filled

he lost his left eye 40 years

ago

—a butcher, he says, he just wanted to

operate to get the money. I found out

later it coulda been

saved.

—I take the eye out at night, he says,

it hurts. they never did get it right.

—which eye is it, Charles?

—this one here, he points,

then excuses himself. he has to get up and

go into the

kitchen, he’s baking cookies in the oven.

he comes out soon with a

plate.

—try some.

I do. they’re

good.

—want some coffee? he asks.

—no, thanks, Charles, I haven’t been sleeping

nights.

he got married at 70 to a woman

58. 22 years ago. she’s in a rest home now.

—she’s getting better, he says, she recognizes me.

they let her get up to go to the bathroom.

—that’s fine, Charles.

—I can’t stand her damned daughter, though, they think

I’m after her money.

—is there anything I can do for you, Charles? need

anything from the store, anything like

that?

—no, I just went shopping this morning.

his back is as straight as the wall and he has the

tiniest pot

belly. as he talks he

keeps his one eye on the tv set.

—I’m going now, Charles, you got my phone number?

—yeh.

—how are the girls treating you, Charles?

—my friend, I haven’t thought about girls for some

years now.

—goodnight, Charles.

—goodnight.

I go to the door

open it

close it

outside

the smell of freshly-baked cookies

follows me.

it was up in San Francisco

after my poetry reading.

it had been a nice crowd

I had gotten my money

I had this place upstairs

there was some drinking

and this guy started beating up on a fag

I tried to stop him

and the guy broke a window

deliberately.

I told them all to

get out

and she started hollering down to the guy

who had beat on the fag

and he kept calling her name back up

and then I remembered she had vanished for an hour

before the reading.

she did those things.

maybe not bad things

but consistently careless things

and I told her we were through

and to get out

and I went to bed

then hours later she walked in

and I said, what the hell are you doing here?

she was all wild, hair down in her face,

you’re too callous, I said, I don’t want you.

it was dark and she leaped at me:

I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!

I was still too drunk to defend myself

and she had me down on the kitchen floor

and she clawed my face and

bit a hole in my arm.

then I went back to bed and listened to her heels

going down the hill.