Poems 1959-2009 (18 page)

They had operated on the wrong leg, made it shorter.

My father's coal yards under a wartime heavy snow.

The big blue trucks wearing chains like S/M love.

Blessed are the poor, for they will have heat this Christmas.

The tire chains/sleigh bells go
chink chink
.

The crow at the foot of the bed caws you

Were the Age of Chivalry and gave my family coal.

And when it was hot your ice trucks delivered

To the colored their block of cold.

 

The horsefly landing fatly on the page

And walking through words from left to right is rage.

It walks, stage right to left, across the stage.

The play is called
The Nest Becomes a Cage
.

I'm reading
Hamlet
, in which a bulging horsefly

Soliloquizes constantly, played by

Me. He's getting old, don't ask me why.

His lines are not familiar. Then I die.

I have been thinking, instead of weeping, tears,

And drinking everybody else's, for years.

They taste amazingly like urine. Cheers!

I tell you this—(But soft! My mother nears.)

You wonder how I know what urine tastes like?

I stuck my finger in a hole in a dike

And made the heart near bursting burst. Strike

While it's hot. You have to seize the mike

And scream, “This is I! Hamlet the Dane!” True—

Too true—the lascivious iceberg you

Are cruising to,
Titanic
, is a Jew

Ophelia loved, a man she thought she knew.

One day I was bombing Belgrade, bombing Belgrade,

To halt the slaughter elsewhere, knowing aid

Arrives through the air in the form of a tirade

Hamlet stabs through the arras, like a man does a maid,

Only in this case it was the father of the girl,

Poor Polonius, her father. She is a pearl

At the bottom of a stream, and every curl

Of nothing but herself is drowned. I whirl

Around, and this is I! a fellow fanned

Into a flame. The horsefly that I land

On her has little legs—but on command

Struts back and forth on stage, princely, grand.

 

I live a life of laziness and luxury,

Like a hare without a bone who sleeps in a pâté.

I met a fellow who was so depressed

He never got dressed and never got undressed.

He lived a life of laziness and luxury.

He hid his life away in poetry,

Like a hare still running from a gun in a pâté.

He didn't talk much about himself because there wasn't much to say.

He found it was impossible to look or not to.

It will literally blind him but he's got to.

Her caterpillar with a groove

Waits for love

Between her legs. The crease

Is dripping grease.

He's blind—now he really is.

Can't you help him, gods!

Her light is white

Moonlight.

Or the Parthenon under the sun

Is the other one.

There are other examples but

A perfect example in his poetry is the what

Will save you factor.

The Jaws of Life cut the life crushed in the compactor

Out.

My life is a snout

Snuffling toward the truffle, life. Anyway!

It is a life of luxury. Don't put me out of my misery.

I am seeking more Jerusalem, not less.

And in the outtakes, after they pull my fingernails out, I confess:

I do love

The sky above.

 

 

I do

Standing still.

I do in my head.

I do everything to keep active.

Everything is excellent.

I do pablum. I do doo-doo. I do heroic deeds.

I do due

Diligence.

I do heroic deeds. I don't move.

I do love

The sky above

Which is black.

I do white gloves at the dances,

But I don't dance with the fascists.

I do beat and smash their stupid wishes.

I take you to be my.

The river is turning into

A place to drown.

The road lay down

In front of the car.

Everything in hell was

Talking English long ago.

I mean English.

I mean fruit bowl. I mean upper crust. I mean, really!

The ocean swings back into view in inland St. Louis.

The time is then.

My headmaster's exotic psychotic wife goes completely

Round the bend and maintains

The Mississippi is down there and up here

Is Berchtesgaden. I am shooting up on this.

Breast milk leaks from the insertion point.

His wife—my bride—wanders around the campus saying I do.

 

Decapitated, he looks much the same,

The same homeless mind.

He watches a starving man

Eating his hiccups

Because he has nothing else to eat

In front of the mirror that is

Brushing his teeth.

Then he goes to bed headless. Then

He hears his wife get out of their bed

And lock the bathroom door

That they never lock.

Both of them are drunk.

He sleeps with his eyes shut in the dark

For a few minutes and then he gets up.

But he doesn't get up.

She comes back to bed.

She says I am so afraid.

She says I feel cold.

He asks her what she has done.

He makes her stand up and walk. He calls 911.

He will go to the theater

Of the locking of the bathroom door, hiccup

Click, and how he stayed in bed

For the rest of his life.

He remembers something else.

That he did get up. He stood

Outside the door.

He went back to a bed

Even more terrible than the loyal eyes

Of a dog about to be euthanized.

Than the efforts of a racehorse

Who will have to be shot to rise.

 

Think of the most disgusting thing you can think of.

It is beautiful in its way.

It has two legs.

It has a head of hair.

It goes downtown.

It goes into an art gallery.

It pulls out a gun.

It kills its friend.

Never mind how much money they made.

Start thinking about what matters.

The MV Agusta motorcycle

Is the most beautiful.

I Do
was one.

The Bathroom Door
was another.

I Do
was one.

Pulled out a gun and fired.

It was point-blank.

It died instantly.

The fragment was Sappho.

You can imagine how beautiful.

The person is walking

Ahead of you on the sidewalk.

You see its back but its face

Is facing you as it walks away.

As if the neck were

Broken, but the face is calm.

The name of the face you

Face is the United Nations.

It is a lovely Picasso walking away

On a broken neck and looking straight ahead back.

First came the seen, then thus the palpable

Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell.

 

Who is this face as little

As a leaf,

The neck a stem?

The furnace waits.

Someone is happening

To someone. Someone is

Alive and enters

Defiantly.

Her lips are full.

The mouth is open.

The living room is full

Of mahogany and art.

The serpent concentrates its gaze until the serpent is

A sumo wrestler agile as a dragonfly,

A furnace eating only good

To stay big.

The girl is a delicate

Drop.

The beautiful face

Is a leaf.

The dragonfly

Practices touch-and-go landings

At the little airport, landing to take off,

See-through with heartbeats.

The serpent is not a serpent

But a lyre.

It asks to play.

It asks the girl to let a dragon fly.

Someone is sailing clay pigeons

And blowing them apart perfectly.

Someone is kissing

The other.

 

I think you do

But it frightens you.

I have the guns

In the car.

I wanted to save

Someone and

The rest. It will happen.

I will take you hostage.

Also I wasn't

Going to fall in love

But when you're fleeing

You're flying.

Someone had to take

My blindfold off for me to

Just take off. I turn the key in your ignition.

Contact! The propeller flickers.

We are taking off to

Elope.

Have another

One

For the road. Burn the birth certificates.

Run the roadblock.

All the whirling lights

On the roofs of their cars.

They're going to check

The trunk and find our bodies.

I won't.

We jump out firing.

I am already in you.

I am rafting down your bloodstream.

That is already over.

I have entered.

 

Root canal is talking

To the opposite—

Twenty-three years old,

With eyes like very dilated

Dewdrops sideways.

Age is visiting

The other side of the moon,

When the moon was young.

Wow, to see the side

That never faces the earth is cool,

And kiss newborn skin

That you could eat off of.

A clean twenty-three-year-old

Heart is tourism

For the senator

Visiting the strange.

You fly there, then get out and walk.

The space shot lands

And he gets out and flies and then on foot.

He is looking at her tits.

The future will not last.

It is coming toward her

On safari

To watch the ancient king of the savannah roar and mate

Despite a root

Canal spang in the middle.

Nothing will.

Not even root canal. Revive his satrapy.

He is rowing down a canal

Of royal palms on either side

And the ocean is near. The oil spill is near

Enough for her to hear it greasing the shore.

 

Phineas has turned

To face the quiet Phoebe to

Touch her cheek.

Phineas, who is tender but not meek,

And certainly is not weak,

Is also not named Phineas.

The name is art.

Phineas turns to touch her tenderly,

But the cab runs over a

Pocked-moon stretch of Brooklyn roadway

And his hand is knocked

Into being a brute.

What is the pH of New York?

PH is

Singing to PH,

Date palm to date palm.

The dunes in every

Direction tower.

Their color is octoroon

In Manhattan at dawn.

That is the color

Of the heart they share

Which is an oasis

Where one can pause

Before going out to die

In the dunes,

Strangling without water

And without a gun

To shoot at night at the stars.

For the moment, they sing.

The saddle has no camel under it.

They know.

 

Venus is getting

Smaller.

Finally, she is

The size of a mouse.

A fully developed young woman

That size

Makes it difficult

To caress her breasts.

The curly wire

To a Secret Service agent's ear

Ends in a plug actually bigger

Than her derrière.

What a magnificent goddess!

And enormous—when

She stands on the back of your hand

With her glorious assets!

Her steatopygous ass

Sticks straight out—a Hottentot harvest moon!

Her breasts are prodigious.

Her ass is steatopygous.

Her head is

Classically small.

Her eyes and her mouth

Are equally oceans and drops from a dropper.

Venus shrank down

To go to Harvard, and got a tiny degree.

Her Junoesque figure

Is the size of a sea horse.

Mr. Universe

Is in love,

But how will he get in?

Venus, goddess, tell him how!

 

I'm having a certain amount of difficulty

Because I am finding it hard.

It is all uphill.

I wake up tired.

It is downhill from here.

The Emancipation Proclamation won't change that.

Evidently there have been irregularities apparently.

It is time to get out.

I am going to go public with this

Beautiful big breasts and a penis

Military-industrial complex.

I live in the infield with other connoisseurs

Behind the bars of the gate to the circuit,

Sniffing burning racing oil till I'm high.

On the other side of the gate is the start/finish,

And the red meat of the racebikes raving to race.

I'm not from anywhere. I'm from my head.

That's where I didn't grow up

And went to school.

Oh, I am totally vile and beautiful!

A military-industrial complex with soul!

Nigra sum sed formosa.

I am black but comely,

O ye daughters of Jerusalem:

Therefore has the king loved me, and brought me into his

Chambers. For, lo, the winter is past,