The Last Night of the Earth Poems
I didn’t say
anything.
“you can stay here
as long as you
want, Henry.
you don’t have to
talk…”
she kissed me on the
forehead
and I reached down
and lightly touched
one of her silken
legs.
Mrs. Gredis was a
hot number.
she kept me after
school almost every
day.
and everybody hated
me
but I believe that I
had the most wonderful
hard-ons
of any eleven year old
boy
in the city of
Los Angeles
this rejoinder
the people survive to come up with flat fists full
of nothing.
I remember Carl Sandburg’s poem, “The
People, Yes.”
nice thought but completely inaccurate:
the people did not survive through a noble
strength but through lie, compromise and
guile.
I lived with these people, I am not so sure
what people Sandburg lived
with.
but his poem always pissed me off.
it was a poem that lied.
it is “The People, No.”
then and now.
and it doesn’t take a misanthrope to
say this.
let us hope that future famous poems
such as Mr. Sandburg’s
make more
sense.
Hemingway never did this
I read that he lost a suitcase full of manuscripts on a
train and that they never were recovered.
I can’t match the agony of this
but the other night I wrote a 3-page poem
upon this computer
and through my lack of diligence and
practice
and by playing around with commands
on the menu
I somehow managed to erase the poem
forever.
believe me, such a thing is difficult to do
even for a novice
but I somehow managed to do
it.
now I don’t think this 3-pager was immortal
but there were some crazy wild lines,
now gone forever.
it bothers more than a touch, it’s something
like knocking over a good bottle of
wine.
and writing about it hardly makes a good
poem.
still, I thought somehow you’d like to
know?
if not, at least you’ve read this far
and there could be better work
down the line.
let’s hope so, for your sake
and
mine.
surprise time again
it’s always a surprise to some
when the killer is that clean-cut
quiet boy with the gentle smile
who went to church
and was nearly a straight-A
student
and also good on the athletic
field,
kind to his elders,
adored by the young girls,
the old ones,
admired by his
peers.
“I can’t believe he did it…”
they always think a killer must
be ugly, gross, unlikable,
that he must give off signs,
signals of anger and
madness.
sometimes these kill
too.
but a potential killer can never
be judged by his
externals
nor a politician, a priest or
a poet.
or the dog
or the woman
wagging
tails.
the killer sits anywhere
like you
as you read this
wondering.
young in New Orleans
starving there, sitting around the bars,
and at night walking the streets for
hours,
the moonlight always seemed fake
to me, maybe it was,
and in the French Quarter I watched
the horses and buggies going by,
everybody sitting high in the open
carriages, the black driver, and in
back the man and the woman,
usually young and always white.
and I was always white.
and hardly charmed by the
world.
New Orleans was a place to
hide.
I could piss away my life,
unmolested.
except for the rats.
the rats in my dark small room
very much resented sharing it
with me.
they were large and fearless
and stared at me with eyes
that spoke
an unblinking
death.
women were beyond me.
they saw something
depraved.
there was one waitress
a little older than
I, she rather smiled,
lingered when she
brought my
coffee.
that was plenty for
me, that was
enough.
there was something about
that city, though:
it didn’t let me feel guilty
that I had no feeling for the
things so many others
needed.
it let me alone.
sitting up in my bed
the lights out,
hearing the outside
sounds,
lifting my cheap
bottle of wine,
letting the warmth of
the grape
enter
me
as I heard the rats
moving about the
room,
I preferred them
to
humans.
being lost,
being crazy maybe
is not so bad
if you can be
that way:
undisturbed.
New Orleans gave me
that.
nobody ever called
my name.
no telephone,
no car,
no job,
no
anything.
me and the
rats
and my youth,
one time,
that time
I knew
even through the
nothingness,
it was a
celebration
of something not to
do
but only
know.
the damnation of Buk
getting old, and older, concerned that
you might not get your driver’s license
renewed, concerned that the hangovers
last longer, concerned that you might
not reach the age of 85,
concerned that the poems will stop
arriving.
concerned that you are concerned.
concerned that you might die in the
spa.
concerned that you might die on the
freeway while driving in from the
track.
concerned that you might die in your
lap pool.
concerned that the remainder of your
teeth
will not last.
concerned about dying but not about
death.
concerned that peopl
e will no longer
consider you dangerous when
drunk.
concerned that you will forget who
the enemy is.
concerned that you will forget how to
laugh.
concerned that there will be nothing to
drink in hell.
and concerned you will have to
listen to
one poetry reading
after another
after another…
the Los Angeles poets
the New York poets
the Iowa poets
the black poets
the white poets
the Chicano poets
the 3rd world poets
the female poets
the homosexual poets
the lesbian poets
the bisexual poets
the sexless poets
the failed poets
the famous poets
the dead poets
the etc. poets
concerned that the toteboard will
explode into flowers of
shit
and the night will never
come.
Charles the Lion-Hearted
he’s 95, lives in a large two story
house.
“they want to send me to a rest
home. ‘hell,’ I tell them, ‘this
IS my home!’”
he speaks of his grandchildren.
he’s outlived his
children.
he visits his wife who’s also
95.
she’s in a rest
home.
“she looks great but she doesn’t
know who I am.”
he lives on bacon, tomatoes and
breakfast cereal.
he lives on a steep hill.
used to take his little dog for
walks.
the dog died.
he walks alone now,
straight-backed,
carrying an
oak cane.
he’s 6 foot two,
lean,
jocular,
imposing.
“they can’t wait for me to
die, they want my house
and money.
I’m gonna live just to
spite them.”
I see him in his room upstairs
at night
watching tv or
reading.
he was married longer than
most men
live.
he still is
only she doesn’t know she’s
married.
he sits up in his room
on top of nine and one
half
decades
neither asking nor
giving
mercy.
he is an ocean of
wonder,
he is a shining
rock.
quick of mind,
so quick.
when death comes for
him
it should be
ashamed.
I so want to see that light burning
in that upstairs
window!
when it goes dark
it will be another world
not quite so magic
not quite so good
when it goes dark.
within the dense overcast
the Spaniards had it right and the Greeks had it
right but
my grandmother, heavy with warts, was
confused.
Galileo did more than guess and
Salisbury became what?
the brightness of doom is anybody’s
mess as
donkeys and camels are still put to
use.
Cleopatra would have loved
Canadian bacon and
nobody speaks of the
hills of Rome
anymore.
the curve ball curves
and vanilla icecream is always
overstocked.
600,000 people died in the
siege of Leningrad
and we got Shostakovich’s
Seventh.
tonight there were gunshots
outside
and I sat and rubbed my
fingers across my greasy
forehead.
palaces, palaces,
and oceans with black
filthy
claws.
the shortest distance between
2 points is
often
intolerable.
who stuck the apple into the
pig’s
mouth?
who plucked out his eyes
and baked him
like that?
Cassiodorus?
Cato?
the aviators of May
the buried dogs bones
the marshmallow kisses
the yellowed fleece of sound
the
tack
in the foot.
Virginia is slim.
Madeline is back.
Tina’s on the gin.
Becky’s on the phone.
don’t
answer.
I see you in the closet.
I see you in the dark.
I see you dead.
I see you in the back of a
pick up truck on the
Santa Monica
freeway.
the perfect place to be
in the rain
is in the rain
walking toward a
farmhouse
at one thirty
a.m.
there is a lone light
in an upper
window.
it goes out.
a dog howls.
the nature of the dream is
best interpreted by the
dreamer.
the snail crawls home.
the toes under a blanket
is one of the most magical
sights
ever.
wood is frozen
fire.
my hand is my hand.
my hand is your hand.
the blue shot of
nerve.
Turgenev
Turgenev
the cloud walks toward
me
the pigeon speaks my
name.
corsage
I suppose Jr. High was the worst.
my friend Teddy began going to
various dances
and talking about it all.
his father loaned him the car
for these
functions.
he also had a new wrist watch.
it was still the depression
era and few of us boys
had wrist
watches.
Teddy kept lifting up his wrist
and looking at his
watch.
he did it 3 or 4 times
within a ten minute
period.
“why the hell do you keep
looking at the time?
you going
somewhere?”
“maybe, maybe…”
“well, go on then…”
“she kissed me at the
doorway, I can still feel her
lips!”
“whose lips?”
“Annabell’s, she kissed me
at her door after the
dance!”
“listen, Teddy, let’s go down to the
lot and get up a
baseball game.”
“I can’t get her out of my mind.
her lips were soft,
warm…”
“Christ, man, who
cares?”
“I bought her a corsage for
the dance, she looked so
be
autiful…”
“didn’t you slip her any
turkey neck?”
“what?
listen, I’m in love!”
“well, that’s what you do
then before somebody
else slams her.”
“don’t talk that way, I’m
warning you!”
“I can take you, Teddy,
with one ball tied behind
my back.”
he looked at his watch:
“I gotta go now…”
“gonna go play with yourself,
Teddy?”