a 56 year old poem
I went with two ladies
down to Venice
to look for antique furniture.
I parked in back of the store
and went in with them.
$125 for a clock, $700 for 6 chairs.
I stopped looking.
the ladies moved around
looking at everything.
the ladies had class.
I waved goodbye to one of the ladies
and walked out.
it was Sunday and the bar
wasn’t much better,
everybody was nervous and young
and blonde and pale.
I finished my drink, got 4 beers
at the liquor store
and sat in my car drinking them.
finishing the 4th beer
the ladies came out.
they asked me if I was all right.
I told them that every experience
meant something
and that they had pulled me out of
my usual murky
current.
the one I knew best had bought a table
with a marble top for $100.
she owned her own business and was a
civilized person.
she was civilized enough to know a neighbor
who had a van
and while I sat in her apartment drinking
1974 Zeller Schwarze Katz
they went down and got the table.
later she wanted to know what I thought about
the table and I said I thought it was all right,
sometimes I lost one hundred dollars at the
racetrack. we watched tv in bed and later
that night I couldn’t come. I think it was
because I was thinking about that marble table.
I’m sure it was. I don’t have any antique marble
tables at my place, I almost never have any sex trouble at
my place. sometimes but
very seldom.
I don’t understand the whole antique
business
I’m sure it’s a giant
con.
the beautiful young girl walking past the graveyard—
I stop my car at the signal
I see her walking past the graveyard—
as she walks past the iron fence
I can see through the iron fence
and I see the headstones
and the green lawn.
her body moves in front of the iron fence
the headstones do not move.
I think,
doesn’t anybody else see this?
I think,
does she see those headstones?
if she does
she has wisdom that I don’t have
for she appears to ignore them.
her body moving in its
magic fluid
and her long hair is lighted
by the 3 p.m. sun.
the signal changes
she crosses the street to the west
I drive west.
I drive my car down to the ocean
get out
and run up and down
in front of the sea for 35 minutes
seeing people here and there
with eyes and ears and toes
and various other parts.
nobody seems to care.
beer
I don’t know how many bottles of beer
I have consumed while waiting for things
to get better.
I don’t know how much wine and whiskey
and beer
mostly beer
I have consumed after
splits with women—
waiting for the phone to ring
waiting for the sound of footsteps,
and the phone never rings
until much later
and the footsteps never arrive
until much later.
when my stomach is coming up
out of my mouth
they arrive as fresh as spring flowers:
“what the hell have you done to yourself?
it will be 3 days before you can fuck me!”
the female is durable
she lives seven and one half years longer
than the male, and she drinks very little beer
because she knows it’s bad for the
figure.
while we are going mad
they are out
dancing and laughing
with horny cowboys.
well, there’s beer
sacks and sacks of empty beer bottles
and when you pick one up
the bottles fall through the wet bottom
of the paper sack
rolling
clanking
spilling grey wet ash
and stale beer,
or the sacks fall over at 4 a.m.
in the morning
making the only sound in your life.
beer
rivers and seas of beer
beer beer beer
the radio singing love songs
as the phone remains silent
and the walls stand
straight up and down
and beer is all there is.
artist
all of a sudden I’m a painter.
a girl from Galveston gives me
$50 for a painting of a man
holding a candycane while
floating in a darkened sky.
than a young man with a black beard
comes over
and I sell him three for $80.
he likes rugged stuff
where I write across the painting—
“shoot shit” or “GRATE ART IS
HORSESHIT, BUY TACOS.”
I can do a painting in 5 minutes.
I use acrylics, paint right out of
the tube.
I do the left side of the painting
first with my left hand and then
finish the right side with my
right hand.
now the man with the black beard
comes back with a friend whose hair
sticks out and they have a young blonde
girl with them.
black beard is still a sucker:
I sell him a hunk of shit—
an orange dog with the word
“DOG” written on his side.
stick-out hair wants 3 paintings
for which I ask $70.
he doesn’t have the money.
I keep the paintings but
he promises to send me a
girl called Judy
in garter belt and high heels.
he’s already told her about me:
“a world-renowned writer,” he said
and she said, “oh no!” and pulled
her dress up over her head.
“I want that,” I told him.
then we haggled over terms
I wanted to fuck her first
then get head later.
“how about head first and
fuck later?” he asked.
“that doesn’t work,” I
said.
so we agreed:
Judy will come by and
afterwards
I will hand her the
3 paintings.
so there we are:
back to the barter system,
the only way to beat
inflation.
never the less,
I’d like to
start the Men’s Liberation Movement:
I want a woman to hand me 3 of her
paintings after I have
made love to her,
and if she can’t paint
she can leave me
a couple of golden earrings
or maybe a slice of ear
in memory of one who
could.
my old man
16 years old
during the depression
I’d come home drunk
and all my clothing—
shorts, shirts, stockings—
suitcase, and pages of
short stories
would be thrown out on the
front lawn and about the
street.
my mother would be
waiting behind a tree:
“Henry, Henry, don’t
go in…he’ll
kill you, he’s read
your stories…”
“I can whip his
ass…”
“Henry, please take
this…and
find yourself a room.”
but it worried him
that I might not
finish high school
so I’d be back
again.
one evening he walked in
with the pages of
one of my short stories
(which I had never submitted
to him)
and he said, “this is
a great short story.”
I said, “o.k.,”
and he handed it to me
and I read it.
it was a story about
a rich man
who had a fight with
his wife and had
gone out into the night
for a cup of coffee
and had observed
the waitress and the spoons
and forks and the
salt and pepper shakers
and the neon sign
in the window
and then had gone back
to his stable
to see and touch his
favorite horse
who then
kicked him in the head
and killed him.
somehow
the story held
meaning for him
though
when I had written it
I had no idea
of what I was
writing about.
so I told him,
“o.k., old man, you can
have it.”
and he took it
and walked out
and closed the door.
I guess that’s
as close
as we ever got.
fear
he walks up to my Volks
after I have parked
and rocks it back and
forth
grinning around his
cigar.
“hey, Hank, I notice
all the women around your
place lately…good looking
stuff; you’re doing all
right.”
“Sam,” I say, “that’s not
true; I am one of God’s most
lonely men.”
“we got some nice girls at
the parlor, you oughta try
some of them.”
“I’m afraid of those places,
Sam, I can’t walk into them.”
“I’ll send you a girl then,
real nice stuff.”
“Sam, don’t send me a whore,
I always fall in love with
whores.”
“o.k., friend,” he says,
“let me know if you change
your mind.”
I watch him walk away.
some men are always on
top of their game.
I am mostly always
confused.
he can break a man
in half
and doesn’t know who
Mozart is.
who wants to listen
to music
anyhow
on a rainy Wednesday
night?
little tigers everywhere
Sam the whorehouse man
has squeaky shoes
and he walks up and down
the court
squeaking and talking to
the cats.
he’s 310 pounds,
a killer
and he talks to the cats.
he sees the women at the massage
parlor and has no girlfriends
no automobile
he doesn’t drink or dope
his biggest vices are
chewing on a cigar and
feeding all the cats in
the neighborhood.
some of the cats get
pregnant
and so finally there are
more and more cats and
everytime I open my door
one or two cats will
run in and sometimes I’ll
forget they are there and
they’ll shit under the bed
or I’ll awaken at night
hearing sounds
leap up with my blade
sneak into the kitchen and
find one of Sam the whorehouse
man’s cats walking around on
the sink or sitting on top
of the refrigerator.
Sam runs the love parlor
around the corner
and his girls stand in the
doorway in the sun
and the traffic signals go
red and green and red and green
and all of Sam’s cats
possess some of the meaning
as do the days and the nights.
after the reading:
“…I’ve seen people in front of
their typewriters in such a bind
that it would blow their intestines
right out of their assholes if they
were trying to shit.”
“ah hahaha hahaha!”
“…it’s a shame to work that
hard to try to write.”
“ah hahaha hahaha!”
“ambition rarely has anything to
do with talent. luck is best, and
talent limps along a little
bit behind luck.”
“ah haha.”
he rose and left with an 18 year old virgin, the most
beautiful co-ed of them
all.
I closed my notebook
got up and limped a
little bit behind
them.
about cranes
sometimes after you get your ass
kicked real good by the forces
you often wish you were a crane
standing on one leg
in blue water
but there’s
the
old up-bringing
you know:
you don’t want to be
a crane
standing on one leg
in blue water
the distress is not
enough
and
the victory
limps
a crane can’t
buy a piece of ass
or
hang itself at noon
in Monterey
those are some of
the things
humans can do
besides
stand on one leg
a gold pocket watch
my grandfather was a tall German
with a strange smell on his breath.
he stood very straight
in front of his small house
and his wife hated him
and his children thought him odd.
I was six the first time we met
and he gave me all his war medals.
the second time I met him
he gave me his gold pocket watch.
it was very heavy and I took it home
and wound it very tight
and it stopped running
which made me feel bad.
I never saw him again
and my par
ents never spoke of him
nor did my grandmother
who had long ago
stopped living with him.
once I asked about him
and they told me
he drank too much
but I liked him best
standing very straight
in front of his house
and saying, “hello, Henry, you
and I, we know each
other.”
beach trip
the strong men
the muscle men
there they sit
down at the beach
cocoa tans
with the weights
scattered about them
untouched
they sit as the
waves go in and
out
they sit as the
stock market
makes and breaks
men and families
they sit while