Love Is a Dog From Hell
Hemingway’s brains dropping into
the orange juice;
Pascal cutting his wrists
in the bathtub;
Artaud locked up with the mad;
Dostoevsky stood up against a wall;
Crane jumping into a boat propeller;
Lorca shot in the road by Spanish
troops;
Berryman jumping off a bridge;
Burroughs shooting his wife;
Mailer knifing his.
—that’s what they want:
a God damned show
a lit billboard
in the middle of hell.
that’s what they want,
that bunch of
dull
inarticulate
safe
dreary
admirers of
carnivals.
Iron Mike
we talk about this film:
Cagney fed this broad
grapefruit
faster than she could
eat it and
then she
loved him.
“that won’t always
work,” I told Iron
Mike.
he grinned and said,
“yeh.”
then he reached down
and touched his belt.
32 female scalps
dangled there.
“me and my big Jewish
cock,” he said.
then he raised his hands
to indicate the
size.
“o, yeh, well,”
I said.
“they come around,” he
said, “I fuck ’em, they
hang around, I tell ’em,
‘it’s time to leave.’”
“you’ve got guts,
Mike.”
“this one wouldn’t leave
so I just got up and
slapped her…she
left.”
“I don’t have your nerve,
Mike. they hang around
washing dishes, rubbing
the shit-stains out of the
crapper, throwing out the
old Racing Forms…”
“they’ll never get me,”
he said,
“I’m invincible.”
look, Mike, no man is
invincible.
some day
you’ll be sent mad by
eyes like a child’s crayon
drawing. you won’t be
able to drink a glass of
water or walk across a
room. there will be the
walls and the sound of
the streets outside, and
you’ll hear machineguns
and mortar shells. that’ll
be when you want it and
can’t have it.
the teeth
are never finally the
teeth of love.
guru
big black beard
tells me
that I don’t feel
terror
I look at him
my gut rattles
gravel
I see his eyes
look upward
he’s strong
has dirty fingernails
and upon the walls:
scabbards.
he knows things:
books
the odds
the best road
home
I like him
but I think he
lies
(I’m not sure
he lies)
his wife sits
in a dark
corner
when I first met
her she was the
most beautiful
woman
I had ever
seen
now she has
become
his twin
perhaps not his
fault:
perhaps the thing
does us all
like that
yet after I leave
their house
I feel terror
the moon looks
diseased
my hands slip
on the
steering wheel
I get my car
out
and down the
hill
almost crash it
into a
blue-green
parked car
clod me forever,
Beatrice
wavering poet, ha
haha
dinky dog of
terror.
the professors
sitting with the professors
we talk about Allen Tate
and John Crow Ransom
the rugs are clean and
the coffeetables shine
and there is talk of
budgets and works in
progress
and there is a
fireplace.
the kitchen floor is
well-waxed
and I have just eaten
dinner
after drinking until
3 a.m.
after reading
the night before
now I’m to read again
at a nearby college.
I’m in Arkansas in
January
somebody even mentions
Faulkner
I go to the bathroom
and vomit up the
dinner
when I come out
they are all in their
coats and overcoats
waiting in the
kitchen.
I ’m to read in
15 minutes.
there’ll be a
good crowd
they tell me.
for Al—
don’t worry about rejections, pard,
I’ve been rejected
before.
sometimes you make a mistake, taking
the wrong poem
more often I make the mistake, writing
it.
but I like a mount in every race
even though the man
who puts up the morning line
tabs it 30 to one.
I get to thinking about death more and
more
senility
crutches
armchairs
writing purple poetry with a
dripping pen
when the young girls with mouths
like barracudas
bodies like lemon trees
bodies like clouds
bodies like flashes of lightning
stop knocking on my door.
don’t worry about rejections, pard.
I have smoked 25 cigarettes tonight
and you know about the beer.
the phone has only rung once:
wrong number.
how to be a great writer
you’ve got to fuck a great many women
beautiful women
and write a few decent love poems.
and don’t worry about age
and/or freshly-arrived talents.
just drink more beer
more and more beer
and attend the racetrack at least once a
week
and win
if possible.
learning to win is hard—
any slob can be a good loser.
and don’t forget your Brahms
and your Bach and your
beer.
don’t overexercise.
sleep until noon.
avoid credit cards
or paying for anything on
time.
remember that there isn’t a piece of ass
in this world worth over $50
(in 1977).
and if you have the ability to love
 
; love yourself first
but always be aware of the possibility of
total defeat
whether the reason for that defeat
seems right or wrong—
an early taste of death is not necessarily
a bad thing.
stay out of churches and bars and museums,
and like the spider be
patient—
time is everybody’s cross,
plus
exile
defeat
treachery
all that dross.
stay with the beer.
beer is continous blood.
a continuous lover.
get a large typewriter
and as the footsteps go up and down
outside your window
hit that thing
hit it hard
make it a heavyweight fight
make it the bull when he first charges in
and remember the old dogs
who fought so well:
Hemingway, Celine, Dostoevsky, Hamsun.
if you think they didn’t go crazy
in tiny rooms
just like you’re doing now
without women
without food
without hope
then you’re not ready.
drink more beer.
there’s time.
and if there’s not
that’s all right
too.
the price
drinking 15 dollar champagne—
Cordon Rouge—with the hookers.
one is named Georgia and she
doesn’t like pantyhose:
I keep helping her pull up
her long dark stockings.
the other is Pam-prettier
but not much soul, and
we smoke and talk and I
play with their legs and
stick my bare foot into
Georgia’s open purse.
it’s filled with
bottles of pills. I
take some of the pills.
“listen,” I say, “one of
you has soul, the other
looks. Can’t I combine
the 2 of you? take the soul
and stick it into the looks?”
“you want me,” says Pam, “it
will cost you a hundred.”
we drink some more and Georgia
falls to the floor and can’t
get up.
I tell Pam that I like her
earrings very much. Her
hair is long and a natural
red.
“I was only kidding about the
hundred,” she says.
“oh,” I say, “what will it cost
me?”
she lights her cigarette with
my lighter and looks at me
through the flame:
her eyes tell me.
“look,” I say, “I don’t think I
can ever pay that price again.”
she crosses her legs
inhales on her cigarette
as she exhales she smiles
and says, “sure you can.”
alone with everybody
the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but they keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.
there’s no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.
nobody ever finds
the one.
the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill
nothing else
fills.
the 2nd novel
they’d come around and
they’d ask
“you finished your
2nd novel yet?”
“no.”
“whatsamatta? whatsamatta
that you can’t
finish it?”
“hemorrhoids and
insomnia.”
“maybe you’ve lost
it?”
“lost what?”
“you know.”
now when they come
around I tell them,
“yeh. I finished
it. be out in Sept.”
“you finished it?”
“yeh.”
“well, listen, I gotta
go.”
even the cat
here in the courtyard
won’t come to my door
anymore.
it’s nice.
Chopin Bukowski
this is my piano.
the phone rings and people ask,
what are you doing? how about
getting drunk with us?
and I say,
I’m at my piano.
what?
I’m at my piano.
I hang up.
people need me. I fill
them. if they can’t see me
for a while they get desperate, they get
sick.
but if I see them too often
I get sick. it’s hard to feed
without getting fed.
my piano says things back to
me.
sometimes the things are
scrambled and not very good.
other times
I get as good and lucky as
Chopin.
sometimes I get out of practice
out of tune. that’s
all right.
I can sit down and vomit on the
keys
but it’s my
vomit.
it’s better than sitting in a room
with 3 or 4 people and
their pianos.
this is my piano
and it is better than theirs.
and they like it and they do not
like it.
gloomy lady
she sits up there
drinking wine
while her husband
is at work.
she puts quite
some importance
upon getting her
poems published
in the little
magazines.
she’s had two or
three of her slim
volumes of poems
done in mimeo.
she has two or
three children
between the ages
of 6 and 15.
she is no longer
the beautiful woman
she was. she sends
photos of herself
sitting upon a rock
by the ocean
alone and damned.
I could have had
her once. I wonder
if she thinks I
could have
saved her?
in all her poems
her husband is
never mentioned.
but she does
talk about her
garden
so we know that’s
there, anyhow,
and maybe she
fucks the rosebuds
and finches