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    The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills

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      virgins before young boys in dementia, & it’s

      too much hair on the neck and flowers dying in a

      bowl. my wife comes out of the

      can.

      are you all right? she

      asks. yeah, I

      say.

      down by the wings

      they speak of angels or she

      speaks of angels

      from a plateglass window overlooking the

      Sunset Strip

      (she has these visions)

      (I don’t have these visions)

      but maybe angels prefer people with

      money

      daughters of rich farmers who are dying of

      throat cancer in Brazil.

      myself—I keep seeing these

      wingless creatures of mean story and dismal

      intent

      and she says

      when I defame her

      dream:

      you are trying to

      pull me down

      by the wings.

      she’s going to Europe in the summer—

      Greece, Italy, most probably

      Paris and she’s

      taking some of her angels with

      her.

      not all

      but some.

      now there’s this half-Chinese boy who used to

      sleep on fire escapes

      the Negro homosexual who plays chess and

      recited Shelley at the Sensualist

      then there’s the one who has real talent with the

      brush (Nickey) but who simply can’t get

      started

      somehow and

      there’s also Sieberling who cries because he

      loves his mother (actually).

      many of these

      angels

      will leave town and

      flow around the

      Arch of Triumph

      to be photographed or

      to chase beetles at

      9 rue Git-le-Coeur, and

      it’s going to be a hot and

      lonesome summer

      for many of us when

      the devil walks in and retakes Hollywood

      once more.

      fire

      schoolgirls in tight skirts and first heels

      came

      sparrows flew away and fat landlords parted from their

      electric mirrors

      skinny housewives with runny noses and dirty aprons

      came

      and the fire engine: polished wailing disorder spilling

      intestines of water

      came

      firemen in helmets

      firemen with axes

      came

      god, a tree 90 feet high

      BURNING

      A HOUSE BURNING RED

      tolling

      lordward

      the grass melting and yelling on the top of the

      ground and

      those smokesweet pictures of bluegray putting the

      whole sky out of

      place

      and all the while nobody saying anything just

      watching

      what the flames did

      like something busted out

      finally and having its

      say

      we all came

      together.

      one for the old man

      standing in the plaza I can hear speeches about a new

      world—

      men asking for their kind of love

      while mine is a kind of pinch-eyed drag of

      going on, for that which seems so important to them

      seems worthless to me.

      so

      I go back to the hotel room

      and look at the pitcher of water on the dresser

      and the bits of glass hung on string

      left in the window by a Mexican whore

      to reflect what’s left of me

      and this seems

      sensible

      as sensible as reading the history of the

      Crimean War

      as sensible as wax and women and

      dogs.

      I watch a fly and read the newspaper

      then eat sausage and bananas

      and an orange.

      then I pull the shade on the speechmakers.

      over the back of a chair are my

      belt and necktie,

      necktie knotted

      for my throat

      which is like a flower 80 feet high and

      pumping out phrases of

      bedlam.

      mutilated forever at the age of

      46. our dear sweet father said we’d come to

      this.

      a drawer of fish

      he kept drawing fish

      on sheets of paper

      and I said,

      Jack, what’s wrong?

      but he wouldn’t answer

      and his wife said

      he won’t look for a job

      that’s what’s wrong,

      and I gotta stay with

      the kids; I don’t know

      how in the hell we’re

      going to make it.

      he kept drawing fish

      on sheets of paper

      and he wasn’t even drunk.

      I went down and got 2

      bottles of wine

      and the old lady poured

      them around.

      and Jack drank his,

      then cursed: this g.d.

      ballpoint pen always runs

      out of blood

      just when I’m at the point,

      the crux, just when I’m

      finally burning

      in the imbecile wax of fire…

      he threw the pen

      into a papersack full of empty bottles,

      empty sardine and

      bean cans, put on his coat

      and walked out.

      where’s he going?

      I asked.

      I don’t give a damn

      where’s he’s going,

      his old lady said.

      then she pulled her dress back

      and showed me a lot of leg;

      it looked pretty good, I

      have always been a leg man

      but I walked over to the closet

      and put on my coat.

      where you going? she asked.

      I’m going to look for a job,

      I told her,

      there’s an ad in the Times,

      they need janitors for the

      new Fleischman building.

      I walked down the steps

      and half a block North

      to the nearest bar.

      Jack was sitting there.

      I don’t know, he said,

      I think I’m going

      to kill myself.

      it doesn’t matter, I said,

      it’s going to happen

      anyhow.

      we sat there the rest of the afternoon

      drinking

      and about 7 p.m. we left,

      he with one with fire in her hair

      and I with one with a limp

      a reader of Henry James

      who laughed out of the side

      of her mouth.

      it was 63 degrees

      and not much left

      of the world.

      L. Beethoven, half-back

      he came out for the team;

      Ludwig V. Beethoven, blocking

      half-back. he really knocked

      them down. but he drank beer

      and played the piano all night.

      Schiller, you’re a freak, he

      said. leave the ladies alone.

      the ladies will always be the

      same. don’t fret, when you

      need one, she’ll be there.

      and Tchaikovsky, he said,

      take some vitamins. I don’t

      mind that you’re a homo:

      just stay away

      from me. that’s the trouble

      with all you guys:

      you’re too

      pale!


      I took a lateral from G. B. Shaw

      and ducked around the end;

      Beethoven blocked out 3 men,

      and as I went past

      he said, I got a couple of

      babes lined up for tonight;

      don’t injure

      anything

      you might need

      later…

      I shot up the field

      evading tacklers

      like a madman. B. was

      studying harmony, but

      I doubted if he could

      ever

      make it. he was just

      a fat

      beer-drinking

      German.

      self-destruction

      my snake’s red fingers

      he said

      and they took him off the couch

      and put him on the stretcher

      and carried him down

      25 steps

      and his woman crossed her legs

      (I could almost see her beautiful crotch)

      and lit a cigarette

      and said

      I just

      can’t kaant see what possessed him,

      and I slapped her across the face

      flying the cigarette to the rug

      like some Mars thing

      and followed the stretcher

      on down.

      these mad windows that taste life and cut me if I go through them

      I’ve always lived on second and third floors or higher

      all my life

      but I got some woman pregnant

      and since she wasn’t my wife

      we moved over here—

      we were in the back at first

      2nd floor rear

      as Mr. and Mrs.—

      a new start—

      and there was a madwoman in this

      place and she kept the shades drawn

      and hollered obscenities in the dark

      (I thought she was pretty sharp)

      but they took her away one day

      and we moved in here and had the baby,

      a beautiful skunk of a child with pale blue eyes

      who made me swallow my heart like a cherry in a chilled drink,

      but the woman decided I was insane too

      and moved the child and herself to Hollywood

      and I give them what money I can—

      but most of the time I lay around all day

      sweating in bed

      wondering how much longer I can fool them

      listening to my landlord outside

      watering his lawn

      46 years hanging on my bones

      and big green tears cascade ha, ha,

      down my face and are tabulated by my dirty pillow:

      all those years shot through the head

      assassinated forever

      drunk senseless

      hobbled and slugged in factories

      poked with bad dreams

      dripping away in mouse- and ghost-infested rooms

      across an America without meaning,

      boy o boy.

      about 3 p.m. I get up

      having failed to sleep but more than a few minutes

      anyhow

      and then I put on an old undershirt

      crisp fresh torn shorts

      and a pair of stolen army pants

      and I pull up the shades

      and sit a little back in a hard folding chair

      near a window on the streetside

      and then they come by,

      young girls

      fresh fluid divine intelligent

      drinks of orange juice

      rides in air-conditioned elevators,

      in blue and green and yellow in motion

      in red in waves

      in squads and battalions of laughter

      they laugh at me and for me,

      old 46, at attention, pig green eyes

      like a Van Gogh bursting and breaking

      the trachea and tits of the earth and the sun,

      my god, look, here I am

      and no matter what I said to them

      they would run away

      I would be reported as an old goof

      babbling in the marketplace for hard pennies—

      they expect me to use the bathroom,

      a shadow-picture for their singing flesh

      and the pliers of my hand—

      a good citizen jacksoff, votes, and looks at Bob Hope—

      and even old maids

      with husbands killed

      making swivel chairs in industry

      they walk by

      in green in yellow in red

      and they have bodies like high-school girls

      they perch on their stilts and dare me to break

      custom

      but to have any of these would take weeks and months

      of torture—introduction, niceties, conversation that

      cleaves the soul like a rusty axe—

      no, no, god damn it! no more!

      a man who cannot adjust to society is called a

      psychotic, and the boy in the Texas tower

      who shot 49 and killed 15 was one,

      although in the Marine Corps he got the o.k.

      to go ahead—it’s all in the way you’re dressed

      and if the beehive says the project

      protects the Queen and Goodyear Rubber and so

      forth,

      but the way I see it from this window

      his action was nothing extraordinary or

      unexpected and psychiatrists are just paid liars

      of a continuing social

      disorder.

      and soon I get up from the window

      and move around

      and if I turn on the radio

      and luck on Shostakovich or Mahler

      or sit down to type a letter to the president,

      the voices begin all around me—

      “HEY! KNOCK IT OFF!”

      “YOU SON OF A BITCH! WE’LL CALL THE LAW!”

      on each side of me are two high-rise apartments

      things lit at night with blue and green lights

      and they have swimming pools that everybody has

      too much class to get into

      but the rent is very high

      and they sit looking at their walls

      decorated with pictures of people with chopped-off

      heads

      and wait to go back to

      WORK,

      meanwhile, they sense that my sounds are not

      their sounds—

      66 people on each side of my head

      in love with Green Berets and piranhas—

      “GOD DAMN YOU, COOL IT!”

      these I cannot see through my window

      and for this I am glad

      my stomach is in bad shape from drinking cheap wine,

      and so for them

      I become quiet

      I listen to their sounds—

      their baseball games, their comedies, their quiz shows,

      their dry kisses, their kindling safety,

      their hard bodies stuffed into the walls and murdered,

      and I go to the table

      take my madman’s crayons

      and begin drawing them on my walls

      all of them—

      loving, fucking, eating, shitting,

      frightened of Christ, frightened of poverty,

      frightened of life

      they crawl my walls like roaches

      and I draw suns between them

      and axes and guns and towers and babies

      and dogs, cats, animals, and it becomes

      difficult to distinguish the animal from the

      other, and my whole body sweats, stinks,

      as I tremble like a liar from the truth of things,

      and then I drink some water, take off my clothing and

      go to bed

      where I will not sleep

      first pulling down all the shades

      and then waiting for 3 p.m.

      my girls my lad
    ies my way

      with nothing going through and nothing coming in and

      nothing going out, Cathedrals and Art Museums and

      mountains wasted, only the salt of myself, some ants,

      old newspapers, my shame, my shame

      at not having

      killed

      (razor, carcrash, turpentine, gaspipe)

      (good job, marriage, investments in the market)

      what is left of

      myself.

      birth

      I.

      reading the Dialogues of Plato when the

      doctor walks up and says

      do you still read that highbrow

      stuff? last time I read that I

      was in

      high school.

      I read it, I tell

      him.

      well, it’s a girl, 9#, 3 oz. no trouble at

      all.

      shit. great. when can I see

      them?

      they’ll let you know. good

      night.

      II.

      I sit down to Plato again. there are 4 people playing

      cards. one woman has beautiful legs that she doesn’t hide

      and I keep looking at her legs until she covers them with a

      blue sweater.

      III.

      I am called upstairs. they show me the thing through glass.

      it’s red as a boiled crab and tough. it will make

      it. it will see it through.

      hey, look at this, Plato: another broad!

      I can see her now on some Sunday afternoon

      shaking it in a tight skirt

      making boulevards of young men warble in their

     
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