The Pleasures of the Damned

please get dressed!

  why does it take you so long to

  get dressed?

  where’s the brush?

  all right, I’ll give you a head

  band!

  what time is it?

  where’s the clock?

  where did you put the clock?

  aren’t you dressed yet?

  where’s the brush?

  where’s your sandwich?

  did you make a sandwich?

  I’ll make your sandwich.

  honey and peanut butter.

  and an orange.

  there.

  where’s the brush?

  I’ll use a comb.

  all right, holler. you lost the brush!

  where did you lose the brush?

  all right. now isn’t that better?

  where’s your coat?

  go find your coat.

  your coat has to be around somewhere!

  listen, what are you doing?

  what are you playing with?

  now you’ve spilled it all!

  I hear them open the door

  go down the stairway,

  get into the car.

  I hear them drive away. they are gone, down the hill

  on the way to

  nursery school.

  grass

  at the window

  I watch a man with a

  power mower

  the sounds of his doing race like

  flies and bees

  on the wallpaper,

  it is like a warm fire, and

  better than eating steak,

  and the grass is green enough

  and the sun is sun enough

  and what’s left of my life

  stands there

  checking glints of green flying;

  it is a giant disrobing of

  care, stumbling away from

  doing.

  suddenly I understand

  old men in rockers

  bats in Colorado caves

  tiny lice crawling into

  the eyes of dead birds.

  back and forth

  he follows his gasoline

  sound. it is

  interesting enough,

  with

  the streets

  flat on their Spring backs

  and smiling.

  crucifix in a deathhand

  yes, they begin out in a willow, I think

  the starch mountains begin out in the willow

  and keep right on going without regard for

  pumas and nectarines

  somehow these mountains are like

  an old woman with a bad memory and

  a shopping basket.

  we are in a basin. that is the

  idea. down in the sand and the alleys,

  this land punched-in, cuffed-out, divided,

  held like a crucifix in a deathhand,

  this land bought, resold, bought again and

  sold again, the wars long over,

  the Spaniards all the way back in Spain

  down in the thimble again, and now

  real estaters, subdividers, landlords, freeway

  engineers arguing. this is their land and

  I walk on it, live on it a little while

  near Hollywood here I see young men in rooms

  listening to glazed recordings

  and I think too of old men sick of music

  sick of everything, and death like suicide

  I think is sometimes voluntary, and to get your

  hold on the land here it is best to return to the

  Grand Central Market, see the old Mexican women,

  the poor…I am sure you have seen these same women

  many years before

  arguing

  with the same young Japanese clerks

  witty, knowledgeable and golden

  among their soaring store of oranges, apples

  avocados, tomatoes, cucumbers—

  and you know how these look, they do look good

  as if you could eat them all

  light a cigar and smoke away the bad world.

  then it’s best to go back to the bars, the same bars

  wooden, stale, merciless, green

  with the young policeman walking through

  scared and looking for trouble,

  and the beer is still bad

  it has an edge that already mixes with vomit and

  decay, and you’ve got to be strong in the shadows

  to ignore it, to ignore the poor and to ignore yourself

  and the shopping bag between your legs

  down there feeling good with its avocados and

  oranges and fresh fish and wine bottles, who needs

  a Fort Lauderdale winter?

  25 years ago there used to be a whore there

  with a film over one eye, who was too fat

  and made little silver bells out of cigarette

  tinfoil. the sun seemed warmer then

  although this was probably not

  true, and you take your shopping bag

  outside and walk along the street

  and the green beer hangs there

  just above your stomach like

  a short and shameful shawl, and

  you look around and no longer

  see any

  old men.

  the screw-game

  one of the terrible things is

  really

  being in bed

  night after night

  with a woman you no longer

  want to screw.

  they get old, they don’t look very good

  anymore—they even tend to

  snore, lose

  spirit.

  so, in bed, you turn sometimes,

  your foot touches hers—

  god, awful!—

  and the night is out there

  beyond the curtains

  sealing you together

  in the

  tomb.

  and in the morning you go to the

  bathroom, pass in the hall, talk,

  say odd things; eggs fry, motors

  start.

  but sitting across

  you have 2 strangers

  jamming toast into mouths

  burning the sullen head and gut with

  coffee.

  in 10 million places in America

  it is the same—

  stale lives propped against each

  other

  and no place to

  go.

  you get in the car

  and you drive to work

  and there are more strangers there, most of them

  wives and husbands of somebody

  else, and besides the guillotine of work, they

  flirt and joke and pinch, sometimes tend to

  work off a quick screw somewhere—

  they can’t do it at home—

  and then

  the drive back home

  waiting for Christmas or Labor Day or

  Sunday or

  something.

  millionaires

  you

  no faces

  no faces

  at all

  laughing at nothing—

  let me tell you

  I have drunk in skid row rooms with

  imbecile winos

  whose cause was better

  whose eyes still held some light

  whose voices retained some sensibility,

  and when the morning came

  we were sick but not ill,

  poor but not deluded,

  and we stretched in our beds and rose

  in the late afternoons

  like millionaires.

  when you wait for the dawn to crawl through the

  screen like a burglar to take your life away

  screen like a burglar to take your life away

  the snake had crawled the hole,

  and she said,


  tell me about

  yourself.

  and

  I said,

  I was beaten down

  long ago

  in some alley

  in another

  world.

  and she said,

  we’re all

  like pigs

  slapped down some lane,

  our

  grassbrains

  singing

  toward the

  blade.

  by

  god,

  you’re an

  odd one,

  I said.

  we

  sat there

  smoking

  cigarettes

  at

  5

  in the morning.

  the talkers

  the boy walks with his muddy feet across my

  soul

  talking about recitals, virtuosi, conductors,

  the lesser known novels of Dostoyevsky;

  talking about how he corrected a waitress,

  a hasher who didn’t know that French dressing

  was composed of so and so;

  he gabbles about the Arts until

  I hate the Arts,

  and there is nothing cleaner

  than getting back to a bar or

  back to the track and watching them run,

  watching things go without this

  clamor and chatter,

  talk, talk, talk,

  the small mouth going, the eyes blinking,

  a boy, a child, sick with the Arts,

  grabbing at it like the skirt of a mother,

  and I wonder how many tens of thousands

  there are like him across the land

  on rainy nights

  on sunny mornings

  on evenings meant for peace

  in concert halls

  in cafes

  at poetry recitals

  talking, soiling, arguing.

  it’s like a pig going to bed

  with a good woman

  and you don’t want

  the woman any more.

  art

  as the

  spirit

  wanes

  the

  form

  appears.

  advice for some young man in the year 2064 A.D.

  let me speak as a friend

  although the centuries hang

  between us and neither you nor I

  can see the moon.

  be careful less the onion blind the eye

  or the snake sting

  or the beetle possess the house

  or the lover your wife

  or the government your child

  or the wine your will

  or the doctor your heart

  or the butcher your belly

  or the cat your chair

  or the lawyer your ignorance of the law

  or the law dressed as a uniformed man and killing you.

  dismiss perfection as an ache of the

  greedy

  but do not give in to the mass modesty of

  easy imperfection.

  and remember

  the belly of the whale is laden with

  great men.

  (uncollected)

  ice for the eagles

  I keep remembering the horses

  under the moon

  I keep remembering feeding the horses

  sugar

  white oblongs of sugar

  more like ice,

  and they had heads like

  eagles

  bald heads that could bite and

  did not.

  The horses were more real than

  my father

  more real than God

  and they could have stepped on my

  feet but they didn’t

  they could have done all kinds of horrors

  but they didn’t.

  I was almost 5

  but I have not forgotten yet;

  o my god they were strong and good

  those red tongues slobbering

  out of their souls.

  girl in a mini skirt reading the Bible

  outside my window

  outside my window

  Sunday. I am eating a

  grapefruit. church is over at the Russian

  Orthodox to the

  west.

  she is dark

  of Eastern descent,

  large brown eyes look up from the Bible

  then down. a small red and black

  Bible, and as she reads

  her legs keep moving, moving,

  she is doing a slow rhythmic dance

  reading the Bible…

  long gold earrings;

  2 gold bracelets on each arm,

  and it’s a mini-suit, I suppose,

  the cloth hugs her body,

  the lightest of tans is that cloth,

  she twists this way and that,

  long young legs warm in the sun…

  there is no escaping her being

  there is no desire to…

  my radio is playing symphonic music

  that she cannot hear

  but her movements coincide exactly

  to the rhythms of the

  symphony…

  she is dark, she is dark

  she is reading about God.

  I am God.

  hell is a lonely place

  he was 65, his wife was 66, had

  Alzheimer’s disease.

  he had cancer of the

  mouth.

  there were

  operations, radiation

  treatments

  which decayed the bones in his

  jaw

  which then had to be

  wired.

  daily he put his wife in

  rubber diapers

  like a

  baby.

  unable to drive in his

  condition

  he had to take a taxi to

  the medical

  center,

  had difficulty speaking,

  had to

  write the directions

  down.

  on his last visit

  they informed him

  there would be another

  operation: a bit more

  left

  cheek and a bit more

  tongue.

  when he returned

  he changed his wife’s

  diapers

  put on the tv

  dinners, watched the

  evening news

  then went to the

  bedroom, got the

  gun, put it to her

  temple, fired.

  she fell to the

  left, he sat upon the

  couch

  put the gun into his

  mouth, pulled the

  trigger.

  the shots didn’t arouse

  the neighbors.

  later

  the burning tv dinners

  did.

  somebody arrived, pushed

  the door open, saw

  it.

  soon

  the police arrived and

  went through their

  routine, found

  some items:

  a closed savings

  account and

  a checkbook with a

  balance of

  $1.14

  suicide, they

  deduced.

  in three weeks

  there were two

  new tenants:

  a computer engineer

  named

  Ross

  and his wife

  Anatana

  who studied

  ballet.

  they looked like another

  upwardly mobile

  pair.

  the girls and the birds

  the girls were young

  and worked the

  streets

  but often couldn?
??t

  score, they

  ended up

  in my hotel

  room

  3 or 4 of

  them

  sucking at the

  wine,

  hair in face,

  runs in

  stockings,

  cursing, telling

  stories…

  somehow

  those were

  peaceful

  nights

  but really

  they reminded me

  of long

  ago

  when I was a

  boy

  watching my grandmother’s

  canaries make

  droppings

  into their

  seed

  and into their

  water

  and the

  canaries were

  beautiful

  and

  chattered

  but

  never

  sang.

  1813–1883

  listening to Wagner

  as outside in the dark the wind blows a cold rain the

  trees wave and shake lights go

  off and on the walls creak and the cats run under the

  bed…

  Wagner battles the agonies, he’s emotional but

  solid, he’s the supreme fighter, a giant in a world of

  pygmies, he takes it straight on through, he breaks

  barriers

  an

  astonishing FORCE of sound as