everything here shakes
shivers
bends
blasts
in fierce gamble
yes, Wagner and the storm intermix with the wine as
nights like this run up my wrists and up into my head and
back down into the
gut
some men never
die
and some men never
live
but we’re all alive
to night.
no leaders, please
invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
don’t swim in the same slough.
invent yourself and then reinvent yourself
and
stay out of the clutches of mediocrity.
invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
change your tone and shape so often that they can
never
categorize you.
reinvigorate yourself and
accept what is
but only on the terms that you have invented
and reinvented.
be self-taught.
and reinvent your life because you must;
it is your life and
its history
and the present
belong only to
you.
song
Julio came by with his guitar and sang his
latest song.
Julio was famous, he wrote songs and also
published books of little drawings and
poems.
they were very
good.
Julio sang a song about his latest love
affair.
he sang that
it began so well
then it went to
hell.
those were not the words exactly
but that was the meaning of the
words.
Julio finished
singing.
then he said, “I still care for
her, I can’t get her off my
mind.”
“what will I do?” Julio
asked.
“drink,” Henry said,
pouring.
Julio just looked at his
glass:
“I wonder what she’s doing
now?”
“probably engaging in oral
copulation,” Henry
suggested.
Julio put his guitar back in
the case and
walked to the
door.
Henry walked Julio to his car which
was parked in the
drive.
it was a nice moonlit
night.
as Julio started his car and
backed out the drive
Henry waved him a
farewell.
then he went inside
sat
down.
he finished Julio’s untouched
drink
then he
phoned
her.
“he was just by,” Henry told
her, “he’s feeling very
bad…”
“you’ll have to excuse me,”
she said, “but I’m busy right
now.”
she hung
up.
and Henry poured one of his
own
as outside the crickets sang
their own
song.
one for Sherwood Anderson
sometimes I forget about him and his peculiar
innocence, almost idiotic, awkward and mawkish,
he liked walking over bridges and through cornfields.
to night I think about him, the way the lines were,
one felt space between his lines, air
and he told it so the lines remained
carved there
something like van Gogh.
he took his time
looking about
sometimes running to save something
leaving everything to save something,
then at other times giving it all away.
he didn’t understand Hemingway’s neon tattoo,
found Faulkner much too clever.
he was a midwestern hick
he took his time.
he was as far away from Fitzgerald as he was
from Paris.
he told stories and left the meaning open
and sometimes he told meaningless stories
because that was the way it was.
he told the same story again and again
and he never wrote a story that was unreadable.
and nobody ever talks about his life or
his death.
bow wow love
here things are tough but
they’re mostly always tough.
basically I’m just trying to get along
with the female. when you
first meet them their eyes
are all moist with understanding;
laughter abounds
like sand fleas. then, Jesus,
time tinkles on and
things leak. they
start BOOMING out DEMANDS.
and, actually, what they
demand is basically contrary to whatever
you are or could be.
what’s so strange is the sudden
knowledge that they’ve never
read anything you’ve written,
not really read it at
all. or worse, if they have,
they’ve come to SAVE
you! which means mainly
wanting you to act like everybody
else and be just like them
and their friends. meanwhile
they’ve sucked
you up and wound you up
in a million webs, and
being somewhat of a
feeling person you can’t
help but remember their
good side or the side
that at first seemed to be good.
and so you find yourself
alone in your
bedroom grabbing your
gut and saying, o, shit
no, not again.
we should have known.
maybe we wanted cotton
candy luck. maybe we
believed. what trash.
we believed like dogs
believe.
(uncollected)
the day the epileptic spoke
the other day
I’m out at the track
betting Early Bird
(that’s when you bet at the
track before it opens)
I am sitting there having
a coffee and going over
the Form
and this guy slides toward
me—
his body is twisted
his head shakes
his eyes are out of
focus
there is spittle upon his
lips
he manages to get close to
me and asks,
“pardon me, sir, but could you
tell me the number of
Lady of Dawn in the
first race?”
“it’s the 7 horse,”
I tell him.
“thank you, sir,”
he says.
that night
or the next morning
really:
12:04 a.m.
Los Alamitos Quarter Horse
Results on radio
KLAC
the man told me
Lady of Dawn
won the first at
$79.80
that was two weeks
ago
and I’ve been there
every racing day since
and I haven’t seen that
poor epileptic fellow
again.
r /> the gods have ways of
telling you things
when you think you know
a lot
or worse—
when you think
you know
just a
little.
when Hugo Wolf went mad—
Hugo Wolf went mad while eating an onion
and writing his 253rd song; it was rainy
April and the worms came out of the ground
humming Tannhäuser, and he spilled his milk
with his ink, and his blood fell out to the walls
and he howled and he roared and he screamed, and
downstairs
his landlady said, I knew it, that rotten son
of a
bitch has dummied up his brain, he’s jacked-off
his last piece
of music and now I’ll never get the rent, and someday
he’ll be famous
and they’ll bury him in the rain, but right now
I wish he’d shut
up that god damned screaming—for my money he’s
a silly pansy jackass
and when they move him out of here, I hope they
move in a good solid fisherman
or a hangman
or a seller of
biblical tracts.
in a neighborhood of murder
murder
the roaches spit out
paper clips
and the helicopter circles and circles
smelling for blood
searchlights leering down into our
bedroom
5 guys in this court have pistols
another a
machete
we are all murderers and
alcoholics
but there are worse in the hotel
across the street
they sit in the green and white doorway
banal and depraved
waiting to be institutionalized
here we each have a small green plant
in the window
and when we fight with our women at 3 a.m.
we speak
softly
and on each porch
is a small dish of food
always eaten by morning
we presume
by the
cats.
the strangest sight you ever did see—
I had this room in front on DeLongpre
and I used to sit for hours
in the daytime
looking out the front
window.
there were any number of girls who would
walk by
swaying;
it helped my afternoons,
added something to the beer and the
cigarettes.
one day I saw something
extra.
I heard the sound of it first.
“come on, push!” he said.
there was a long board
about 2½ feet wide and
8 feet long;
nailed to the ends and in the middle
were roller skates.
he was pulling in front
two long ropes attached to the board
and she was in back
guiding and also pushing.
all their possessions were tied to the
board:
pots, pans, bed quilts, and so forth
were roped to the board
tied down;
and the skate wheels were grinding.
he was white, red-necked, a
southerner—
thin, slumped, his pants about to
fall from his
ass—
his face pinked by the sun and
cheap wine,
and she was black
and walked upright
pushing;
she was simply beautiful
in turban
long green earrings
yellow dress
from
neck to
ankle.
her face was gloriously
indifferent.
“don’t worry!” he shouted, looking back
at her, “somebody will
rent us a place!”
she didn’t answer.
then they were gone
although I still heard the
skate wheels.
they’re going to make it,
I thought.
I’m sure they
did.
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.
junk
sitting in a dark bedroom with 3 junkies,
female.
brown paper bags filled with trash are
everywhere.
it is one-thirty in the afternoon.
they talk about mad houses,
hospitals.
they are waiting for a fix.
none of them work.
it’s relief and food stamps and
Medi-Cal.
men are usable objects
toward the fix.
it is one-thirty in the afternoon
and outside small plants grow.
their children are still in school.
the females smoke cigarettes
and suck listlessly on beer and
tequila
which I have purchased.
I sit with them.
I wait on my fix:
I am a poetry junkie.
they pulled Ezra through the streets
in a wooden cage.
Blake was sure of God.
Villon was a mugger.
Lorca sucked cock.
T. S. Eliot worked a teller’s cage.
most poets are swans,
egrets.
I sit with 3 junkies
at one-thirty in the afternoon.
the smoke pisses upward.
I wait.
death is a nothing jumbo.
one of the females says that she likes my yellow shirt.
I believe in a simple violence.
this is
some of it.
Mademoiselle from Armentières
if you gotta have wars
I suppose World War One was the best.
really, you know, both sides were much more enthusiastic,
they really had something to fight for,
they really thought they had something to fight for,
it was bloody and wrong but it was Romantic,
those dirty Germans with babies stuck on the ends of their
bayonets, and so forth, and
there were lots of patriotic songs, and the women loved both the soldiers
and their money.
the Mexican war and those other wars hardly ever happened.
and the Civil War, that was just a movie.
the wars come too fast now
even the pro-war boys grow weary,
World War Two did them in,
and then Korea, that Korea,
that was dirty, nobody won
except the black marketeers,
and BAM!—then came Vietnam
,
I suppose the historians will have a name and a meaning for it,
but the young wised up first
and now the old are getting wise,
almost everybody’s anti-war,
no use having a war you can’t win,
right or wrong.
hell, I remember when I was a kid it
was 10 or 15 years after World War One was over,
we built model planes of Spads and Fokkers,
we bought Flying Aces magazine at the newsstand
we knew about Baron Manfred von Richthofen