told me to keep phoning
you, you told me to move closer into town,
then you told me to leave you alone.”
it’s all quite dramatic and I enjoy it.
“sure, well, what do you want?”
“I want to talk to you, I want to go to your
place and talk to you …”
“I’m with somebody now. she’s in getting a
sandwich.”
“I want to talk to you … it takes a while
to get over things. I need more time.”
“sure. wait until she comes out. we’re not
inhuman. we’ll all have a drink together.”
“shit,” she says, “oh shit!”
she jumps into her car and drives off.
the other one comes out: “who was that?”
“an ex-friend.”
now she’s gone and I’m sitting here drunk and my eyes seem wet with tears.
it’s very quiet and I feel like I have a spear
rammed into the center of my gut.
I walk to the bathroom and puke.
mercy, I think, doesn’t the human race know anything
about mercy?
the girl outside the supermarket
a very tall girl lifts her nose at me
outside a supermarket
as if I were a walking garbage
can; and I had no desire for her,
no more desire
than for a
phone pole.
what was her message?
that I would never see the top of her
pantyhose?
I am a man in his 50s
sex is no longer an aching mystery
to me, so I can’t understand
being snubbed by a
phone pole.
I’ll leave young girls to young
men.
it’s a lonely world
of frightened people,
just as it has always
been.
(uncollected)
it is not much
I suppose like others
I have come through fire and sword,
love gone wrong,
head-on crashes, drunk at sea,
and I have listened to the simple sound of water running
in tubs
and wished to drown
but simply couldn’t bear the others
carrying my body down three flights of stairs
to the round mouths of curious biddies;
the psyche has been burned
and left us senseless,
the world has been darker than lights out
in a closet full of hungry bats,
and the whiskey and wine entered our veins
when blood was too weak to carry on;
and it will happen to others,
and our few good times will be rare
because we have a critical sense
and are not easy to fool with laughter;
small gnats crawl our screen
but we see through
to a wasted landscape
and let them have their moment;
we only asked for leopards to guard
our thinning dreams.
I once lay in a
white hospital
for the dying and the dying
self, where some god pissed a rain of
reason to make things grow
only to die, where on my knees
I prayed for LIGHT,
I prayed for 1*i*g*h*t,
and praying
crawled like a blind slug into the
web
where threads of wind stuck against my mind
and I died of pity
for Man, for myself,
on a cross without nails,
watching in fear as
the pig belches in his sty, farts,
blinks and eats.
2 Outside, As Bones Break in My Kitchen
they get up on their garage roof
both of them 80 or 90 years old
standing on the slant
she wanting to fall really
all the way
but hacking at the old roofing
with a hoe
and he
more coward
on his knees praying for more days
gluing chunks of tar
his ear listening
for more green rain
more green rain
and he says
mama be careful
and she says nothing
and hacks a hole
where a tulip
never grew.
O lord, he said, Japanese women,
real women, they have not forgotten,
bowing and smiling
closing the wounds men have made;
but American women will kill you like they
tear a lampshade,
American women care less than a dime,
they’ve gotten derailed,
they’re too nervous to make good:
always scowling, belly-aching,
disillusioned, overwrought;
but oh lord, say, the Japanese women:
there was this one,
I came home and the door was locked
and when I broke in she broke out the bread knife
and chased me