Come On In

welcome to my wormy hell.

the music grinds off-key.

fish eyes watch from the wall.

this is where the last happy shot was

fired.

the mind snaps closed

like a mind snapping

closed.

we need to discover a new will and a new

way.

we’re stuck here now

listening to the laughter of the

gods.

my temples ache with the fact of

the facts.

I get up, move about, scratch

myself.

I’m a pawn.

I am a hungry prayer.

my wormy hell welcomes you.

hello. hello there. come in, come on in!

plenty of room here for us all,

sucker.

we can only blame ourselves so

come sit with me in the dark.

it’s half-past

nowhere

everywhere.

long ago, oh so long ago, when

I was trying to write short stories

and there was one little magazine which printed

decent stuff

and the lady editor there usually sent me

encouraging rejection slips

so I made a point to

read her monthly magazine in the public

library.

I noticed that she began to feature

the same writer

for the lead story each

month and

it pissed me off because I thought that I could

write better than that

fellow.

his work was facile and bright but it had no

edge.

you could tell that he had never had his nose rubbed into

life, he had just

glided over it.

next thing I knew, this ice-skater-of-a-writer was

famous.

he had begun as a copy boy

on one of the big New York

magazines

(how the hell do you get one of those

jobs?)

then he began appearing in some of the best

ladies’ magazines

and in some of the respected literary

journals.

then after a couple of early books

out came a little volume, a sweet

novelette, and he was truly

famous.

it was a tale about high society and

a young girl and it was

delightful and charming and just a bit

naughty.

Hollywood quickly made a movie out of

it.

then the writer bounced around Hollywood

from party to party

for a few years.

I saw his photo again and again:

a little elf-man with huge

eyeglasses.

and he always wore a long dramatic

scarf.

but soon he went back to New York and to all the

parties there.

he went to every important party thereafter for years

and to

some that weren’t very

important.

then he stopped writing altogether and just went

to parties.

he drank or doped himself into oblivion almost

every night.

his once slim frame more than doubled in

size.

his face grew heavy and he no longer looked

like the young boy with the quick and dirty

wit but more like an

old frog.

the scarf was still on display but his hats were

too large and came down almost to his

eyes;

all you noticed was his

twisted

lurid

grin.

the society ladies still liked to drag him

around New York

one on each arm

and

drinking like he did, he didn’t live

to enjoy his old age.

so

he died

and was quickly

forgotten

until somebody found what they claimed was his secret

diary / novel

and then all the famous people in

New York were very

worried

and they should have been worried because when it

was published

out came all the dirty

laundry.

but I still maintain that he never really did
know
how to

write; just what and

when and about

whom.

slim, thin

stuff.

ever so long ago, after reading

one of his short stories,

after dropping the magazine to the floor,

I thought,

Jesus Christ, if this is what they

want,

from now on

I might as well write for

the rats and the spiders

and the air and just for

myself.

which, of course, is exactly what

I did.

my friend Tom, he liked to come over

and he’d say, “let’s go get a coffee.”

and my girlfriend would say, “you guys

going to talk that literary stuff again?”

and we’d go to this place where you paid

for your first coffee and all the refills were

free

and we’d get a seat by the window and he

would begin:

Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos

Passos mainly but others got in there

too: e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, Dreiser,

Jeffers, Céline and so forth.

although I will admit I was mostly a

listener and wondered what he was

really getting at, if anything, I

continued to listen and

drink coffee after

coffee.

once he said, “look, I’ll take you to the

place Fitzgerald stayed at for a while

during his Hollywood period.”

“all right,” I said and we got into his

car and he drove me there and pointed

it out:

“Fitzgerald lived there.”

“all right,” I said and then he drove us

back for more coffee.

Tom was truly excited about these

literary figures of the past.

I was too, to an extent,

but as Tom talked on and on about

them

and the coffees continued unabated

my interest began to wane, more than

wane.

I began to want to get rid of

Tom.

it was easy.

one day I wrote a poem about Tom

and it was published and he read

it

and after that

we enjoyed no more coffees

together.

Tom had been working on a

biography of me

and that ended that.

then another writer came along

and he drank my wine

and didn’t talk about Hemingway,

Fitzgerald, Faulkner, etc.,

he talked about himself

and ended up writing a not-very-

satisfactory biography

of me.

I should have stuck with Tom.

no, I should have gotten rid of

both of them.

which is exactly what I have

done.