The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (3 page)

 

these things that we support most well

have nothing to do with us,

and we do with them

out of of boredom or fear or money

or cracked intelligence;

our circle and our candle of light

being small,

so small we cannot bear it,

we heave out with Idea

and lose the Center:

all wax without the wick,

and we see names that once meant wisdom,

like signs into ghost towns,

and only the graves are real.

 

 

An old man asked me for a cigarette

and I carefully dealt out two.

“Been lookin’ for job. Gonna stand

in the sun and smoke.”

 

 

He was close to rags and rage

and he leaned against death.

It was a cold day, indeed, and trucks

loaded and heavy as old whores

banged and tangled on the streets…

 

 

We drop like planks from a rotting floor

as the world strives to unlock the bone

that weights its brain.

(God is a lonely place without steak.)

 

 

We are dying birds

we are sinking ships—

the world rocks down against us

and we

throw out our arms

and we

throw out our legs

like the death kiss of the centipede:

but they kindly snap our backs

and call our poison “politics.”

 

 

Well, we smoked, he and I—little men

nibbling fish-head thoughts…

 

 

All the horses do not come in,

and as you watch the lights of the jails

and hospitals wink on and out,

and men handle flags as carefully as babies,

remember this:

 

 

you are a great-gutted instrument of

heart and belly, carefully planned—

so if you take a plane for Savannah,

take the best plane;

or if you eat chicken on a rock,

make it a very special animal.

(You call it a bird; I call birds

flowers.)

 

 

And if you decide to kill somebody,

make it anybody and not somebody:

some men are made of more special, precious

parts: do not kill

if you will

a president or a King

or a man

behind a desk—

these have heavenly longitudes

enlightened attitudes.

 

 

If you decide,

take us

who stand and smoke and glower;

we are rusty with sadness and

feverish

with climbing broken ladders.

 

 

Take us:

we were never children

like your children.

We do not understand love songs

like your inamorata.

 

 

Our faces are cracked linoleum,

cracked through with the heavy, sure

feet of our masters.

 

 

We are shot through with carrot tops

and poppyseed and tilted grammar;

we waste days like mad blackbirds

and pray for alcoholic nights.

Our silk-sick human smiles wrap around

us like somebody else’s confetti:

we do not even belong to the Party.

 

 

We are a scene chalked-out with the

sick white brush of Age.

 

 

We smoke, asleep as a dish of figs.

We smoke, dead as a fog.

 

 

Take us.

 

 

A bathtub murder

or something quick and bright; our names

in the papers.

 

 

Known, at last, for a moment

to millions of careless and grape-dull eyes

that hold themselves private

to only flicker and flame

at the poor cracker-barrel jibes

of their conceited, pampered correct comedians.

 

 

Known, at last, for a moment,

as they will be known

and as you will be known

by an all-gray man on an all-gray horse

who sits and fondles a sword

longer than the night

longer than the mountain’s aching backbone

longer than all the cries

that have a-bombed up out of throats

and exploded in a newer, less-planned

land.

 

 

We smoke and the clouds do not notice us.

A cat walks by and shakes Shakespeare off of his back.

Tallow, tallow, candle like wax: our spines

are limp and our consciousness burns

guilelessly away

the remaining wick life has

doled out to us.

 

 

An old man asked me for a cigarette

and told me his troubles

and this

is what he said:

that Age was a crime

and that Pity picked up the marbles

and that Hatred picked up the

cash.

 

 

He might have been your father

or mine.

 

 

He might have been a sex-fiend

or a saint.

 

 

But whatever he was,

he was condemned

and we stood in the sun and

smoked

and looked around

in our leisure

to see who was next in

line.

 

 

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 shorts, biting your nails, revolving your ass,

the boys are looking at you—

you hold more, it seems,

than Gauguin or Brahma or Balzac,

more, at least, than the skulls that swim at our feet,

your swagger breaks the Eiffel tower,

turns the heads of old newsboys long ago gone

sexually to pot;

your caged malarkey, your idiot’s dance,

mugging it, delightful—don’t ever wash stained under-

wear or chase your acts of love

through neighborhood alleys—

don’t spoil it for us,

putting on weight and weariness,

settling for TV and a namby-pamby husband;

don’t give up that absurd dispossessed wiggle

to water a Saturday’s front lawn—

don’t send us back to Balzac or introspection

or Paris

or wine, don’t send us back

to the incubation of our doubts or the memory

of death-wiggle, bitch, madden us with love

and hunger, keep the sharks, the bloody sharks,

from the heart.

 

 

spoor and anemia and deviltry

and what can we make of this?:

a belly in the trash…

down by Mr. Saunders’ beer cans

curled up like a cat;

life can be no less ludicrous

than rain

and as I take the lift

up to 3

I pass Mrs. Swanson

in the grate

powdered and really dead

but walking on

buying sweets and fats

and mailing Christmas cards;

and opening the door to my room

a fat damsel scrambles my vision

bottles fall

and a voice says

why are all your poems

personal?

 

 

were best, the French F. Legion

every man with a bitch and the Arabs charging down

on white parade ponies, and the Sarge’t holding the

fort by propping up dead men until re’forcemnts arriv’l.

And the ones with the boys flying around in the Spads

full of wire and one plat. blonde who seemed to symbolize

everything. Maybe it was just because I was a kid

or maybe it isn’t the same any more. All the angles,

the cautious patriots, the air-raid wardens, cigarettes

for sex, and even the enemy seeming to play a game.

Or the time they found the Jap nurse in the shell-hole

who had been hit in the breast and wanted some sulfa

and one of the boys said, “Hey, you think we can fuck

her before she dies?”

 

 

I thought the dove was the bird of peace

but here they were shooting them out

of the brush

and climbing up the sides of mountains

and banging them down;

and everywhere the doves went

there were the hunters

blasting and beaming and blasting,

and one man who didn’t

in the slightest

resemble a dove

was shot in the shoulder;

and there were many complaints

that the doves

were smaller and scarcer

than last year,

but the way they fell

through the air

when you stung the life

out of them

was the same;

and I was there too

but I couldn’t shoot anything

with a paintbrush;

and a couple of them

came over to my canvas

and stood and stood and stood

until I finally said,

for God’s sake

go look at Picasso and Rembrandt,

go look at Klee and Gauguin,

listen to a symphony by Mahler,

and if you get anything

out of that

come back

and stare at my canvas!

 

 

what the hell’s wrong with

him? the one guy

said.

 

 

he’s nuts. they’re all nuts,

the other guy said. anyhow,

I got my 10 doves.

 

 

me too, his buddy said, let’s

go home: we can have them

in the pan

by 2:30.

 

 

the blossoms shake

sudden water

down my sleeve,

sudden water

cool and clean

as snow—

as the stem-sharp

swords

go in

against your breast

and the sweet wild

rocks

leap over

and

lock us in.