The Roominghouse Madrigals (11 page)

 

I once bought a toy rabbit

at a department store

and now he sits and ponders

me with pink sheer eyes:

 

 

He wants golfballs and glass

walls.

I want quiet thunder.

 

 

Our disappointment sits between us.

 

 

the latest sleeping on my pillow catches

window lamplight through the mist of alcohol.

 

 

I was the whelp, the prude who shook when

the wind shook blades of grass the eye could see

and

you were a

convent girl watching the nuns shake loose

the Las Cruces sand from God’s robes

 

 

you are

yesterday’s

bouquet so sadly

raided, I kiss your poor

breasts as my hands reach for love

in this cheap Hollywood apartment smelling of

bread and gas and misery.

 

 

we move through remembered routes

the same old steps smooth with hundreds of

feet, 50 loves, 20 years.

and we are granted a very small summer, and

then it’s

winter again

and you are moving across the floor

some heavy awkward thing

and the toilet flushes, a dog barks

a car door slams…

it’s gotten inescapably away, everything,

it seems, and I light a cigarette and

await the oldest curse

of all.

 

 

Please keep your icecream hands

for the leopard,

please keep your knees

out of my nuts;

if women must love me

I ask them also

to cook me sauerkraut dinners

and leave me time

for games of gold

in the mind,

and time for sleep

or scratching

or rolling upon my side

like any tired bull

in any tired meadow.

 

 

love is not a candle

burning down—

life is,

and love and life are

not the same

or else

love having choice

nobody would ever die.

 

 

which means? which means:

let loose a moment

your hand upon my center—

I’ve done you well

like any scrabby plant

upon a mountain, so

please be kind enough

to die for an hour

or 2,

or at least

take time

to turn the

sauerkraut.

 

 

I don’t know, it was raining and I had fallen down

somewhere but I seemed to have money so it didn’t

matter, and I went into the opera to dry off, and it

was opening night and everybody was dressed and

trying

to act very polite and educated but I saw a lot of

guys there mean as hell, I don’t mean mean enough

to be

a Dillinger but mean enough to be successful in

business and their wives were all tone deaf

and even the people hollering in the opera

were not enjoying it but hollering because it was the

thing to do, like wearing bermudas in the summer, and

I thought, I’ll never write an opera because they’ll

walk all over it, and I walked out

and phoned a gal I knew from South Philly and she met

me on Olvera Street and we went into a fancy place

and ate and drank and this big female kept

whirling her fans and shaking her ass in my face

and the South Philly broad got mad and I laughed

and a little Mexican mean as a tarantula

kept asking us to keep quiet and I asked him out

in the alley and he went and I took him quite

easily and I felt like Hemingway and I took the

S. Philly broad to my room and I told her all about

the opera

          how the people were so nicely dressed

          and applauded all the time

          whether it was good or bad

and we slept real good that night

the rain coming down on our heads

through the open window

but I kept thinking of the bigassed Mexican gal

with the fans who kept shaking it

and I don’t think she was kidding

because I am real handsome

and educated

and someday I’m going to give up

drinking and smoking and whoring

and kneel and pray in the Sunday sunshine

while they are killing the beautiful bulls

and selling their ears and tails in

Tiajuana, and I’m going to the opera,

I’m going to the opera and have 12 guys

working for me for

80 dollars a week, including half-days on

Saturdays and no

hangovers on

Monday.

 

 

my friend writes of rejection and editors,

and how he has visited K. or R. or W.,

and am I in
S.#12
? he will have a poem in there,

and T. has written him from Florida

but rejected his poems; R. sleeps in the printshop

and T. chided him mercilessly…

met editor of the
X. Review
in the street,

and editor acted like he was kicked in the nuts

when he found out who he was

and pressed him for opinion of poems;

it does good to corner these guys sometime,

flush them outa the brush;

ad agencies have forgotten him, and W. is taking

too long to read his book; only got $5

for reading at the Unicorn,

phoned K. of the
W. Review
, sounds like a sharp guy;

and he thinks he is done with R.;

encloses some clippings for my amusement:

his name in a newspaper column;

he’ll have to call R. again: S. is lecturing at

the university

and he can’t bear to go; M. is a homo,

C. can’t make up his mind and P. is mad at him

because he drank beer in front of N.

nothing but rejects but he knows his stuff is good.

L. was there to borrow a pack of Pall Malls, bastard makes

him sick, always whining…

B. writes that P. is in trouble, they must organize

a benefit;

awful discouraged. not even money for stamps.

dead without stamps. write me, he says,

I got the blues.

 

 

write you? about what, my friend?

I’m only interested in

poetry.

 

 

I found a loose cement slab outside the icecream store,

tossed it aside and began to dig; the earth was

soft and full of worms and soon I was in to my

waist, size 36;

a crowd gathered but stepped back before my shots

of mud,

and by the time the police came, I was in below

my head,

frightening gophers, eels and finding bits of golden

inlaid skull,

and they asked me, are you looking for oil, treasure,

gold, the end of China? are you looking for love, God,

a lost key chain? and little girls dripping icecream

peered into my darkness, and a psychiatrist came

and a

college professor and a movie actress in a bikini, and

a Russian spy and a French spy and an English spy,

and a drama critic and a bill collector and an old

girl friend, and they all asked me, what are you

looking

for? and soon it began to rain…atomic submarines

changed course, Tuesday Weld hid behind a newspaper,

Jean-Paul Sartre rolled in his sleep, and my hole

filled

with water; I came out black as Africa, shooting

stars

and epitaphs, my pockets full of lovely worms,

and they took me to their jail and gave me a shower

and a nice cell, rent-free, and even now the people

are picketing in my cause, and I have signed

contracts to appear on the stage and television,

to write a guest column for the local paper and

write a book and endorse some products, I have

enough money to last me several years at the best

hotels, but as soon as I get out of here, I’m gonna

find me another loose slab and begin to dig, dig,

dig, and this time I’m not coming back…rain, shine,

or bikini, and the reporters keep asking, why did you

do it? but I just light my cigarette and smile…

 

 

to say great words of kings and life

to give equations like a math genius;

I sat in on a play by Shakespeare,

but the grandeur did not come through;

I do not claim to have a good ear

or a good soul, but most of Shakespeare

laid me dry, I confess,

and I went me into a bar

where a man with hands like red crabs

laid his sick life before me through the fumes,

and I grew drunk,

mirror upon myself,

the age of life like a spider

taking last blood from us all,

and I knew I had misjudged Shakey,

his voice speaking out of the tube of the grave,

and the traffic went past

I could see it out the door,

pieces of things that moved

and the red crab hands moved before my face

and I took my drink then knocked it over

with the back of my hand;

and I walked out on the street

but nothing got better.

 

 

exposed to grief too long

I become in time

surfeited with suffering,

decide that I owe myself

survival; this is not easy:

telling yourself that you

deserve better days

after the history of your past;

but I have seen complete fools

go on (of course)

without ever

considering their shortcomings;

then too turtles crawl the

land, dirty words scratched

on their backs…

but they hardly

improve the horizon.

 

 

would you have me peel an orange and

talk of Saavedra (Miguel de) Cervantes?

get out! you are like that fly on the

curtain.

 

 

I am not liked in the marketplace.

I do not smile at the children.

I am not interested in the doings of

armies.

I drink at fountains until my eyes

stick out like ripe berries.

I stink under the armpits and do not

shine my shoes.

I do not own

anything.

 

 

I understand little but my

misuse.

I understand only horror and

more horror.

 

 

I cannot rhyme.

I am too tired to

steal.

I listen to Segovia

smile.

I look at a hog’s head and

am in

love.

 

 

I walk I walk a

hymenotomy of a

man—o

sweet things of this time

where are you?

you must find me now for I am

terrified with what I

see!

 

 

the dungeons sweep past lit with

eyes. eyes?
magma!

I enter a shop and buy wine from a

dead man

then walk away under a sky overflowing

with pus. the hunters cough

on the benches.

 

 

I walk…