Burning in Water, Drowing in Flame (9 page)

he was easy, fat as a hummingbird

and I had him blowing,

I jabbed and crossed and took my time:

everybody was waiting for the main event,

drinking beer, and I was thinking

how we were going to furnish the house,

I needed a workbench and some tools,

and then he came over with the right—

I had been looking at the lights

and the next thing I knew everybody was

howling, and I was down on my knees like

praying, and when I got up

he was strong and I was weak;

well, I thought, I’ll go back to the farm,

I always was a poor winner.

the branches break, the birds fall, the buildings burn,

the whores stand straight,

the bombs stack,

evening, morning, night,

peanutbutter,

peanutbutter falcons,

rain breathing like lilies from the top of my head,

pincers pincers

kisses like steel clamps

mouths full of moths,

hydra-headed cocksuckers,

Florida in full moon,

shark with mouthful of man

man with mouthful of peanutbutter, rain

rain peeking into the guts of grey hours,

horses dreaming of horses,

flowers dreaming of flowers,

horses running with greyhour pieces of my lovely flesh,

bread burning, all Spain on fire and

cities dreaming of craters,

bombs bigger than the brains of anything,

going down

are the clocks cocks roosters?

the roosters stand on the fence

the roosters are peanutbutter crowing,

the FLAME will be high, the flame will be big,

kiss kiss kiss

everything away,

I hope it rains today, I hope

the jets die, I hope

the kitten finds a mouse, I hope

I don’t see it, I hope

it rains, I hope

anything away from here,

I hope a bridge, a fish, a cactus somewhere

strutting whiskers to the noon,

I dream flowers and horses

the branches break the birds fall the buildings

burn, my whore walks across the room and

smiles at me.

I watched the board and the 6 dropped to 9

after a first flash of 18 from a morning line

of 12…two minutes to post and a fat man

kept jamming against my back, but I made it,

I bet 20 to win and walked out to the deck

looking down at my program:

purple and cerise quarters, cerise sleeves

and cap; b.f.3., Indian Red—Impetuous, by Top Row,

and people kept walking into me

although there was no place to go,

they were putting them in the gate

and the people were walking like ants over spilled

sugar,

the machine had cranked them up to die

and they were blind with it,

and now by the 7th race

stinking sweating broke ugly

reamed

there was no way back to the dream,

and the horses came out of the gate

and I looked for my colors—

I saw them, and the boy seemed to be riding sideways

he had the horse running in and was pulling his head back

toward the outer rail,

and I could tell by the way the horse was striding

that he was out of it;

the action had been all wrong

and I walked to the bar

while the winners turned into the stretch,

and they were making the final calls as I ordered my drink,

and I leaned there thinking

I once knew places that sweetly cried

their walls’ voices

where mirrors showed me chance,

I was once saddened when an evening became

finally a night to sleep away.

—the bartender said, I hear they are going to send in

the 7 horse in the next one.

I once sang operas and burned candles

in a place made holy by nothing but myself

and whatever there was.

—I never bet mares in the summer,

I told him.

then the crowd came on in

complaining

explaining

bragging

thinking of suicide or drunkenness or sex,

and I looked around

like a man waking up in jail

and whatever there was

became that,

and I finished my drink

and walked away.

the droll noon

where squadrons of worms creep up like

stripteasers

to be raped by blackbirds.

I go outside

and all up and down the street

the green armies shoot color

like an everlasting 4th of July,

and I too seem to swell inside,

a kind of unknown bursting, a

feeling, perhaps, that there isn’t any

enemy

anywhere.

and I reach down into the box

and there is

nothing—not even a

letter from the gas co. saying they will

shut it off

again.

not even a short note from my x-wife

bragging about her present

happiness.

my hand searches the mailbox in a kind of

disbelief long after the mind has

given up.

there’s not even a dead fly

down in there.

I am a fool, I think, I should have known it

works like this.

I go inside as all the flowers leap to

please me.

anything? the woman

asks.

nothing, I answer, what’s for

breakfast?

30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses and one fox

and look here, they write,

you are a dupe for the state, the church,

you are in the ego-dream,

read your history, study the monetary system,

note that the racial war is 23,000 years old.

well, I remember 20 years ago, sitting with an old Jewish tailor,

his nose in the lamplight like a cannon sighted on the enemy; and

there was an Italian pharmacist who lived in an expensive apartment

in the best part of town; we plotted to overthrow

a tottering dynasty, the tailor sewing buttons on a vest,

the Italian poking his cigar in my eye, lighting me up,

a tottering dynasty myself, always drunk as possible,

well-read, starving, depressed, but actually

a good young piece of ass would have solved all my rancor,

but I didn’t know this; I listened to my Italian and my Jew

and I went out down dark alleys smoking borrowed cigarettes

and watching the backs of houses come down in flames,

but somewhere we missed: we were not men enough,

large or small enough,

or we only wanted to talk or we were bored, so the anarchy

fell through,

and the Jew died and the Italian grew angry because I stayed

with his

wife when he went down to the pharmacy; he did not care to have

his
personal
government overthrown, and she overthrew easy, and

I had some guilt: the children were asleep in the other bedroom;

but later I won $200 in a crap game and took a bus to New Orleans,

and I stood on the corner listening to the music coming from bars

and then I went inside to the bars,

and I sat there thinking about the dead Jew,

how all he did was sew on buttons and talk,

and how he gave way although he was stronger than any of us—

he gave way because his bladder would not go on,

and maybe that saved Wall Street and Manhattan

and the Church and Central Park West and Rome and the

Left Bank, but the pharmacist’s wife, she was nice,

she was tired of bombs under the pillow and hissing the Pope,

and she had a very nice figure, very good legs,

but I guess she felt as I: that the weakness was not Government

but Man, one at a time, that men were never as strong as

their ideas

and that ideas were governments turned into men;

and so it began on a couch with a spilled martini

and it ended in the bedroom: desire, revolution,

nonsense ended, and the shades rattled in the wind,

rattled like sabres, cracked like cannon,

and 30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses chased one fox

across the fields under the sun,

and I got out of bed and yawned and scratched my belly

and knew that soon very soon I would have to get

very drunk again.

I have been looking at

the same

lampshade

for

5 years

and it has gathered

a bachelor’s dust

and

the girls who enter here

are too

busy

to clean it

but I don’t mind

I have been too

busy

to notice

until now

that the light

shines

badly

through

5 years’

worth.

it is not very good

to not get through

whether it’s the

wall

the human mind

sleep

wakefulness

sex

excretion

or most anything

you can name

or

can’t name.

when a chicken

catches its worm

the chicken gets through

and when the worm

catches you

(dead or alive)

I’d have to say,

even through its lack

of sensibility,

that it enjoys

it.

it’s like when you

send this poem

back

I’ll figure

it just didn’t get

through.

either there were

fatter worms

or the chicken

couldn’t

see.

the next time

I break an egg

I’ll think of

you.

scramble with

fork

and then turn up

the flame

if I

have

one.

they found him walking along the freeway

all red in

front

he had taken a rusty tin can

and cut off his sexual

machinery

as if to say—

see what you’ve done to

me? you might as well have the

rest.

and he put part of him

in one pocket and

part of him in

another

and that’s how they found him,

walking

along.

they gave him over to the

doctors

who tried to sew the parts

back

on

but the parts were

quite contented

they way they

were.

I think sometimes of all the good

ass

turned over to the

monsters of the

world.

maybe it was his protest against

this or

his protest

against

everything.

a one man

Freedom March

that never squeezed in

between

the concert reviews and the

baseball

scores.

God, or somebody,

bless

him.