Mockingbird Wish Me Luck

for Linda King
for all the good reasons

the world is full of shipping clerks

who have read

the Harvard Classics

 

dying for a beer dying

for and of life

on a windy afternoon in Hollywood

listening to symphony music from my little red radio

on the floor.

 

 

a friend said,

“all ya gotta do is go out on the sidewalk

and lay down

somebody will pick you up

somebody will take care of you.”

 

 

I look out the window at the sidewalk

I see something walking on the sidewalk

she wouldn’t lay down there,

only in special places for special people with special $$$$

and

special ways

while I am dying for a beer on a windy afternoon in

Hollywood,

nothing like a beautiful broad dragging it past you on the

sidewalk

moving it past your famished window

she’s dressed in the finest cloth

she doesn’t care what you say

how you look what you do

as long as you do not get in her

way, and it must be that she doesn’t shit or

have blood

she must be a cloud, friend, the way she floats past us.

 

 

I am too sick to lay down

the sidewalks frighten me

the whole damned city frightens me,

what I will become

what I have become

frightens me.

ah, the bravado is gone

the big run through center is gone

on a windy afternoon in Hollywood

my radio cracks and spits its dirty music

through a floor full of empty beerbottles.

 

 

now I hear a siren

it comes closer

the music stops

the man on the radio says,

“we will send you a free 25 page booklet:

FACE THE FACTS ABOUT COLLEGE COSTS.”

 

 

the siren fades into the cardboard mountains

and I look out the window again as the clasped fist of

boiling cloud comes down—

the wind shakes the plants outside

I wait for evening I wait for night I wait sitting in a chair

by the window—

the cook drops in the live

red-pink salty

rough-tit crab and

the game works

on

 

 

come get me.