The Roominghouse Madrigals (17 page)

 

the bumblebee

is less than a stack of

potato chips,

and growling and groaning

through barbs

searchlight shining into eyes,

I think of the good whore

who wouldn’t even

take god damn easy money

and when you slipped it into her purse

she’d find it

and slap it back

like the worst of insults,

but she saved you from the law

and your own razor

only meant to shave with

 

 

to find her dead later

in a three-dollar-and-fifty-cent-a-week room,

stiff as anything can stiffen,

never having complained

starved and laughing

only wanting one more drink

and one less man

only wanting one small child

as any woman would

coming across the kitchen floor toward her,

everything done up in ribbons and sunshine,

 

 

and when the man next to the barstool

that stood next to mine

heard about Liz

he said,

“Too bad, god damn, she was a fine piece.”

No wonder a whore is a whore.

 

 

Liz, I know, and although I’d like to see you

now

I’m glad

you’re dead.

 

 

It isn’t easy running through the halls

lights out trying to find a door

with the jelly law

pounding behind you like the dead,

then #303 and in, chain on,

and now they rattle and roar,

then argue gently,

then plead,

but fortunately

the landlord would rather have his door

up than me down

in jail…

 

 

“…he’s drunk in there

with some woman. I’ve warned him,

I don’t allow such things,

this is a nice place, this is…”

 

 

soon they go away;

you’d think I never paid the rent;

you’d think they’d allow a man to drink

and sit with a woman and watch the sun

come up.

 

 

I uncap the new bottle

from the bag and she sits in the corner

smoking and coughing

like an old Aunt from New Jersey.

 

 

have you ever been in a room

on top of 32 people sleeping

on the floors below,

only you are not sleeping,

you are listening to the engines

and horns that never stop,

you are thinking of minotaurs,

you are thinking of Segovia

who practices 5 hours a day

or the graves

that need no practice,

and your feet twist in the sheets

and you look down at a hand

that could easily belong to a man

of 80, and you

are on top of 32 people sleeping

and you know that most of them

will awaken

to yawn and eat and empty trash,

perhaps defecate,

but right now they are yours,

riding your minotaurs

breathing fiery hailstones of song,

or mushroom breathing:

skulls flat as coffins,

all lovers parted,

and you rise and light a cigarette,

evidently,

still alive.

 

 

the foreign hands and feet that tear my window shades,

the masses that shape before my face and ogle

and picture me relegated to their damned cage

          failed and locked

          quite finally in;…

the fires are preparing the burnt flowers of my hills,

the wall-eyed butcher spits

and flaunts his blade

backed by law, dullness and admiration—

how the girls rejoice in him: he has no doubts,

he has nothing

and it gives him strength

like a bell clanging against the defenseless air…

 

 

there is no church for me,

no sanctuary; no God, no love, no roses to rust;

towers are only skeletons of misfit reason,

and the sea waits

as the land waits,

amused and perfect;

 

 

carefully, I call voices on the phone,

measuring their sounds for humanity and laughter;

somewhere I am cut off, contact fails;

I return the receiver

and return also

to the hell of my undoing, to the looming

larks eating my wallpaper

and curving fat and fancy in the bridgework

of my tub,

and waiting against my will

against music and rest and color

against the god of my heart

where I can feel the undoing of my soul

spinning away like a thread

on a quickly revolving spool.

 

 

the insistent resolution like

the rosebud or the anarchist

is eventually

wasted

like moths in towers

or bathing beauties in

New Jersey.

 

 

the buses sotted with people

take them through the streets of

evening where Christ

forgot to weep

as I move down move down

to dying

behind pulled windowshades

like a man who has been gassed or stoned

or insulted by the days.

 

 

there goes a rat stuck with love,

there goes a man in dirty underwear,

there go bowels like a steam roller,

there goes the left guard for Notre Dame in

1932, and like Whitman

I have these things:

 

 

I am a face behind a window

a toothache

an eater of parsley

a parallel man staring at ceilings of night

a heaver of gas

an expeller of poisons

smaller than God and not nearly as sure

a bleeder when cut

a lover when lucky

a man when born.

 

 

there’s much more and much less.

 

 

at 6 o’clock they start coming in like the

sea or the evening paper, and like the leaves of the

berry bush outside they are a little sadder now,

inch by inch now it’s speckled with brown and falling leaves,

day by day it gets worse like a wart haggled with a pin;

my shades are down as the scientists decide how

to get to Mars,

how to get out of

here. it is evening, it is time to eat a pie, it is time for

music.

 

 

Whitman lies there like a sandcrab like a frozen

turtle and I get up and walk across

the room.

 

 

So what is a body but a man

caught inside

for a little while?

staring into a mirror,

recognizing the vegetable clerk

or a design on wallpaper;

it is not vanity that seeks reflection

but dumb ape wonder;

but still the reflection…

movement of arm and muscle, shell-head,

a face staring down through the

stale dimension of dreams

as a Mississippi coed powders her nose

and paints a lavender kiss;

the phone rings like a plea

and the razor breaks through the snow,

the dead roses, the dead moths,

sunset after sunset,

steam and Christ and darkness,

one tiny inch of light.

 

 

the simple misery of survival

the tyranny of ancient rules

and new deaths,

the coming of the beetle-winged

enemy

chanting, cursing

bits of blood and grit;

I slam my fingers

in the window

as the phone rings.

I count 9 rings

and then it stops;

some voice it was

to test my reality

when I have no reality,

when I am water

walking around bone

in a green room.

 

 

I would burn the swans

in their lake,

I would send messengers

to the mountaintop

to razz the clouds.

 

 

she was getting to be a

dull lay

anyway.

 

 

hey man! somebody yells down to me through my broken

window,

        ya wanna go down to the taco stand?

 

 

hell, no!

        I scream from down on the floor.

 

 

why not? he asks.

 

 

        I yell back, who are you?

 

 

none of us knows who we are, he states, I just thot maybe you

wanted to go down to the taco

stand.

 

 

        please go away.

 

 

no, I’m comin’ in.

 

 

        listen, friend, I’ve got a foot of salami

        here and the first fink that walks in,

        he’s gonna get it in the side of his

        head!

 

 

don’t mess with me, he answers, my mother played halfback for

St. Purdy High for half-a-year before somebody found her

squatting over one of the

urinals.

 

 

oh yeah, well, I’ve got bugs in my hair, mice and fish in

my pockets and Charles Atlas is in my bathroom

shining my mirror.

 

 

with that, he leaves.

I get up, brush the beercans off my chest

and yell at Atlas to get the humping hell out of there,

I’ve got

business.

 

 

hummingbird make yr mark he said and then something about

an arab and a son of a bitch and I hit him in the mouth and

we fought in the snow for ten minutes spotting it with red

blossoms—breathing is a blade—and I kept thinking of astronauts

up there circling the earth like a rowboat around a pond

all out of trouble and in trouble, and we finally stopped

or somebody or something stopped us and we went into Harry’s

for a drink and the place was empty and Harry kept looking

at us as if he hated us and pretty soon we began to hate him

his money, his hate, his hate of us without as much money

or as much hate, and my friend threw his glass against Harry’s

mirror and then he
did
hate us, and we ran out down the alley

and the dogs barked, and the only essence that was left

was remembering

the time

the last time I was asleep

and the earth obeyed

everything.