The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje Read Free Book Online

vomiting 10 yards from the house, to my left a fucking big desert where nothing is except wind picking up sand and dust and the smell off dead animals a hundred miles away and aiming it at me and my body.
    And this bloody dog goes over and sniffs it and then methodically begins to eat, preparing no doubt his appetitefor tomorrow morning, while now, it puts the machinery in me that organises my throwing up to sleep, as if I hadnt drunk a thing in a year. I kick the dog away but it comes back to the meal. I cant yell cos my mouth is dry. I try and then the muscles heave deep down and up it comes like a daisy chain whipping out as it gets free into the slipstream of the wind and collapses on the ground right in front of the dog who is having the time of his life. The end. I leave the dog and move back into the now warm house, sand on my feet and collapse into my bed. And Angela’s there and Sallie wasnt in the hall so I guess she’s in there or back in bed. And just as I drop off I hear John getting up and staggering in the dark.
    So it was a bad night. But this morning the room is white and silvery shadows roll across the ceiling. All is clean except our mouths and I move to the basin and rinse out last night’s throat and pee down the drain and struggle back to bed, and Angela D is golden and cool beside me the sheet over her stomach like a skirt and her arm out straight over the edge of the bed like a peninsula rich with veins and cooler than the rest of her for it has been in the path of the window’s wind all night.
    She is so brown and lovely, the sun rim blending into lighter colours at her neck and wrists. The edge of the pillow in her mouth, her hip a mountain further down the bed. Beautiful ladies in white rooms in the morning. How do I wake her? All the awkwardness of last night with the Chisums gone. My body open to every new wind direction, every nerve new move and smell. I look up. On the nail above the bed the black holster and gun is coiled like a snake, glinting also in the early morning white.

*
    The street of the slow moving animals
while the sun drops in perfect verticals
no wider than boots
The dogs sleep their dreams
off they are everywhere
so that horses on the crowded weekend
will step back and snap a leg
    / while I’ve been going on
the blood from my wrist
has travelled to my heart
and my fingers touch
this soft blue paper notebook
control a pencil that shifts up and sideways
mapping my thinking going its own way
like light wet glasses drifting on polished wood.
    The acute nerves spark
on the periphery of our bodies
while the block trunk of us
blunders as if we were
those sun drugged horses
    I am here with the range for everything
corpuscle muscle hair
hands that need the rub of metal
those senses that
that want to crash things with an axe
that listen to deep buried veins in our palms
those who move in dreams over your women night
near you, every paw, the invisible hooves
the mind’s invisible blackout the intricate never
the body’s waiting rut.

*
    The eyes bright scales
               (watch)   bullet claws coming
    at me like women fingers
part my hair slow
go in slow in slow
leaving skin in a puff
behind and the slow
as if fire pours out
red grey brain the hair slow
startled by it all pour
Miss Angela D her eyes like a boat
on fire her throat is a kitchen
warm on my face heaving
my head mouth out
she swallows your breath
like warm tar pour
the man in the bright tin armour star
blurred in the dark
saying stop jeesus jesus jesus JESUS

*
    This nightmare by this 7 foot high doorway
waiting for friends to come
mine or theirs
I am 4 feet inside the room
in the brown cold dark
the doorway’s slide of sun three inches from my shoes I am on the edge of the cold dark watching the white landscape in its frame
a world that’s so precise
every nail and cobweb
has magnified itself to my presence
    Waiting
nothing breaks my vision
but flies in their black path
like inverted stars,
or the shock