exceptional
without ever meeting one person
truly good
gliding into old age
the decades gone
the mornings are the worst.
in error
a warrior
I come in from a long but
victorious day
at the track.
she greets me with some
trash
which I carry and dump
into the garbage
can.
“Jesus Christ,” she says,
“push the lid down tight!
the ants will be
everywhere! ”
I push the lid down tight.
I think of Amsterdam.
I think of pigeons flying from a
roof.
I think of Time dangling from
a
paper clip.
she’s right, of course: the lid
should be
tight.
I walk slowly back
into
the
house.
confession
waiting for death
like a cat
that will jump on the
bed
I am so very sorry for
my wife
she will see this
stiff
white
body
shake it once, then
maybe
again:
“Hank!”
Hank won’t
answer.
it’s not my death that
worries me, it’s my wife
left with this
pile of
nothing.
I want to
let her know
though
that all the nights
sleeping
beside her
even the useless
arguments
were things
ever splendid
and the hard
words
I ever feared to
say
can now be
said:
I love
you.
mugged
finished,
can’t find the handle,
mugged in the backalleys of nowhere,
too many dark days and nights,
too many unkind noons, plus a
steady fixation for
the ladies of death.
I am
finished. roll me
up, package
me,
toss me
to the birds of Normandy or the
gulls of Santa Monica, I
no longer
read
I
no longer
breed,
I
talk to old men over quiet
fences.
is this where my suicide complex
uncomplexes?:
as
I am asked over the telephone:
did you ever know Kerouac?
I now allow cars to pass me on the freeway.
I haven’t been in a fist fight for 15 years.
I have to get up and piss 3 times a night.
and when I see a sexpot on the street I
only see
trouble.
I am
finished, back to square one,
drinking alone and listening to classical
music.
much about dying is getting ready.
the tiger walks through my dreams.
the cigarette in my mouth just exploded.
curious things still do
occur.
no, I never knew Kerouac.
so you see:
my life wasn’t
useless
after
all.
the writer
when I think of the things I endured trying to be a
writer—all those rooms in all those cities,
nibbling on tiny bits of food that wouldn’t
keep a rat
alive.
I was so thin I could slice bread with my
shoulderblades, only I seldom had
bread…
meanwhile, writing things down
again and again
on pieces of paper.
and when I moved from one place to
another
my cardboard suitcase was just
that: paper outside stuffed with
paper inside.
each new landlady would
ask, “what do you
do?”
“I’m a writer.”
“oh…”
as I settled into tiny rooms to evoke my
craft
many of them pitied me, gave me little
tidbits like apples, walnuts,
peaches…
little did they know
that that
was about all that I
ate.
but their pity ended when
they found cheap wine bottles in my
place.
it’s all right to be a starving writer
but not
a starving writer who
drinks.
drunks are never forgiven
anything.
but when the world is closing in very
fast
a bottle of wine seems a very
reasonable friend.
ah. all those landladies,
most of them heavy, slow, their husbands
long dead, I can still see those
dears
climbing up and down the stairways of
their world.
they ruled my very existence:
without them allowing me
an extra week on the rent
now and then,
I was out on the
street
and I couldn’t WRITE
on the street.
it was very important to have a
room, a door, those
walls.
oh, those dark mornings
in those beds
listening to their footsteps
listening to them cough
hearing the flushing of their
toilets, smelling the cooking of
their food
while waiting
for some word
on my submissions to New York City
and the world,
my submissions to those