28 Addiction poems

Straight rye whiskey, 100 proof you need a better friend? Yes.        Myself. The lights the lights the lonely        lovely      fucking       lights and the bridge on a rainy Tuesday night Blue/green double-stars      the line that is the drive and on the dark alive gleaming river Xmas trees of tugs scream and struggle Midnite Drops on the train window wobble  .  stream My trouble is it is her fate to never learn to make anything grow be born or stay Harbor beginnings and that other gleam  .  The train is full of long/way/home and holding lovers whose flesh I would exchange for mine The rain, R.F., sweeps the river as the bridges sweep Nemesis is thumping down the line But I have premises to keep & local stops before I sleep & local stops before I sleep The cree- ping train joggles rocks across I hear the waves below lap against the piles, a pier from which ships go to Mexico a sign which reads PACE O MIO DIO oil “The flowers died when you went away” Manhattan Bridge a bridge between we state, one life and the next, we state is better so is no backwater, flows between us is our span our bridge our naked eyes open here see bridging whatever impossibility. . . PACE! PACE O MIO DIO oil “The flowers died. . .” Of course they did Not that I was a green thing in the house I was once. No matter. The clatter of cars over the span, the track the spur the rusty dead/pan ends of space of grease We enter the tunnel. The dirty window gives me back my face

fleshes  his dirty  rotten  hunka  tin   I  am  right   strapped  into  head  electrodes   he sticks a gun in teen age drug   Harry S Truman decided to drop first   I am right   sequence   repeat   dim  jerky  far  away smoke   cop rat bares his yellow teet   kicks in the door   I am right   survivors burned   time and place   he throws atom bomb   knocks man to floor   you are wrong you are wrong   he was looking for are wrong   Breaks through door I’m poli   outside bar   Hiroshima   has strayed into Dillinger’s right   is making a difficult decision   right   survivors burned   mixed you child I am he kicks him into 1914 movie   if you are gay I am right   wrong   executioner   officer   I am cop   right enough you are I am right   right   wrong Pentagon   dim jerky far away smoke. I cut up his cut-ups, allegory of an allegory of an allegory of an allegory of a waterfall of mental curlicues whose new meaning is no meaning in extremity. Is a Burroughs to eat? I am timid, abstract, complete, light fever, timid. Barefoot, yells Hey Pop, got any more Dick Tracys?  Burroughs am paying one wrecked penny for the pleasure he’s wreaking on some “boy”; shooting quarts of toxins,  skin a welcome  mat,  body  heroically disjunct Picasso  (two profiles,  left  front  high…).  The stapled urge for self-protection that…Danger is a refuge from more danger. Don’t even know what a Burroughs is. Manhattan Project, first atom bomb test, New Mexico 1945: Oppenheimer and his boys think the planet could go critical. Oppenheimer refigures, the probability remains, “What the  hell.” So-and-so many blasts: radioactive sex causes untold genetic mutations. A carnival of giants, vile luminosity sheeting off their scales and exoskeletons, march out of that desert looking for something to eat. I don’t want to die but witness APPETITE and MURDER tread the vile luminous sand: ant spider Gila monster rattler wasp rat locust lizard grasshopper rabbit praying mantis crow ant spider wasp…The entire town of Soda Bluff stampedes down narrow canyons scattering funeral lights beneath their trembling feet. The destruction of today. Last men, mercenaries on the last patrol, eat rations with dog mouths, then fool around in caustic green dusk; they wear Mylar capes and copper-studded jockstraps. Bud’s withheld a basket musta weigh two pounds of fresh peaches. Bud squirms down with a deep sigh, odor of penetration, he says, “I want to be so embraced.” The last ant cold mandibles his thigh, a howl and spasms from Bud’s lifted body mean death. I send my own spear into the enormous insect eye shattering a thousand selves —point touched pinpoint brain, blue sparks, burning isolation, burning rubber, ant collapses, cold heap of old parts. The reason Bud dies, so that his orgasm stays beyond. I don’t wonder who I am, I wonder where I am—still, nothing to do now but kick back and wait for orders.

Things happen when you drink too much mescal. One night, with not enough food in my belly, he kept on buying.   I’m a girl who’ll fall damn near in love with gratitude and, well, he was hot and generous and so the least that I could do was let him kiss me, hard and soft and any way you want it, beast and beauty, lime and salt—sweet Bacchus’ pards— and when his friend showed up I felt so warm and generous I let him kiss me too. His buddy asked me if it was the worm inside that makes me do the things I do. I wasn’t sure which worm he meant, the one I ate?   The one that eats at me alone?

Lynda Hull Maybe you sold it to buy junk. Though I like to think not. And I don't want to think you used the money for food or rent or anything obligatory, practical. A pair of boots, perhaps. Thigh high burgandy boots with gold laces. Something crucial as lilies. Mostly, I want to believe you held onto the book, that your fingers brailed those pages' inky veins even in your final weeks. I want to believe words can be that important in the end. Who can help the heart, which is grand and full of gestures? I had been on my way out. He was rearranging his bookshelves when, in an approximation of tenderness, he handed me, like the last of the sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving, like a thing he wanted but was willing to share, the rediscovered book— he'd bought it years ago in a used bookstore in Chicago. Levine's poems, with your signature inside. That whole year I spent loving him, something splendid as lemons, sour and bright and leading my tongue toward new language, was on the shelf. These weren't your own poems, autographed, a stranger's souvenir—we'd spent vain months leafing through New York stacks for your out-of-print collections—but you'd cared about this book, or cared enough to claim it, your name looped across the title page as if to say,Please. This is mine, This book is mine. Though you sold it. Or someone else did when you died. We make habits out of words. I grew accustomed to his, the way they spooned me into sleep so many times. Now I am sleepless and alone another night. What would you give for one more night alone? No booze. No drugs. Just that hunger and those words. He gave me The Names of the Lost. Need comes down hard on a body. What else was sold? What else—do you know?—did we lose

You do look a little ill. But we can do something about that, now. Can’t we. The fact is you’re a shocking wreck. Do you hear me. You aren’t all alone. And you could use some help today, packing in the dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and grinning with terror flowing over your legs through your fingers and hair . . . I was always waiting, always here. Know anyone else who can say that. My advice to you is think of her for what she is: one more name cut in the scar of your tongue. What was it you said, “To rather be harmed than harm, is not abject.” Please. Can we be leaving now. We like bus trips, remember. Together we could watch these winter fields slip past, and never care again, think of it. I don’t have to be anywhere.

Fighting a losing battle lives next door to a vibrant woman in her 30’s. When he talks to her sub-mediocre takes over in a big way. Zombie-ized by the big eye she even sleeps with it on. Just sign me: concerned.

No, this is not my life, thank God ... ... worn out like this, and crippled by brain-fag; Obsessed first by one person, and then (Almost at once) most horribly besotted by another; These Februaries, full of draughts and cracks, They belong to the people in the streets, the others Out there – haberdashers, writers of menus. Salt breezes! Bolsters from Istanbul! Barometers, full of contempt, controlling moody isobars. Sumptuous tittle-tattle from a summer crowd That’s fed on lemonades and matinées. And seas That float themselves about from place to place, and then Spend

Three years sober some people get trophies for this i got my life back which is better