25 Living poems

He walked to the window stared down twenty stories to the street gaseous and dizzy as a swamp not visible at this height but there had been a street down there and he knew It came with the apartment and the guarded foyers and halls and the doorman holstered beneath the uniform the television split-screening front and rear entrances He knew it was all there and he was here twenty stories above the unsetteled swamp-mist he knew the trucks bound for the bridge were still passing near he could feel them rumbling in the soles of his feet so he knew the floor he walked on was someone's ceiling and it was all normal tonight and countable a two-year lease because a desirable with full view of river- a five-by-three balcony through the door is $200 deposit fully carpeted self-defrosting refriger- the balcony door is stuck but He can stare twenty stories down from the windowsill watching the swamp smokes curl and thin and the swamp lapping at the base and the unpaid-for miracle one inch at a time

Slowing down your body enough to feel. Thought you were at a standstill but you were only slowing down enough to feel the pain. There are worse things than running to catch the train, twisting your ankle, the afternoon fucked. Running to get to or away from? the stranger who helps you up wants to know, you who are so used to anything scribbled on a prescription blank. Just want the pain to go away, you say, surprised to find yourself reaching for someone else's hand.

For Jack Collom 10 Things I do Every Day play poker drink beer smoke pot jack off curse BY THE WATERS OF MANHATTAN flower positive & negative go home read   lunch   poems hunker down changes Life goes by quite merrily blue NO HELP WANTED Hunting For The Whale “and if the weather plays me fair I’m happy every day.” The white that dries clear the heart attack the congressional medal of honor A house in the country NOT ENOUGH

don’t ever get the idea I am a poet; you can see me at the racetrack any day half drunk betting quarters, sidewheelers and straight thoroughs, but let me tell you, there are some women there who go where the money goes, and sometimes when you look at these whores these onehundreddollar whores you wonder sometimes if nature isn’t playing a joke dealing out so much breast and ass and the way it’s all hung together, you look and you look and you look and you can’t believe it; there are ordinary women and then there is something else that wants to make you tear up paintings and break albums of Beethoven across the back of the john; anyhow, the season was dragging and the big boys were getting busted, all the non-pros, the producers, the cameraman, the pushers of Mary, the fur salesman, the owners themselves, and Saint Louie was running this day: a sidewheeler that broke when he got in close; he ran with his head down and was mean and ugly and 35 to 1, and I put a ten down on him. the driver broke him wide took him out by the fence where he’d be alone even if he had to travel four times as far, and that’s the way he went it all the way by the outer fence traveling two miles in one and he won like he was mad as hell and he wasn’t even tired, and the biggest blonde of all all ass and breast, hardly anything else went to the payoff window with me. that night I couldn’t destroy her although the springs shot sparks and they pounded on the walls. later she sat there in her slip drinking Old Grandad and she said what’s a guy like you doing living in a dump like this? and I said I’m a poet and she threw back her beautiful head and laughed. you? you . . . a poet? I guess you’re right, I said, I guess you’re right. but still she looked good to me, she still looked good, and all thanks to an ugly horse who wrote this poem.

This time I’m not going to say a thing about deity. It’s not the blizzard, it’s three days after. Trinkle from thawing roofs, ruined crocus pronging through. Ruin, I promise, won’t be mentioned again. Trees, sure, still begging in the road, split to the bole but this isn’t about the chainsaw. A pruning saw will have to do. The puppets aren’t hanging themselves in each other’s strings. Everyone’s easily identifiable beneath the funny mask. Somewhere in Oregon, Mary has another month to go, she’s comfortable in any position for thirty-five seconds. Lulu, we know you’re in there but no one’s blaming you for reluctance to come out. Poetry is the grinding of a multiplicity throwing off sparks, wrote Artaud and look what that got him: toothlessness and shock therapy. Your dad, who has the worst teeth of anyone I know, once ordered eggplant in a steakhouse. Do not order eggplant in a steakhouse turned out to be more than aphoristicly true. Do not spend a lot of time in an asylum writing cruel poems if you can help it, one Artaud is enough. In Kandinsky’s Blue 2, there’s a shape in two rows of shapes that seems okay although to the right’s a capsized canoe full of mathematicians, to the left a bow about to launch the killer astrolabe. By what manner is the soul joined to the body? How about climbing a ladder of fire? No thanks. On TV, a rhino’s lying in some red dust, munching a thorn. You wouldn’t think he could ejaculate for half an hour straight, but you’d be wrong. See that cloud, it might weigh 10,000 pounds which is about average for a cloud. Happy birthday, happy birthday to you. Tony says Mary is always writing about the sacred. Talcum powder, binoculars, this decimated planet. I know, a promise has been made but Tony’s been sick for years and no one knows with what. Flax oil, bark tinctures, corticosteroids. He’s not exactly someone you’d trust to drive your car, but still. Something awful’s coming, isn’t it? Would it help if I said Amen?