517 Social commentaries poems

I Tonite I walked out of my red apartment door on East tenth street’s dusk— Walked out of my home ten years, walked out in my honking neighborhood Tonite at seven walked out past garbage cans chained to concrete anchors Walked under black painted fire escapes, giant castiron plate covering a hole in ground —Crossed the street, traffic lite red, thirteen bus roaring by liquor store, past corner pharmacy iron grated, past Coca Cola & Mylai posters fading scraped on brick Past Chinese Laundry wood door’d, & broken cement stoop steps For Rent hall painted green & purple Puerto Rican style Along E. 10th’s glass splattered pavement, kid blacks & Spanish oiled hair adolescents’ crowded house fronts— Ah, tonite I walked out on my block NY City under humid summer sky Halloween, thinking what happened Timothy Leary joining brain police for a season? thinking what’s all this Weathermen, secrecy & selfrighteousness beyond reason—F.B.I. plots? Walked past a taxicab controlling the bottle strewn curb— past young fellows with their umbrella handles & canes leaning against a ravaged Buick —and as I looked at the crowd of kids on the stoop—a boy stepped up, put his arm around my neck tenderly I thought for a moment, squeezed harder, his umbrella handle against my skull, and his friends took my arm, a young brown companion tripped his foot ’gainst my ankle— as I went down shouting Om Ah Hū m to gangs of lovers on the stoop watching slowly appreciating, why this is a raid, these strangers mean strange business with what—my pockets, bald head, broken-healed-bone leg, my softshoes, my heart— Have they knives? Om Ah Hū m —Have they sharp metal wood to shove in eye ear ass? Om Ah Hū m & slowly reclined on the pavement, struggling to keep my woolen bag of poetry address calendar & Leary-lawyer notes hung from my shoulder dragged in my neat orlon shirt over the crossbar of a broken metal door dragged slowly onto the fire-soiled floor an abandoned store, laundry candy counter 1929— now a mess of papers & pillows & plastic car seat covers cracked cockroach-corpsed ground— my wallet back pocket passed over the iron foot step guard and fell out, stole by God Muggers’ lost fingers, Strange— Couldn’t tell—snakeskin wallet actually plastic, 70 dollars my bank money for a week, old broken wallet—and dreary plastic contents—Amex card & Manf. Hanover Trust Credit too—business card from Mr. Spears British Home Minister Drug Squad—my draft card—membership ACLU & Naropa Institute Instructor’s identification Om Ah Hū m I continued chanting Om Ah Hū m Putting my palm on the neck of an 18 year old boy fingering my back pocket crying “Where’s the money” “Om Ah Hū m there isn’t any” My card Chief Boo-Hoo Neo American Church New Jersey & Lower East Side Om Ah Hū m —what not forgotten crowded wallet—Mobil Credit, Shell? old lovers addresses on cardboard pieces, booksellers calling cards— —“Shut up or we’ll murder you”—“Om Ah Hū m take it easy” Lying on the floor shall I shout more loud?—the metal door closed on blackness one boy felt my broken healed ankle, looking for hundred dollar bills behind my stocking weren’t even there—a third boy untied my Seiko Hong Kong watch rough from right wrist leaving a clasp-prick skin tiny bruise “Shut up and we’ll get out of here”—and so they left, as I rose from the cardboard mattress thinking Om Ah Hū m didn’t stop em enough, the tone of voice too loud—my shoulder bag with 10,000 dollars full of poetry left on the broken floor— November 2, 1974

swell me a bowl with lusty oil brightest under bis geynest under gore ecce who com inna persian vestment un monodatal voll marines cd not hoist thee whose eyes go seaward   noreaster reeling thrashing at the mouth of the gowanus mischance upbrimmd sludgie helas, aloft sometimes honeysuckle can smell like MURTHER yr shining form to oil hath returned yr helmet now shall make a hive for bees it was no dream   I lay broad waking oil blossomed green, incarnadine s/thing keeps on testing me for tb is politer not to talk about beastly p.o.v. ludic like a succubus vomiting ivy lordly subtler grotesquerie you can bet it smelled like murther creped and crinolinnd along the noggin w/ a victorian western pin till I may see a plumper sludgie swim everlike rotund buddha—smack aghast everlike leo and thir friends marching in lockstep to the sunlit uplands.

We must be slow and delicate; return the policeman's stare with some esteem, remember this is not a shadow play of doves and geese but this is now the time to write it down, record the words— I mean we should have left some pride of youth and not forget the destiny of men who say goodbye to the wives and homes they've read about at breakfast in a restaurant: "My love."—without regret or bitterness obtain the measure of the stride we make, the latest song has chosen a theme of love delivering us from all evil—destroy. . . ? why no. . . this too is fanciful. . . funny how hard it is to be slow and delicate in this, this thing of framing words to mark this grave I mean nothing short of blood in every street on earth can fitly voice the loss of these.

I have no illusion some fusion of force and form will save me, bewilderment of bonelight ungrave me as when the El shooting through a hell of ratty alleys where nothing thrives but soot and the ratlike lives that have learned to eat it screechingly peacocked a grace of sparks so far out and above the fast curve that jostled and fastened us into a single shock of— I will not call it love but at least some brief and no doubt illusionary belief that in one surge of brain we were all seeing one thing: a lone unearned loveliness struck from an iron pain. Already it was gone. Already it was bone, the gray sky and the encroaching skyline pecked so clean by raptor night I shuddered at the cold gleam we hurtled toward like some insentient herd plunging underground at Clark and Division. And yet all that day I had a kind of vision that's never gone completely away of immense clear-paned towers and endlessly expendable hours through which I walked teeming human streets, filled with a shine that was most intimately me and not mine.

Highway of Death — the indifference of snakes. Sky is ripe and everywhere the colors are breaking.¿Quién es el jefe más jefe?

But whose did? She’s crumpled where she’s supposed to be unfolded, something bad written on a piece of paper. Her walking is a devolution that hunches and shrinks everyone as she moves up the tree-lined street. I’m on my porch waving to my neighbors and having one of those honeyed afternoons when I don’t know who I am. I know everything else, though, and it’s ringing in my head. Then there she is in a pool on my front steps, laughing, asking about lunch, as if the bones of at least four different animals weren’t loose inside her, scurrying this way and that. Someone needs to find her a place to live, a hidey hole we can cram food in and get away from quickly. We could call her part bird and be done with it. But everyone is dying right under the surface these days, especially around the eyes. Death has crawled up into the face to nibble away whatever blocks its view of the stars. We’re riddled with it. It’s pulling our flesh into outrageous, unwilled positions, like the huge smile on my face as I lift her onto my lap and hold her together for a minute before I tell her she isn’t welcome here.

They live alone together, she with her wide hind and bird face, he with his hung belly and crewcut. They never talk but keep busy. Today they are washing windows (each window together) she on the inside, he on the outside. He squirts Windex at her face, she squirts Windex at his face. Now they are waving to each other with rags, not smiling.

Dazed with rambling gossip, their looming net of mistakes, their love of rumor, they all dream arousal. They are far from indifferent. Their language bellows need. A gull darts over and behind bare buildings, shaggy forests, mountains, city streets. Trees lose leaves, and one man insists the leaves aren’t dying after collecting outdated food at church, upswing in full euphoric force, he’s certain he’s spreading world peace. Men at work lumber to dumpsters. Oaks yellow. Rocks trap leaves. Jehovah’s Witnesses mouthed salvation. Janice listened wishful, but today she relays her own bitter story: lazy sister-in-law fat on a couch, quarter-sized bedsores on her ass, brother-in-law blind, stumbling drunk. Hearts rigid and numb, neighbors forget crepe myrtle blooming pink. Impermanent and frenetic worry hums. Eyes grow glaucoma blue. Sucking cigarettes and mumbling, they stand hardy as an autumn day’s geraniums, hard before winter.

In the woods at the corner of our yards we hang the plywood squares, the Magic Marker images of pronghorn, panther, grizzly, whitetail, and step off the paces we use to measure our skill. Here in the soft light filtering through needles and cones, green shifting membrane of poplar, hickory, live oak, white skin of dogwood beginning to flower, we heft the blades, grind points on stone, gauge the fine balance between what is real and what is imagined, the knives bringing all the animals to life and killing them again as our throws bury steel deep in the heart of the quivering wood and the blades tremble back through their bones. In our own hearts we love what they might be, their shapes frozen in brush as though, suddenly, they had turned from wood and caught our scent drifting in a wind-shift. So we hunt this suburb, whet our aim to move among them in the little wilderness beyond the bricked-in beds of azaleas, sunflowers tied against tall sticks, the half-acres of razored grass, trellised vines, boxwoods manicured by wives.

I was only eight years old; And before I grew up and knew what it meant I had no words for it, except That I was frightened and told my Mother; And that my Father got a pistol And would have killed Charlie, who was a big boy, Fifteen years old, except for his Mother. Nevertheless the story clung to me. But the man who married me, a widower of thirty-five, Was a newcomer and never heard it Till two years after we were married. Then he considered himself cheated, And the village agreed that I was not really a virgin. Well, he deserted me, and I died The following winter.