1
I saw I could not help repeating myself,
my writing suffered from indigestion.
I can’t help it, I repeat what I believe,
what I want to happen or not happen,
something like morning prayers.
Every word that follows is a four letter word.
I am dead and buried with one foot sticking out
of the ground, my right foot four toes left.
Now I’m older there’s no difference
between my word and my word of honor.
There was a difference when I was 12,
when I told lies: what I wanted to do
I often said was done. I said I was older
than I was. A little later when I was 14
I told a hat-check girl at the Bal Tabarin
I was a freshman at Columbia.
I have some memory of telling my teacher,
“I was absent because I had a fever”
when I went to the Main Reading Room
at the 42nd Street Library and museums.
I told her the truth when I thought I lied.
I was in love with my Shakespeare teacher.
I had pains in my belly till after the German Hour.
I told my parents I would spend the night
at John’s house (John’s dad, a Forrest Hills doctor),
when I slept at a Swiss French refugee poet’s
father’s photography studio off Broadway,
a photo of Errol Flynn in the store window—
I was awakened by two whores
cursing each other out, “You got shit in your blood!
You got shit in your blood!”
Next morning—I can still see my mother’s face
at our apartment door, “When I called John’s house
she told me you weren’t there last night.”
My father said, “Liar! You’ve had a perfectly
normal upbringing.” I replied, “What? You’re a sadist!”
The result was war, till I realized war was hell
on my mother. So I answered flaming cannonballs
with a smile. (She refused to see her husband again
six months before she died.) A little after the shot
heard around the apartment, I was making a harp
for a dancer friend out of door keys, violin strings,
a bent wire coat hanger.
My father said, “Don’t you call that sadism?”
I answered, “Wire, not people.”
I thank my lucky stars I had a doctor godfather
I loved. Gently my uncle taught me to tell the truth,
to love the truth—make the world all better.
2
I’m chewing the bubblegum of ideas.
No lie, a short lyric poem is I
and any verb or moody word. There may be
truth in the poem of a single word,
“The,” long since well done, but what about
the poem “But” or the word “And,”
a poem of the hereafter, the last word of someone,
“but,” instead of all the famous “goodbyes.”
I became a foot soldier in the wars
between the naked armies of truth and liars. I sang
Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on?
I would not join the quarrel, the long war
between Catholic adios and Protestant goodbyes,
quarrels for a straw. I was anathema.
Why did I think a girlfriend would never
leave me when I said I was going blind?
I made a discovery—to get with child
a mandrake root, I opened her crossed legs.
How long can you lie without telling the truth,
nap or get a full night’s sleep?
Whatever it is, Death is no nap.
I wish I knew how to say “nap” on a long
or short list of languages.
“A long time” in Chinese is chang shi jian.
Zhou Enlai when asked
“Do you think the French Revolution was successful?”
said, “It’s too early to tell.” The truth is
I wrote what was and is too early to tell.
Mandrake Root
