I used to argue with my father
None could be more sincere than mine
want to do something different
no place
Viet Nam
that was later with my wife
Max Ernst David Smith etc. then
Father Knows Best had me scared
where was the USA big rocks & cars
long white highways & afternoon dark bars
& my neighborhood
nobody knew anything
especially if anyone else asked
my father never asked so why should I
I don’t know
I just did
& that would start the arguments until
somebody died of cancer or suicide
I got a job playing piano
washing dishes or recreational therapist
James Moody wrote Last Train From Overbrook
my father opened my mail when I was 21
and hadn’t lived at home for over three years
still muttering about the rubber in my wallet
when I was 15
or the address of the sweet black girl
when I was 15
or the way the priests wanted me out of school
when I was 15
or the noise I made re entering their atmosphere
when I was 15
or the guilt I felt among the civilized
when I was 15
or the nightly rituals of Bridget Bardot fantasies
when I was 15
my father was born in the last century
and if I’m allowed I’ll live into the next
that’s enough to forgive anyone for
you all anxiously
tore the bouquets from your
wrists and tight little tits
In the morning the telephone wires
resembled hot nerves in a dying
Indian’s spine as he watches a
white man cut off his nuts for
an unusual tobacco pouch. This
[ . . . ]
seeing more ways in more ways
of seeing
and getting jacked up for it
When it comes time.
Take it away, demand that could make a marshmallow loud.
Everywhere, children who didn’t want to go anywhere.
“I usta just wail on that mutha fucka.
Now that mutha fucka just wails on me.”
carrying a silo full of animals around in his arms.
“I don’t know what I want to be.”
The fallen parallel lines of white.
You break down in a grin. Leather,
the spider behind. Either. Yet and still.
“I was a fool who thought woman had to be in love with
somebody else to be worth anything to me. In fact
blew me away.”
It was a case of love at first sight
and the case was closed. And the pale old men say,
“loosen.”
Okay, touching and then opening the wounds
for the salt you always carry. This many times
I’ve been awake all night and we continue to act
as though we were sleeping. My heritage is
the way you look tonight.
Covering that black was. I got a job. Something forced home
and beat my head on the wall, a fragile, gnawed, paganism in
the back:
Mecca.
“Of course we are all one. Rocknroll music any KARATE! hah,
rubbers, the parking lot’s legs as miles on the kids. Be big,
be busy, be the walls.”
Your eyes and eyes. Outside the elevator one night.
Ready this time for liberation you know what that means.
Your name has come up again and again. This is
the Bob Dylan one this is the Janis Joplin one this is
the John Coltrane one this is the Charlie:
YOU CAN’T EVEN SPELL LEROI JONES NEW NAME???
Goodly inclinations. Stop it. Knowing what you care about.
D) Your kit.
Resting night loons behind your cock.
Try to do anything to us.
There’s something beautiful Mao.
For all?
The little good in everything.
White sisters are coming home with or without Ted Joans.
The fat black sparrow with way to marry a beautiful and
black woman on orders of the commander who wanted me.
On a lonely airstrip in the great NorthWest the dig it I
can kick your ass and commies all wear grey brain change
until you a white dog bite yourself there, up there.
Listening to Marion Brown shit I don’t know. He said son
I love to touch inside my cells.
“White and short and stocky ones.”
Round shoulders a new guy came. I walked up to the big
country boy. I never saw Nutsy, Andre, or Dolores again.
It was the year they discovered Jim Carroll.
“Everything is quiet. My hand feels pretty bad.”
Getting them together
because I love. And now it’s me.
July 2nd and suddenly ungrateful! Old one
we demand the sun on my ass. It comes out at night.
Half shit the rest sugar.
“I jus tellsem I don know what it mean
but I sure know what it do.”
Ted’s case.
He waspingly gruff embraces steel snow. Common stew whore.
One is enough.
No more annexing the gris-gris. Me they generally call
THE SHELF. They call him DRY the way your balls feel
when you been put away AGAIN. She forgives the future
when we take out each others’ eyes
to fill in the blanks. Blue gorges.
“Way uptown on a hundred, hanging from my action back, you’re
supposed to watch tv.”
Once a year the sharks would come to
singular execution of snow fields,
o, in piles behind the early fifties.
On top of that we move around,
gored silver following ourselves. Getting fucked.