So you think I’m cool?
I’m a fool you asshole.
Mean? Shit, I almost cream
at the thought of tenderness.
You think I’m some sort of
sissy? Not after I stick
this nail file in your eye
motherfucker. A faggot?
Ask your old lady, now that
she can’t take your straight
stick no more. A whore?
I never took nothin more
for it than a meal, you
can steal my love and my
lovin with plain niceness.
On the other hand, I got
plans, and if you’re part
of them, get a good hold
on your heart or your hard on.
I look like a nice boy to you?
A nice looking, clean living,
regular shoe? I’ve been the
star attraction at the freak
show and zoo. I got me
a j.d. badge “they” call a
tattoo. You think you can
see me, but I aint lookin
at you. I’m talkin bout
m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-my image,
and how whatever it is it
aint true, only whatever
you think I’m not gonna do.
I’m the ugliest fucker that
ever looked good and the
baddest cocksucker that ever
stood up for the saints and
the softies like I really am
only once in a while I gotta
kick out the jams and be
rock n roll history before you
were born and get high forty
ways and never reform. I’m
so smart I’m a jerk and
so hip I’m still starving,
I telegraph your secret
fantasies when I flirt
and then jerk off to anal
retentive jargon. I’m so
blase I’m frantic, so passe
I’m hot, so nervous I’m
calm, so mellow I’m not.
That wasn’t my life;
that was my image.
The Ramones sing about being “sedated”
& Marianne Faithful about “brain drain”
while my ex-wife lies “brain damaged”
in a DC hospital, lawyers and doctors
and well-intentioned meddlers poking
around in her life and what’s left of
her self, and the tragedy and unfairness
of such cheap shots of fate seem so
overwhelmingly insignificant in the
face of the larger cruelties of so many
we often call “fellow humans” I got
to once again rearrange my books and
records looking for the ones I know I
can do without til there’s only a handful
left I can run with when the time comes
again as it will if I survive this rage
and frustration with what some of us
once thought we’d surpassed, the hopeless
lack of tenderness and caring in the
world we were changing only to end up
with speeding fascists and junkie saints
quivering and jerking to the sounds of
something quaint, like screams in the
night from some earlier war, only this
isn’t war it’s mass self-parody and
regrets for the tv shows no longer
with us and the memory of something
even more ridiculous than us and our
sorry state we never think of as our
fault because we grew up watching others
do it for us like Lucy and Ethel and
Tom Hayden whose luck I can’t
help but see linked to the same dark
forces that contrived a liberation where
an exchange of prisoners was going on,
I mean how can Jane Fonda make love to
that creep who once told me we had to
think for “the people” because “the
people are either too dumb or too crazy
or both” and now he’s right about mine
if I honestly identify with the rocknroll
dancers and screamers in the night he
never was or seemed to be, and so what
if he gets to play sensual games with
a woman who seems so sexy and bright
even her dumbness and spoiled silver
spoon life are forgotten when she smiles
and shares her passion for a justice
she’ll never be the victim of, only
once are we here and it’s so fucking
delicate we don’t even know why we do
each other like we do, unless we’re
the ones who do it for money, but if
we were we wouldn’t be reading or
writing or listening to anything even
remotely resembling what once was
called “poetry,” no, we’re the ones
who were looking for kindness when
we found another boot up our ass . . .
always have been
I saw it in the old folks when I was growing up
but then
the women also loved their men
more than their dreams or strength or easy grace
for starting over again
ah but maybe that was because
back then the men were really men
I only meant to be more human
more tender and kind and understanding than
I remembered any man being for any woman
but who knew what went on when others weren’t looking
now I do my own and my kids’ cooking
and wonder why I exposed myself to so much
heartache and heartbreak and unmanly intuitions
when what everyone seems to want
is the cocky confident even arrogant man
I was on my way to being before my humanism
introduced me to the neo-communism that led me to
the super-feminism that helped me turn myself
inside out, a person above and beyond his roots
his heritage his initial influences
looking for a woman who might love me for
my variations
they went out to find themselves a real man
& I went out to find myself
[ . . . ]
It is 5:27AM on a Spring like DC morning in March
and only now at 5:28 in what is everywhere still winter
do I understand Kerouac, or The Paris Review!
Alice fucking in our bed and Seventh Day Adventist Hospitals!
I want to let the world in on it at 5:29AM on Emery Place
Northwest, reading lovers stories. DC doesn’t have to be
a museum in the pits! Spies! Ritual catalogue of dates!
Alternating friends, dressing rooms, cultures:
those eruptions of intra-human functions—grab a root
and growl, that’s the seventies satisfaction,
perceptively recognizing two kinds of jealousy:
passion transformed into the uprising of the masses,
and the complex of human relations.
I jerked off to the Korean War
Josie hasn’t been home in years
Everytime the Roosevelts touched it rained . . .
uncertain sexual stimulation. DC summertime clothes
make me feel like Christopher Columbus, all that land,
those high notes, we can dance, I can’t sleep—12:48AM
70 degrees inside, outside a woman in the dark makes noises
like Ted Berrigan in Chicago, not the musical, without speed,
not DC where Ed Sullivan plays blues harp til 2AM with
the natural aluminum of a Santa Claus whose amazing cells
love to dance. Midnight December 24th, 1972, 487th poetry
manuscript for the National Endowment for the Arts awards,
check another self-conscious crash, that’s a, this poetry Christ
my throat like I swallowed dry ice I ought to, that must have
really been, sounded like something hollow
maybe hit into the side door, lighting a cigarette dropping it,
surprised and almost pleased, thinking, imagine this happening,
like starring in your own movie, not crushed, dead, just broken,
into the pain, my throat, most of these poems and the lives
if we can believe each other and after 487 it seems obvious
we can’t just talk on the phone. That’s what the moments do!
Pretense!
Wisconsin Avenue balloon man, Hecht’s downtown store,
doin’ the GOOD FOOT. It’s the juxtaposition, the
“look I don’t know about you” but I live alone with ten others
and folks dropping in on their way from Georgetown
to Bethesda, the place where things seize down, and
no almighty righteous fonts of magic fill the cars—
some dark invention to test the tension between
the tight fit of our need to star and that Washington weather,
like trying to unclog the toilet all day where A
tried to make her manifesto disappear because they printed it
wrong, or the car I let B borrow then paid to get repaired
each time, seven times, and she still asked for money for gas,
or the typewriter C used til it no longer turned
and the “f” stuck so that life always came out lie,
and I wanted to know if when they were through using my
books and records and clothes and car and radio and
borrowing my money and I was through making their dinner
and doing their wash and cleaning up after them and their friends
would they still hate me for my male arrogance.
With zest and bizarre little energy bursts
the train that speeds them out of the night, “eeeeet eeeeees soooo
bad . . . oooo soooo baaaad “ because they’ve lost
the cosmic forces I give myself up most to,
that’s what people call “performing”—
the best ways to do some things is to do them the American way
cause they’re American things, like beauty pageants,
sit-ins, phone taps, rock’n’roll, Hollywood and Texas,
where even the mice throw tantrums. This is the question:
did I? Slowly, like bringing the war in your heart
into the streets, making money not music,
wanting to go away but also wanting to stay,
and then one day to go away.
3.
H. R. “Bob” Haldeman’s round queen’s eyes,
the Tottel House waitress who had two girls that died
before two boys that lived, talking to no one in particular:
“Guess I wasn’t supposed to have no girls.”
Can we make this place our home, when winter comes in
to Dulles Airport with one foot still in the clouds and
the other one we never say out loud, the partying crowd
from Howard. There is only one Georgetown, one Turkey Thicket;
turkeys, wild ones, were almost the national symbol, like
Mount Rainer, or dirty talk, or Love, Unlimited the way I
miss my kids (Natalie Wood’s turning James Dean’s filter tip
cigarette around so he doesn’t light the wrong end again and
again and again—on a flag!—) I wanted to choose.
I want other people to choose. And so forth.
[ . . . ]
Today in the unemployment line this black man punched this
black woman in her black face til she screamed and cried and
no one helped—I was going to, honest, I told myself
when he stopped to tell the cop who finally showed “She’s
my wife, it’s alright” her sobbing “No, we’re divorced . . .”
Arguments occurred like pastimes or the consequences of
the lives we wished we lived and never the few ways we’re given
to make our living work. I was horribly disappointed
I can’t talk about it.
I thought about other things:
Is Beckett still writing?
Living without ego, how can those bliss heads get anything done?
At the block party black kids pushed me aside like cops used to
at demonstrations. At Stone Soup your skin a light for the way
your body was reading the atmosphere casually as you passed
through it. Our “people” is a funny way to talk about
whatever we have in common that isn’t taste in music or
style of dress or memories of growing up in a time when even
Gertrude Stein was old. But look, you oughta see how
a real copy of incredible energy stays in touch:
a man changes a flat tire on the beltway and the sun emerges
a colossal job all healthy and strong and big boy dumb but
good hearted despite the fact it once helped the nasty Nazis
as well, agreeing with that too in some measure, coming and
going like “the long poem.” One year Allende didn’t know
what to do either. There’s a lot of ways of describing (anything).
There’s so many tough guys in the world.
In 1972 the Supreme Court declared the death penalty
as it had been imposed in the USA violated the 8th amendment’s
cruel and unusual punishment clause. After much rumination
I’m something like that, and overwhelmed.
“Live fast,
die young,
and have a
good looking
corpse” was
the expression to live up to
when I was
starting out
before I
realized
professional
football
players
are the personification of
contemporary
American
aesthetics
with their
ballet-like
forms from the waist down
(pants
hugging
the ass
like dance
tights) and
from the waist up they’re
fucking cars!
their game
choreographed
traffic jams,
equipment all
chrome and
bumpers and
built for speed and destruction
my sense of spontaneity and joy
in the give
and take
of living
up front
came from Gracie Allen’s art,
so intense
and immediately
gratifying
there was
no metaphor
just “part one of something more”
another way
to play
another kind of
music . . .
for Peter Gordon and The Love of Life Orchestra
[ . . . ]
I was looking
forward
to all this
another way
I thought we
fought for
room to be
whatever
“yet and still”
some spades would say
—as certain of a
certain failure of will
***
it aint baggage
it’s my feelings
it’s my mind
my life
my desires
it’s my need to never
be bored
it’s my
survival
myself
my my
***
remember the trees
before a storm
in the city it’s warm
not trees—but faces—
***
“kicks” distilled
till
distant
and killing me
you
still
sexy
like before when
we were the enemy
now—it’s the
“untouchables”—
another easy way
to keep us down—
***
I thought I saw
another one
just like the
other one
only
it was
the other one—
a lot of them
resented me when
they wanted what
they’d like to despise
so despicable I should
become for one of them?
***
do they matter?
this is New York City
1978
I’m 36 soon and
“doing great”
which means I’m
not in jail
or dead or dying
—not in the suburbs
or too successful
or trying too hard to be
what that’s supposed to be
—not even fat or shot to hell
or given up or lying—
***
I believe in true love
as many times as
you can take it—
and politics and
music and sensuality
and art and a poetry
that has room for me
and tough women
who don’t just look
it or need men who
aren’t—and
New York City and 1978
and my life and the
way it keeps going—
***
they sell trees in
the city
still
and the ladies dress
up to go out
to be looked at
only
they seem to think it’s
to prove something only
they know as though
the rest of us were too
slow
***
where do they go
by themselves
so special—
to the bathroom
to the store
to the movies
to the refrigerator
to the guy who
doesn’t know what
he wants—they
want it too—not
knowing—where we
just had to know
***
“don’t know much
about”—
Soho soul
I grew up on rock’n’
roll—I can’t help it
if I lived it back then—
and the nights still
remind me of the
chances to be taken
if you want to go out
and get away and
do your searchin’
among your only
kind—only not so kind—
***
even then
even there
even still
even here
there’s so many
who have seen it
and been it or lived it
and left it or never
had it but knew what
it was and they’re
kind to you—tough or
hard edged or surviving
with a vengeance they
still know what a little
kindness can do—
***
Hey man—
stick your head in
here and
don’t come out for
a year—
that’s one way—
some say it’s the only way
they know to go—
maybe it’s inspiring—or
another way to grow—
I don’t know—
I never tried it—
***
shirtsleeve weather
for the shirtsleeve
executives—
the business world is
like high school
the art world like
college—the
world world is like
home—
if you
don’t make it yours
you got to get out
or be passive or bitchy
or keep to your space
***
room to move around in
—that’s not much
but it still wasn’t
easy to get or quick coming
[ . . . ]
If you aint gonna write a poem
don’t be breakin’ up the lines.
If you gonna talk like a spade
wino way behind the times
ah shit, you aint no spade wino.
about some things I’m so simple
like I’ve got enough to make it
through the next two days and so
I feel ridiculously mellow & content
even happy cause I paid the rent
though other bills like gas & phone
& credit companies & eye doctor
& so on I still owe back due
but somehow it doesn’t add up to
much more than numbers on paper
either in the shape of money or
bills so uninteresting & un
important compared to the snow
outside the window making Greenwich
Street & the park & sidewalks
look so olden days & hopeful or
just peaceful & connected to
the world I know, not the stupid
business of business & the slow
approach of some sort of ultimate
bill to pay, I mean today I got
enough to eat & even treat my
son & his cute friend to ice
cream & tomorrow I can buy
enough to make a meal for us
& ahead or beyond all that
I hardly can consider, it seems
so vague & pointless to try
& outside of the amusement
& support it somehow gives
me when I write or read or listen
to its variations, the past I
finally truly feel I’m free of
at last, I mean it’s just the past . . .
& so what’s left is me here now
the way it’s always been for all
of us I guess unless we count the
moments when we’re all of it at
once & totally, which is why we
thought we might be talented or
special or immortal after all,
though that kind of cosmic ecstasy
is redress for the ways we’ve come
to treat each other to get by, I
mean the fear of others’ problems
& the jealousy of others’ success
& all the rest that makes our
age as tough & real & cold
as that snow might be if I was
out there trying to sleep on it
1:
Is this the Paradise they sing of
in Saturday Night Fever
or Reznikoff wrote of in his
Adam-and-Eve-as-the-city-romantics poem
of the 1930s I discovered in the late ’50s
and recognized myself in
as all I experience that shocks me
with its clarity?
I love to see the edges and the blurs,
I’d like to be in Frank O’Hara’s mind
when he’s drunk and in love
and the city is out of focus
but gorgeous and his.
When he wrote those things
I was drunk too and in love and
wandering the same streets
a kid from Jersey away from home
immersed in my bohemian self-pity
and incredibly inarticulate conceptions
about life and the wages of concern
and sensitivity, it was the ’50s.
I slept in parks
walked in the rain
was afraid of anyone
as graceful and erudite
as O’Hara and Reznikoff could be
in the poetry that would celebrate
my escape when I was through rehearsing it.
2:
The wind from the Hudson River
keeps my ears busy
with the help of the leaves
of the avocado plants
and ailanthus trees
the debris of 100 years of electricity
and telephones, loose wires and
connections that tap or scrape or ping
or confuse my mice radar
wondering if this is the real thing
or only part of the tenement symphony
that surrounds me
in the city homes I’ve preferred
even where mice can be heard and disturb
my concentration.
The hallways of your voices
the sweet secretaries of your silences
the most ambitious office boy
in your intimate company
the laundries of your intellect
the delicatessens of your affairs
o city escaping the air—
Manhattan, you don’t owe me a thing.
John Ashbery made me sit down. He then plucked a single
eyebrow from a number of newspapers and gave it to me. He
ordered me to bend down on my long cylindrical back and
loosen my hand and place the girls against the skin of my
effort region. He created my movements and instructed me
to coastline the kindness against my mind with both hands.
He then ordered me to close my supernatural world and
warned me that if I wanted perfect revolution I should not
lose the general structure of a dream action, or open my
gift messenger, or try to Indian up when he shifted my
real interest to a position of destiny.
He grabbed me by the right stairs and tanked me around.
I had an invincible desire to clutch language itself
through my most recent values, but John Ashbery put his
scraping over my point. He commanded me to surprise myself
only with the sense of buoy that was coming from a
marvelous clarification.
He then interfered that I should let my reception area
have at least clapped through the streets to my body
building. He gently pushed me into the edges. I awkwardly
poisoned for a moment and then came upon the castaway.
I thought that I must have stability and rejuvenated the
spokesman in which John Ashbery had arms upflung. He
dried out the garage, saying that I went “autobio” to
the chalice because my sweater had been soaked for hours
in no light.
“I’ve told you,” he said, “the secret.” I laughed and
patted him on my body.
(11/73)
after Kenneth Koch
In the evening the only sounds weren’t
from the street.
Though the voices of the kids disturbed
the peace of
passing cars whose vapors slowly trailed
the sound of tires and asphalt to our
windows
and on in through the din of DeSeverac
on the phonograph and the occasional click
of her knitting needles as she contemplated
stardom on the silver screen in conjunction
and sometimes competition with my own
ambitions.
Goddamn the kids are noisy and too bad
my own the worst, short for their age
but not in the lungs. O well whatever
gets them through. But Jesus I’m trying
to write a poem and find a character to
make my own in future auditions and con-
versations
until my fantasy of using Duse for my
middle name instead of David so Middle
Ages destiny somehow opposed to “post-
modernism’s”
like Bogie, Mitchum, Cagney, Randy Quaid . . .
They should be in bed, my kids’ exhausted
lungs, along with her and me, our sleep so
restless these days, night after night we
fight for our lives and reputations on
the screen of our dreams’ imaginations.
By day we stalk the telephone-handed agents
and their entres to the ones who hire
future stars
like we will be. It’s not the chance to be
“up there” and all that implies, but another
way to share what makes us think we’re
“special.”
Only when you’re insecure or self-conscious
for whatever reason, you’re not so “special”
after all.
Or we’re not. Or I’m not. Though who can say
what “way” was found by those who transcended
all that,
like Sam Shepard in Days of Heaven or
Linda Mantz in same, or Jane Greer in From
Out of the Past and Robert Blake in In Cold
Blood,
you never thought of him as very talented til
that one did you, or ever since, though I
can’t get away from easy self-exposure as not
so easy, enthralled by Nick Nolte in North
Dallas Forty because he seems to “act” so
“effortlessly”—
try “just being yourself” sometime on some-
body else’s line
and money and see what it makes you feel like—
John Hurt in The Naked Civil Servant and
Midnight Express, top that, except by Rip
Torn’s performance
as Walt Whitman in some tv special I’ve heard
some intellectual-arty types dismiss while
wallowing in their misconceptions about Meryl
Streep’s “technique.”
Maybe they like it “worked,” which I’m afraid
is the brain’s way of transcending its know-
ledge of
the body’s not so brainy self-conscious routines.
“Technique” is simply “ritualization” of “style”
you either invent or discover among your selves
like Bacall, Monroe, Presley, Lydia Lunch . . .
Even the kids are quiet sometimes, and the cars
seem to be disappearing. It’s getting late, if
this wasn’t a city block those brats would be in
bed.
That isn’t what “I” really said, I never use the
term “brats,”
it was my self-conscious insecurity at not being
as sophisticatedly
cynical as . . . what were the names of those guys?
sometimes I feel lonely
sometimes I feel mad
sometimes I feel pistol whipped
sometimes I feel like I have to answer the phone
sometimes I feel like I’m all alone when I’m not
sometimes I feel hot
sometimes I feel enormous
sometimes I feel like I’m in each of my cells punching my way out
sometimes I feel like Ted Berrigan
sometimes I feel like Raquel Welch
sometimes I feel incredibly tough
sometimes I feel like an aristocrat without means
sometimes I feel dumb
sometimes I feel like a has been
sometimes I feel terribly wise
sometimes I feel like a star
sometimes I feel I’m as handsome as a movie star
sometimes I feel ordinary and not exceptionally smart
sometimes I feel like the bearded heart
sometimes I feel myself all over and it feels good
sometimes I feel like a young teenager, very confused
sometimes I feel I’m not good enough
sometimes I feel lucky
sometimes I feel distracted
sometimes I feel my heart pumping funny
sometimes I feel for everybody who isn’t smart or attractive
sometimes I feel like a bum
sometimes I feel like my whole life is a not very useful lie
sometimes I feel my ambitions are unreal
sometimes I feel missed
sometimes I feel so fucking horny nothing can satisfy it
sometimes I feel pretty fucked up
sometimes I feel pretty ugly
sometimes I feel extremely important
sometimes I feel like something wonderful is bound to happen if I
can wait long enough
sometimes I feel I can really understand what it’s like to be
anybody else
sometimes I feel like I don’t know anyone
sometimes I feel really lazy
sometimes I feel high when I’m not
sometimes I feel incredibly grateful for so much
sometimes I feel like the music I’m listening to is me
sometimes I feel poems get away from me
sometimes I feel I do too
the music stops me cold,
new or old, it tells me
that old fist-in-the-stomach-
lump-in-the-heart shit keeps
us all awake at nights,
if not this time then that,
more common than the ways
we never mean to betray
even our best friends,
only love’s got nothing
to do with friendship when
the one who’s loving most
thinks they’re lost in it . . .
you’d think by now we’d know
how to keep it going but
we only know how to show
it out like it’s never
gonna end when in our
heart’s most secret files
we got a dossier all ready
for the fucker when whoever
it is walks out or tries to
make us think we’re crazy
when we know it’s only this
pressure from within to
overwhelm them with the logic
of our cause—we ain’t
unlovable or above all that
or crazy or too much we’re
just in touch with more of
what’s going down right now
inside us and together than
the other one can figure
cause they just ain’t as
involved, and that’s the
giveaway we’re right, the
fucker’s gonna walk tonight,
if not for real than in
the head while our bodies
are supposed to be like one
in the bed we’ve been sharing
and now is only tearing out
the good shit so it all seems
bleak and bitter and despair
is all the air can hold of
what was once the sweetness
and the light of every night
we spent together . . . no matter
who walks out the door of
whose heart, it takes the
best part of our lives
to open it again, to
trust the fucking—you know
that’s it—to trust
the fucking . . . some poor fuckers
never do again and some of us
just learn how to pretend
Like his best friend said whenever this happened to him
and he said back whenever it happened to his best friend:
time to learn everything all over again. Begin at start.
Let time heal the heart and then hope it still can love again.
Because despite the macho upbringing, the feminist influence,
the righteous rationality of radical analysis, the years
of experience, the endless bodies and smells and sensations,
the drugs and experiments, the break ups and divorces,
the dead ends and long gone lovers, the kicks in the ass
and the endless regrets, he still understood that
at least for him there was never any bigger thrill
or kick or high or rush or ideal or goal or accomplishment
or reward or prize or surprise or sensation or experience
or epiphany or good feeling than falling in love
with someone who is falling in love with you. Shit.
It never lasted. Did it for anyone? He didn’t care.
The first thing that happens to you when your heart is broken:
you stop caring about everything else, the only thing
that matters is your broken heart and the confusion of feelings
toward the one who broke it. Maybe women go through
the same thing, maybe they expect it too. But,
like all the other men he had ever known, he was
always amazed that it could happen to him. It did though.
Only a few times in his 38 years. Out of all the lovers
he had had, only a few, a handful, had broken his heart.
That was enough. It didn’t matter. Even if this
had been the first, though it wasn’t. It didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered except the little details of their life
as lovers and all the accumulated proof overwhelming
his attention as he added up the evidence once more
to convince whoever was the object of his thoughts
that he was wronged, that he deserved better, that if
this whole disastrous series of events could not be erased
then he deserved at least some sort of revenge. Only
he didn’t want to see her hurt. He still loved her.
The rotten piece of shit, how could she do this to him.
for Rain and Renee
Alright. It’s night again.
I’m here & you’re there.
The past is the past—
at last. Only the night—
“in the still of” and “oh
what a”—lights some
fires in my head & heart
that start the memories
going. No. Fuck them.
Then images, feelings,
fucking promises I can’t
define & can’t forget.
They let me know there’s
more waiting for me if
I could get over this
momentary certainty I
already had it all or
it should come to me
if I’m really that hot
and not make me go out
to the lonely places to
share the fearful lack
of tenderness these times
or this city imposes on us.
Besides, I haven’t got
the money. That’s more
important than sex or
maybe even love, at least
when you don’t have any.
And you can’t even talk
about it. When I first
told about my sexual
secrets and feelings I
got the startled or hot
or reassured responses.
But talking about money,
when you don’t have any,
really causes havoc in
the normal human ways
we have of understanding.
People feel you’ve really
changed when all you’ve
done is tried to borrow.
The most outrageous hip
politically correct &
outlaw friends & heroes
seem to have some sort
of solid investment in
tomorrow that my poverty-
induced need threatens.
I miss you. & you. &
all of you. Well, maybe
not the ones who turned
me down or let me wallow
in my desperate situation.
We all need a vacation
from ambition & our fears
for our “careers” & for
each other. Maybe it’s
disdain I’m seeing in the
ways my onetime friends
& even lovers sometimes
treat each other & me.
Not all of them of course,
but their record is as bad
as any random bunch of
strangers, & in this town
that can be a pretty busy
crowd of cynics or turn-
it-on-for-fame-&-fortune
phonies. I should talk.
I mean maybe I shouldn’t.
I’d like to be able to
turn-it-on for any kind
of financial security at
the moment. Sometimes I
do. So what. I still
miss you. & you. & you.
Only what I really want
is new exciting friends
who understand the need
for tenderness & support
& still can kick ass in
the world that matters
to our life’s work. I
know they’re out there
cause I already have a
few. One of them was
you. The other two are
busy with their lovers
& after that they’re on
their way to do another
picture or whatever it
is they do. I love them
anyway, & they love me,
but not the way I once
loved you. Alright. No
nostalgia, I promise,
after all it was my idea
we try it on our own.
I thought we could still
keep it close with dates
& weekends together &
long conversations on
the phone. But I’m alone
right now & the phone
hasn’t rung all evening
& I haven’t got a dime
or an inspiration for
a way of getting one
except to do the work
we always somehow find
to do to bring in just
enough to get us through
until tomorrow night.
Yeah, I got some dates
lined up. I’ve already
had a few. But shit,
age seems to make you
more selective—I mean
me. I used to get turned
on just knowing someone
wanted me to, or getting
naked or imagining all
kinds of kinky things.
The only thing that’s
made me really horny
lately was the way a
woman talked about the
things she did & knew
to make the money &
successes she needed &
wanted, to get to where
we all want to go. You
know. The place where
we can make a living
by living our wonderful
lives, doing what we’d
do anyway because we
can’t help it. Like
me writing this down.
There ain’t no money
in it. I never thought
there would be & it
didn’t seem to matter.
But this is 1980 &
by now I should have
been dead, or right, or
totally shattered. &
all I am is all I’ve
ever been. Broke. In
need of some special
sexual stimulation.
Looking for some male
and female friends who
will understand & not
betray me. Still on the
verge of stardom. [ . . . ]
“I don’t think we know how to live like
failures anymore.” I said that in 1974.
Now it’s 1980—what are those voices
outside my window over the melancholy
sound of car tires on wet streets coming
through the air that should be colder
than it is & for which I’m grateful . . .
there used to be a way of making poetry
that was all about crossing out words &
phrases & lines & even entire pages . . .
Celine dying by jumping into a shit-filled
cesspool or Jane Bowles slowly driven
insane and out of her life with periodic
doses of arsenic from her jealous aging
Arab lady lover . . . what the fuck am I
doing in the same world
I won’t cross out shit motherfucker
stumbling around in the speech in my head
like an old wino who isn’t so old but
doesn’t know how not to show it
So it’s finally 1980 & I get to start doing
“soft portraits” of myself at last
though those voices sounded hostile
and racist and sexist and reminded me of
where I am—
I am in New York City in the first month
of 1980 and everybody’s out to kick ass!
they think, though
secretly as hungry for a little tenderness
I mean sexy tenderness, softly tough & vital
as me when I’m in this
rain-in-the-streets-like-Spring-or-Fall-but-
it’s-still-only-January mood
I want to love you
I fucking do love you
I can’t help it if I thought I didn’t
or didn’t want to anymore because it
made me so soft I was like a baby out there
and some of them really are mean
and most of them seem to think it’s hip or
hot or tomorrow to react to nice as though
it were really naïve—
I can’t be no baby before I die
I got to make a mark I can stick my whole
life in
before it’s over because then
I won’t even give a fuck like Etheridge Knight
said to the Black student he was trying to
hustle for a few bucks for another fix once in a
motel room in DC we were all getting high in—
he said I don’t give a fuck about what anybody
thinks about me or my poetry a hundred years
after I’m dead, I don’t give a fuck what they’ll
think five minutes after I’m dead—
and I knew that I had been depending on the fact
that someday my real-language-movement machines
would be seen as perfect expressions of what
a person might have been making with a head of
his times—
for Jane DeLynn
“Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.”
—Max Frisch (Montauk)
I was standing in the lobby of the movie theater.
It was a warm Saturday morning, late August, 1979.
There had been a special preview screening.
Several hundred people came.
I didn’t know how many had been invited.
I had been allowed to invite a few and had hesitated.
[ . . . ] the people I had invited who showed up seemed as
apprehensive after the screening as I had been before it.
I felt liberated once it was over.
I had taken it this far, the movie star fantasy, no where to go
but ahead with it.
The mistakes seemed so obvious to me, I assumed they were to
everyone.
So did the high points.
The people I knew didn’t mention either.
They were polite, confused, seemingly embarrassed, and in a hurry.
Soon there were only strangers.
When one mentioned autographs, I got embarrassed,
thinking at first they were making fun of me.
I forgot what had happened after the surprise of technicolor
reflections of someone I’d never seen before on a giant screen
that had reflected not too long ago a woman I once thought I
couldn’t live without. I mean
a movie.
Me.
I felt I acted like a poet at the start.
I understood why actors never looked that real to me,
they didn’t want to look like I had sometimes looked,
and why I had been wrong in thinking that was all I had to do,
make it real for me by seeing what I thought I was up there.
I didn’t know I was that.
Or that too.
The strangers didn’t seem to care.
I loved them for it, wondering why my friends had rushed away.
Why had she avoided me.
Had he really told her it had been a waste of his time.
[ . . . ]
I like to hear things like John Voight is good
but all over the place without a strong and wise director.
Let’s blame it on directors.
I like to be compared with Voight.
It’s better than being compared to Alan Alda.
Though that has only happened twice.
The same amount as Dennis Hopper.
I like the Montgomery Clift ones best, but wonder if
there’s something in my actor’s presence
that reeks of disturbed sissy underneath.
And early Henry Fonda makes me glow.
Although I know I haven’t justified it up there.
Who knows.
It’s all so subjective, as they say.
What once was thought ridiculous might be considered “classic”
today. I remember
thinking James Dean a very sorry and too old imitation
of something I thought I knew firsthand to be much
sharper, tougher, cooler, stronger, and less strained.
I mean in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE.
[ . . . ]
And now another poet says he’s writing a book on
the influence of Dean in that one role, or the influence
of that movie on himself and subsequent culture and society.
I wish I could be that confident.
But then I must have been sometime to get this habit
of writing it down to share with whoever can get into it
as we said in the ’60s long ago.
I wanted to write a poem with lots of speed shift changes
not one this slow, but
I forgot about what.
[ . . . ]
I feel guilty about it when I can’t stop myself
from letting someone know I think they or someone they know
got their style from me.
Especially since style is something that’s
“in the air”—as Ted Greenwald might put it and has—
like music, “and then it’s gone” said Eric Dolphy
as if unaware of recording equipment and his own
recorded music living on after he would be long gone.
I used to hate it when I’d read some proper name
of some contemporary person in another poet’s poem.
It made them seem they had a confidence I didn’t,
elevating their friends to what had once been the domain
of long dead famous cultural heroes and their kind.
When I did it too I ended up feeling guilty for
not including so-and-so instead of him or her and
having so many references to what once were
obscure jazz creators and rock n roll heroes of a time
I thought would never be revived because I hated it.
Now I can’t go out without
running into someone I think I dated 20 years ago,
only they wouldn’t look like that anymore,
their style long since lost to the inevitable:
cheap synthetic clothing, food, and hair.
What does that mean? Now I can feel guilty
for feeling so superior to the people I once knew
who stayed behind to raise a normal family
and grow old among the people who won’t care
what kind of clothes they wear or who they know
or what they’ve done with their potential.
[ . . . ]
Potential never filled my heart to bursting like new love,
or stopped starvation in the world, or ended war,
it never got me off incredibly intensely like new lust satisfied,
or put my picture in the paper or my “dependents” food on
the table or change in their pockets or braces in their mouths.
God, my kids got braces already.
I never knew anyone with braces when I was growing up.
My sisters and brothers had terrible teeth.
I was more fortunate.
I avoided dentists like the Arabs avoid Jews.
Although I’ve known some Arabs who were living as lovers with Jews
and obviously vice versa.
Braces sound so Waspy and middle-class.
Have I become Waspy and middle-class without my realizing it?
Or just my kids?
I had them baptized Catholic, just in case.
But the only time they’ve been to communion was by mistake
and scandalized a church full of relatives and their friends
who all suspected any kids of mine wouldn’t know what communion
was all about. They didn’t, but just got on line with everybody else.
I didn’t want to make a scene by yelling to them to come back,
as I was already conspicuous as the only person still
sitting in the pew and not on line to “eat god” as I remember
hearing a “beatnik” poet put it in a poem about first communion
ending with a line about a nun smacking him
and saying something like “Don’t chew it, brat,”
since that was against church regulations back then.
At the time it seemed a pretty bold thing to write, to me,
though the language, even then, made me want to do my own
in words and rhythms I felt would be so much more real
because I was so much more real to me than them.
But since that time I’ve given up control to
all kinds of things, like typing patterns and chance
and a simple love of language’s hidden orders.
It was easier then.
I was all confidence, a kid in love with words and music
if not entirely with myself, that came later when I found
a way of getting rid of guilt. No shit.
It didn’t last, but while it did . . .
well, I was happy.
What a wonderful word, who knows what it means.
We do when we are.
Though sometimes “it” seems almost childish, or backward.
Is that just the times, or any time?
That beatnik was reading his poem in The Gaslight Cafe
on McDougal Street where I had taken one of my cousins
who thought she wanted to be hip and a friend of the family
so close I rarely realized she was only our friend.
They were maybe in their early 20s and me in my mid-teens.
But the Village was already my turf, so to speak
at a time when the street living non-neighborhood teenagers
were few, and most of us knew each other.
It was maybe ’57 or so, me still spending afternoons
after school fixing things for a price
and my evenings and weekends and sometimes overnights
on the streets of the Village feeling so hip
I was sure this beatnik poet was really a fraud,
that no true beat would be on display in such an obvious
tourist trap as The Gaslight Café, just as a few years later
when I met a newcomer to town, I thought he was too phony country
and self-consciously folk to get any hipness renown.
Show’s what I know.
He became Bobby Dylan, while my cousin became one of those
Catholics they didn’t allow back then, like
fundamentalist holy roller or worse, believing in
healing and tongues and eye contact.
I just realized if Dylan’s new album is honest
he’s somewhere close to my cousin’s position.
[ . . . ]
See what I mean about honesty?
It’s only honesty, not necessarily right or accurate or
precise or becoming or nice or bright. As Joe Brainard might write
Poetry is the best policy.
Only I wrote that a while ago, not Joe, and I had something
else to say about that day when my first professional movie role
was screened and the friends who were having some trouble
with their lives or careers or acceptance of something so
obviously below their expectations for themselves and their arts
and what they know or think I can do and should, and the friends
who were at the time more secure in their own success and
financial support were as generous as could be with me,
knowing I’d made it over a hump that gave me a chance to
keep going, no easier, even more risky, but now known,
maybe the biggest hump of being grown up about ambitions.
How should I know, I’d say to you,
that Saturday morning, I knew I knew.
another fall in New York City
another beautiful sunset over New Jersey
another overwhelming emotional experience
impossible to express accurately with
the stupid language of my time and people
well, limited language then
and not “my people” but the ones who live and grew up here too
only the darkness and coolness sets in
and I’m fiercely pleased
as if
as if I did something wonderful
or the world really was
is wonderful I mean
of something beautiful and moving I am so central it seems
because I’m here caring about it and wanting to share that
not show it out or off but
reinforce the fact that it still happens and we got to be
at least me
as honest about that as about all the shit and grief and non-
belief that makes this year distinct from little else I never
could use to get through either
I mean the new wave post-post-modern punknik cold chic power
of negation and denial or
abusement and retaliation
or finessing the passé as blasé style and fashion
as though it really was politics
only most of us aren’t better off
for the first time in several generations
except those who
wait a minute, it gets away again, see how,
because I let it interfere when what was pulling me into
my life and the chances left to take and make was
the contentedness of this evening’s gift
the sky, the air, the atmosphere outside my window
despite the lack of a toilet, a rank hole where it had been
thanks to the landlord’s henchmen, black apologists for—
but, I’m alive and well and the world outside that I can see
and feel is beautiful in ways that made that word once meaningful
I mean for use with precision, like the paintings those first
gifted artists couldn’t stop when wandering into the western
mountains and wildernesses, only this is New Jersey industrial
landscape and Hudson river pollution and “Tribeca” development
and rip off and abuse and despite the fucking penalties of
wrong choices and fate to my various mates and ex-mates and
kids and friends and family and self and the shit I’ve seen
and been and created, it still feels so fucking nice to be
here watching that incredible gray fall sky return to burn
the dues and blues and attitudes from my not so different—
what do we call it now where the feelings originate or wait
to be discovered—I lived here too, I wore those clothes and
took some attitudes that rocked some boats and paid some dues,
I know it aint alright or nice or bright or new but I got to
acknowledge the good things, the fucking good things that keep
me, for one, here and wanting to stay and share it . . . if not with
you than with the me I always speak to when I do . . . I mean the me
in you.
One warm night, when I was a kid,
we were all playing ringalario in
the high school field at the bottom
of my street when Mrs. Murphy, known
mostly for the time her hair turned
purple when she tried to die it, stuck
her head out the door and yelled across
the street to us, “Go on home now and be
quiet, Babe Ruth just died.” And we all
did go home where everything was somber
and serious and adult and strange,
worse than when one of the family died,
because then there were outbursts of
emotion as well as jokes and stories
and good drunken parties, but
the night Babe Ruth died, everyone
felt as sad as if it was a close close
friend or a sister or a brother,
but no one was really related so
there was no call for an actual Irish
wake or funeral party. I couldn’t help
remembering that night again, the
night John Lennon died. Nobody
threw a wake or a party where we
could all get drunk and high and
have a good cry together. We all
went home and wandered around our
rooms and heads looking for answers,
unable to sleep or forget or accept
or understand what had happened.
It had to be a mistake and it was,
a fucking senseless, horrible,
deadening mistake.
It’s hard to
recognize even the most familiar
things. I don’t know where I am
half the time, the other half I’m
flashing on some song or line or look
or attitude so close to my own
personal history I thought it was
mine. But it ain’t, cause it’s gone
with John and I feel like I got to
go do something now to spread a
little joy and loving and honest
fucking answers and questions about
the world I live in and the only times
we ever have, our own. I hope I’m
not alone.
Fuck me in the heart
in the acceptance
in the part
I fuck you in the heart with
when I fuck you in the fantasy
of childhood acceptance
of the cosmic connection
with our deaths
that fuck us crazy in the end.
Fuck the 1950s
til theyre over and over at last
and the best of the 1970s
that refused to give in to the past
and the worst of the 1960s
that I refuse to believe was all bombast and gesture
I still live that dream
in my fucking for pleasure
fucking guilt in the ass of a brain without hindsight
or quality control
or speed monitor
or check-in-the-mirror devices.
Fuck vices
fuck vice-like grips
on the imaginations that led us here
in their failure to fuck themselves silly.
Fuck silly
and dirty
and angry
and nice.
Fuck me in my past
and my dreams
and my lights
the ones that keep blinking
in back of my brain
that ignore all the warnings
to get back on the train
that I fucked
and I fucked
to get off in the first place,
and fuck all the ladies
and men who deserve it
I’m here
at your service
if you’ll only preserve it
the fucking I saw
in all your beginnings.
Big
innings
for
fucking
that’s the sport
I grew up with,
I don’t want to die
without fucking you all
in the ass
of your past
inhibitions.