an empire of coins
the legs are gone and the hopes—the lava of outpouring,
and I haven’t shaved in sixteen days
but the mailman still makes his rounds and
water still comes out of the faucet and I have a photo of
myself with glazed and milky eyes full of simple music
in golden trunks and 8 oz. gloves when I made the semi-finals
only to be taken out by a German brute who should have been
locked in a cage for the insane and allowed to drink blood.
Now I am insane and stare at the wallpaper as one would stare
at a Dalí (he has lost it) or an early Picasso, and I send
the girls out for beer, the old girls who barely bother to wipe
their asses and say, “well, I guess I won’t comb my hair today:
might bring me luck.” well, anyway, they wash the dishes and
chop the wood, and the landlady keeps insisting “let me in, I can’t
get in, you’ve got the lock on, and what’s all that singing and
cussing in there?” but she only wants a piece of ass while she pretends
she wants the rent
but she’s not going to get either one of ’em.
meanwhile the skulls of the dead are full of beetles and Shakespeare
and old football scores like S.C. 16, N.D. 14 on a John
Baker field goal.
can see the fleet from my window, the sails and the guns, always
the guns poking their eyes in the sky looking for trouble like young
L.A. cops too young to shave, and the younger sailors out
there sex-hungry, trying to act tough, trying to act like men
but really closer to their mother’s nipples than to a true evaluation
of existence. I say god damn it, that
my legs are gone and the outpourings too. inside my brain
they cut and snip and
pour oil
to burn and fire out early dreams.
darling,” says one of the girls, “you’ve got to snap out of it,
we’re running out of MONEY. how do you want
your toast?
light or dark?”
woma n’s a woman, I say, and I put my binoculars between her
kneecaps and I can see where
empires have fallen.
wish I had a brush, some paint, some paint and a brush, I say.
why?” asks one of the
whores.
BECAUSE RATS DON’T LIKE OIL! I scream.
can’t go on. I don’t belong here.) I listen to radio programs and
people’s voices talking and I marvel that they can get excited
and interested over nothing and I flick out the lights, I
crash out the lights, and I pull the shades down, I
tear the shades down and I light my last cigar imagining
the dreamjump off the Empire State Building
into the thickheaded bullbrained mob with the hard-on attitude.
already forgotten are the dead of Normandy, Lincoln’s stringy beard,
all the bulls that have died to flashing red capes,
all the love that has died in real women and real men
while fools have been elevated to the trumpet’s succulent sneer
and I have fought red-handed and drunk
in slop-pitted alleys
the bartenders of this rotten land.
and I la ugh, I can still laugh, who can’t laugh when the
whole thingis
so ridiculous
that only the insane, the clowns, the half-wits,
the cheaters, the whores, the horse players, the bankrobbers, the
poets... are interesting?
in the dark I hear the hands reaching for the last of my money
like mice nibbling at paper, automatic feeders on inbred
helplessness, a false drunken God asleep at the wheel...
quarter rolls across the floor, and I remember all the faces
and
the football heroes, and everything has meaning, and an editor
writes me, you are good
but
you are too emotional
the way to whip life is to quietly frame the agony,
study it and put it to sleep in the abstract.
is there anything less abstract
than dying day by day?
The door closes and the last of the great whores are gone
and somehow no matter how they have
killed me, they are all great, and I smoke quietly
thinking of Mexico, the tired horses, of Havana
and Spain and Normandy, of the jabbering insane, of my dear
friends, of no more friends
ever; and the voice of my Mexican buddy saying, “you won’t die
you won’t die in the war, you’re too smart, you’ll take care
of yourself.”
keep thinking of the bulls. the brave bulls dying every day.
the whores are gone. the bombing has stopped for a minute.
fuck everybody.
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