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sex

I am driving down Wilton Avenue

when this girl of about 15

dressed in tight blue jeans

that grip her behind like two hands

steps out in front of my car

I stop to let her cross the street

and as I watch her contours waving

she looks directly through my windshield

at me

with purple eyes

and then blows

out of her mouth

the largest pink globe of

bubble gum

I have ever seen

while I am listening to Beethoven

on the car radio.

she enters a small grocery store

and is gone

and I am left with

Ludwig.

a clean, well-lighted place

the old fart, he used his literary reputation

to reel them in one at a time,

each younger than the last.

he liked to meet them for luncheon and

wine

and he’d talk and listen to them

talk.

what ever wife or girlfriend he had at the moment

was made to

understand that this sort of thing made him

feel “young again.”

and when the luncheons became more

than luncheons

the young ladies vied to bed down with

this

literary

genius.

in between, he continued to write,

and late at night in his favorite bar

he liked to talk about writing and his amorous

adventures.

actually, he was just a drunk

who liked young ladies,

writing itself,

and talking about writing.

it wasn’t a bad life.

it was certainly more interesting than

what most men were

doing.

at one time he was probably the

most famous writer in the

world.

many tried to write like he did

drink like he did

act like he did

but he was the original.

then life began to

catch up with him.

he began to age quickly.

his large bulk began to wither.

he was growing old

before his time.

finally it got to where he couldn’t

write anymore,

“it just wouldn’t come”

and the psychiatrists couldn’t

do anything for him but only

made it worse.

then he took his own cure,

early one morning,

alone

just as his father had done

many years

before.

a writer who can’t write any

more is dead

anyhow.

he knew that.

he knew that what he was

killing was already

dead.

and then the critics

and the hangers-on

and the publicists

and his heirs

moved in

like vultures.

something for the touts, the nuns,

the grocery clerks and you…

we have everything and we have nothing

and some men do it in churches

and some men do it by tearing butterflies

in half

and some men do it in Palm Springs

laying it into butterblondes

with Cadillac souls

Cadillacs and butterflies

nothing and everything,

the face melting down to the last puff

in a cellar in Corpus Christi.

there’s something for the touts, the nuns,

the grocery clerks and you…

something at 8 a.m., something in the library

something in the river,

everything and nothing.

in the slaughter house it comes running along

the ceiling on a hook, and you swing it—

one

two

three

and then you’ve got it, $200 worth of dead

meat, its bones against your bones

something and nothing.

it’s always early enough to die and

it’s always too late,

and the drill of blood in the basin white

it tells you nothing at all

and the gravediggers playing poker over

5 a.m. coffee, waiting for the grass

to dismiss the frost…

they tell you nothing at all.

we have everything and we have nothing—

days with glass edges and the impossible stink

of river moss—worse than shit;

checkerboard days of moves and countermoves,

fagged interest, with as much sense in defeat as

in victory; slow days like mules

humping it slagged and sullen and sun-glazed

up a road where a madman sits waiting among

blue jays and wrens netted in and sucked a flakey

gray.

good days too of wine and shouting, fights

in alleys, fat legs of women striving around

your bowels buried in moans,

the signs in bullrings like diamonds hollering

Mother Capri, violets coming out of the ground

telling you to forget the dead armies and the loves

that robbed you.

days when children say funny and brilliant things

like savages trying to send you a message through

their bodies while their bodies are still

alive enough to transmit and feel and run up