• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

work off a quick screw somewhere—

they can’t do it at home—

and then

the drive back home

waiting for Christmas or Labor Day or

Sunday or

something.

millionaires

you

no faces

no faces

at all

laughing at nothing—

let me tell you

I have drunk in skid row rooms with

imbecile winos

whose cause was better

whose eyes still held some light

whose voices retained some sensibility,

and when the morning came

we were sick but not ill,

poor but not deluded,

and we stretched in our beds and rose

in the late afternoons

like millionaires.

when you wait for the dawn to crawl through the

screen like a burglar to take your life away

screen like a burglar to take your life away

the snake had crawled the hole,

and she said,

tell me about

yourself.

and

I said,

I was beaten down

long ago

in some alley

in another

world.

and she said,

we’re all

like pigs

slapped down some lane,

our

grassbrains

singing

toward the

blade.

by

god,

you’re an

odd one,

I said.

we

sat there

smoking

cigarettes

at

5

in the morning.

the talkers

the boy walks with his muddy feet across my

soul

talking about recitals, virtuosi, conductors,

the lesser known novels of Dostoyevsky;

talking about how he corrected a waitress,

a hasher who didn’t know that French dressing

was composed of so and so;

he gabbles about the Arts until

I hate the Arts,

and there is nothing cleaner

than getting back to a bar or

back to the track and watching them run,

watching things go without this

clamor and chatter,

talk, talk, talk,

the small mouth going, the eyes blinking,

a boy, a child, sick with the Arts,

grabbing at it like the skirt of a mother,

and I wonder how many tens of thousands

there are like him across the land

on rainy nights

on sunny mornings

on evenings meant for peace

in concert halls

in cafes

at poetry recitals

talking, soiling, arguing.

it’s like a pig going to bed

with a good woman

and you don’t want

the woman any more.

art

as the

spirit

wanes

the

form

appears.

advice for some young man in the year 2064 A.D.

let me speak as a friend

although the centuries hang

between us and neither you nor I

can see the moon.

be careful less the onion blind the eye

or the snake sting

or the beetle possess the house

or the lover your wife

or the government your child

or the wine your will

or the doctor your heart

or the butcher your belly

or the cat your chair

or the lawyer your ignorance of the law

or the law dressed as a uniformed man and killing you.

dismiss perfection as an ache of the

greedy

but do not give in to the mass modesty of

easy imperfection.

and remember

the belly of the whale is laden with

great men.

(uncollected)

ice for the eagles

I keep remembering the horses

under the moon

I keep remembering feeding the horses

sugar

white oblongs of sugar

more like ice,

and they had heads like

eagles

bald heads that could bite and

did not.

The horses were more real than

my father

more real than God

and they could have stepped on my

feet but they didn’t

they could have done all kinds of horrors

but they didn’t.

I was almost 5

but I have not forgotten yet;

o my god they were strong and good

those red tongues slobbering

out of their souls.

girl in a mini skirt reading the Bible

outside my window

outside my window

Sunday. I am eating a

grapefruit. church is over at the Russian

Orthodox to the

west.

she is dark

of Eastern descent,

large brown eyes look up from the Bible

then down. a small red and black

Bible, and as she reads

her legs keep moving, moving,

she is doing a slow rhythmic dance

reading the Bible…

long gold earrings;

2 gold bracelets on each arm,

and it’s a mini-suit, I suppose,

the cloth hugs her body,

the lightest of tans is that cloth,

she twists this way and that,

long young legs warm in the sun…

there is no escaping her being

there is no desire to…

my radio is playing symphonic music