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I lean upon this,

I lean on all of this

and I know:

her dress upon my arm:

but

they will not

give her back to me.

notice

the swans drown in bilge water,

take down the signs,

test the poisons,

barricade the cow

from the bull,

the peony from the sun,

take the lavender kisses from my night,

put the symphonies out on the streets

like beggars,

get the nails ready,

flog the backs of the saints,

stun frogs and mice for the cat,

burn the enthralling paintings,

piss on the dawn,

my love

is dead.

for Jane

225 days under grass

and you know more than I.

they have long taken your blood,

you are a dry stick in a basket.

is this how it works?

in this room

the hours of love

still make shadows.

when you left

you took almost

everything.

I kneel in the nights

before tigers

that will not let me be.

what you were

will not happen again.

the tigers have found me

and I do not care.

eulogy to a hell of a dame

dame

some dogs who sleep at night

must dream of bones

and I remember your bones

in flesh

and best

in that dark green dress

and those high-heeled bright

black shoes,

you always cursed when you

drank,

your hair coming down you

wanted to explode out of

what was holding you:

rotten memories of a

rotten

past, and

you finally got

out

by dying,

leaving me with the

rotten

present;

you’ve been dead

28 years

yet I remember you

better than any of

the rest;

you were the only one

who understood

the futility of the

arrangement of

all the others were only

displeased with

trivial segments,

carped

nonsensically about

nonsense;

Jane, you were

killed by

knowing too much.

here’s a drink

to your bones

that

this dog

still

dreams about.

barfly

Jane, who has been dead for 31 years,

never could have

imagined that I would write a screenplay of our drinking

days together

and

that it would be made into a movie

and

that a beautiful movie star would play her

part.

I can hear Jane now: “A beautiful movie star? oh,

for Christ’s sake!”

Jane, that’s show biz, so go back to sleep, dear, because

no matter how hard they tried they

just couldn’t find anybody exactly like

you.

and neither can

I.

was Li Po wrong?

you know what Li Po said when asked if he’d rather be an

Artist or Rich?

“I’d rather be Rich,” he replied, “for Artists can usually be found

sitting on the doorsteps of the

Rich.”

I’ve sat on the doorsteps of some expensive and

unbelievable homes

myself

but somehow I always managed to disgrace myself and / or insult

my Rich hosts

(mostly after drinking large quantities of their fine

liquor).

perhaps I was afraid of the Rich?

all I knew then was poverty and the very poor,

and I felt instinctively that the Rich shouldn’t be so

Rich,

that it was some kind of clever

twist of fate

based on something rotten and

unfair.

of course, one could say the same thing

about being poor,

only there were so many poor, it all seemed completely

out of proportion.

and so when I, as an Artist, visited the

homes of the Rich, I felt ashamed to be

there, and I drank too much of their fine wines,

broke their expensive glassware and antique dishes,

burned cigarette holes in their Persian rugs and

mauled their wives,

reacting badly to the whole damned

situation.

yet I had no political or social solution.

I was just a lousy house guest,

I guess,

and after a while

I protected both myself and the Rich

by rejecting their

invitations

and everybody felt much better after

that.

I went back to

drinking alone,

breaking my own cheap glassware,

filling the room with cigar

smoke and feeling

wonderful

instead of feeling trapped,

used,

pissed on,

fucked.

the night I saw George Raft in Vegas

I bet on #6, I try red, I stare at the women’s legs and breasts,

I wonder what Chekhov would do, and over in the corner three men with

blue plates sit eating the carnage of my youth, they have beards

and look very much like Russians and I pat an