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I 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?”

a woman’s a woman, I say, and I put my binoculars between her

kneecaps and I can see where

empires have fallen.

I 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.

(I 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 laugh, 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…

a 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.”

I keep thinking of the bulls. the brave bulls dying every day.

the whores are gone. the bombing has stopped for a minute.

fuck everybody.

what?

sleepy now

at 4 a.m.

I hear the siren

of a white

ambulance,

then a dog

barks

once

in this tough-boy

Christmas

morning.

the American Flag Shirt

now more and more

all these people running around

wearing the American Flag Shirt

and it was more or less once assumed

(I think but I’m not sure)

that wearing an A.F.S. meant to

say you were pissing on

it

but now

they keep making them

and everybody keeps buying them

and wearing them

and the faces are just like

the American Flag Shirt—

this one has this face and that shirt

that one has that shirt and this face—

and somebody’s spending money

and somebody’s making money

and as the patriots become

more and more fashionable

it’ll be nice

when everybody looks around

and finds that they are all patriots now

and therefore

who is there left to

persecute

except their

children?

now she’s free

Cleo’s going to make it now

she’s got her shit together

she split with Barney

Barney wasn’t good for her

she got a bigger apartment

furnished it beautifully