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piece by piece

leaving nothing there

until at last the red gut-sack splashes

its secrets,

and I run child-like

with God’s anger a step behind,

back to simple sunlight,

wondering

as the world goes by

with curled smile

if anyone else

saw or sensed my crime.

the lisp

I had her for 3 units

and at mid-term

she’d read off how many assignments

stories

had been turned in:

“Gilbert: 2…

Ginsing: 5…

McNulty: 4…

Frijoles: none…

Lansford: 2…

Bukowski: 38…”

the class laughed

and she lisped

that not only did Bukowski

write many stories

but that they were all of

high quality.

she flashed her golden legs

in 1940 and there was something

sexy about her lisp

sexy as a hornet

as a rattler

that lisp.

and she lisped to me

after class

that I should go to

war,

that I would make a

very good sailor,

and she told me about how

she took my stories home

and read them to her husband

and how they both laughed,

and I told her, “o.k., Mrs. Anderson.”

and I’d walk out on the campus

where almost every guy had a

girl.

I didn’t become a sailor,

Mrs. Anderson, I’m not crazy

about the ocean

and I didn’t like war

even when it was the popular

thing to

do.

but here’s another completed assignment

for you

those golden legs

that lisp

still has me typing

love songs.

on being 20

my mother knocked on my rooming-house door

and came in

looked in the dresser drawer:

“Henry you don’t have any clean

stockings?

do you change your underwear?”

“Mom, I don’t want you poking around in

here…”

“I hear that there is a woman

who comes to your room late at

night and she drinks with you, she lives

right down the hall.”

“she’s all right…”

“Henry, you can get a terrible

disease.”

“yeah…”

“I talked with your landlady, she’s a

nice lady, she says you must read a lot

of books in bed because as you fall to sleep at

night the books fall to the floor,

they can hear it all over the

house, heavy books, one at midnight,

another at one a.m., another at 2 a.m.,

another at four.”

after she left I took the library books

back

returned to the rooming house and

put the dirty stockings and the dirty

underwear and the dirty shirts into

the paper suitcase

took the streetcar downtown

boarded the Trailways bus to

New Orleans

figuring to arrive with ten dollars

and let them do with me

what they would.

they did.

meanwhile

neither does this mean

the dead are

at the door

begging bread

before

the stockpiles

blow

like all the

storms and hell

in one big love,

but anyhow

I rented a 6 dollar a week

room

in Chinatown

with a window as large as the

side of the world

filled with night flies and neon,

lighted like Broadway

to frighten away rats,

and I walked into a bar and sat down,

and the Chinaman looked at my rags

and said

no credit

and I pulled out a hundred-dollar bill

and asked for a cup of Confucius juice

and 2 China dolls with slits of eyes

just about the size of the rest of them

slid closer

and we sat

and we

waited.

the world’s greatest loser

he used to sell papers in front:

“Get your winners! Get rich on a dime!”

and about the 3rd or 4th race

you’d see him rolling in on his rotten board

with roller skates underneath.

he’d propel himself along on his hands;

he just had small stumps for legs

and the rims of the skate wheels were worn off.

you could see inside the wheels and they would wobble

something awful

shooting and flashing

imperialistic sparks!

he moved faster than anybody, rolled cigarette dangling,

you could hear him coming

“god o mighty, what was that?” the new ones asked.

he was the world’s greatest loser

but he never gave up

wheeling toward the 2-dollar window screaming:

“IT’S THE 4 HORSE, YOU FOOLS! HOW THE HELL YA

GONNA BEAT THE

4?”

up on the board the 4 would be reading

60 to 1.

I never heard him pick a winner.

they say he slept in the bushes. I guess that’s where he

died. he’s not around any

more.

there was the big fat blonde whore