• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

instead of sending your poems to me

along with your letters of

complaint

you should enter the

arena—

send your work to the editors and

publishers, it will

buck up your backbone and your

versatility.

boy, I wish to thank you for the

praise for some of my

published works

but that

has nothing to do with

anything and won’t help a

purple shit, you’ve just got to

learn to hit that low, hard

inside pitch.

this is a form letter

I send to almost everybody, but

I hope you take it

personally,

man.

I liked him

I liked D. H. Lawrence

he could get so indignant

he snapped and he ripped

with wonderfully energetic sentences

he could lay the word down

bright and writhing

there was the stink of blood and murder

and sacrifice about him

the only tenderness he allowed

was when he bedded down his large German

wife.

I liked D. H. Lawrence—

he could talk about Christ

like he was the man next door

and he could describe Australian taxi drivers

so well you hated them

I liked D. H. Lawrence

but I’m glad I never met him

in some bistro

him lifting his tiny hot cup of

tea

and looking at me

with his worm-hole eyes.

one for the shoeshine man

the balance is preserved by the snails climbing the

Santa Monica cliffs;

the luck is in walking down Western Avenue

and having the girls in a massage

parlor holler at you, “Hello, Sweetie!”

the miracle is having 5 women in love

with you at the age of 55,

and the goodness is that you are only able

to love one of them.

the gift is having a daughter more gentle

than you are, whose laughter is finer

than yours.

the peace comes from driving a

blue 67 Volks through the streets like a

teenager, radio tuned to The Host Who Loves You

Most, feeling the sun, feeling the solid hum

of the rebuilt motor as you needle through traffic.

the grace is being able to like rock music,

symphony music, jazz…anything that contains the original energy of

joy.

and the probability that returns

is the deep blue low

yourself flat upon yourself

within the guillotine walls

angry at the sound of the phone

or anybody’s footsteps passing;

but the other probability—

the lilting high that always follows—

makes the girl at the checkstand in the

supermarket look like

Marilyn

like Jackie before they got her Harvard lover

like the girl in high school that we

all followed home.

there is that which helps you believe

in something else besides death:

somebody in a car approaching

on a street too narrow,

and he or she pulls aside to let you

by, or the old fighter Beau Jack

shining shoes

after blowing the entire bankroll

on parties

on women

on parasites,

humming, breathing on the leather,

working the rag

looking up and saying:

“what the hell, I had it for a

while. that beats the other.”

I am bitter sometimes

but the taste has often been

sweet. it’s only that I’ve

feared to say it. it’s like

when your woman says,

“tell me you love me,” and

you can’t.

if you see me grinning from

my blue Volks

running a yellow light

driving straight into the sun

I will be locked in the

arms of a

crazy life

thinking of trapeze artists

of midgets with big cigars

of a Russian winter in the early 40s

of Chopin with his bag of Polish soil

of an old waitress bringing me an extra

cup of coffee and laughing

as she does so.

the best of you

I like more than you think.

the others don’t count

except that they have fingers and heads

and some of them eyes

and most of them

legs and all of them

good and bad dreams

and a way to go.

justice is everywhere and it’s working

and the machine guns and the frogs

and the hedges will tell you

so.

the proud thin dying

I see old people on pensions in the

supermarkets and they are thin and they are

proud and they are dying

they are starving on their feet and saying

nothing. long ago, among other lies,

they were taught that silence was

bravery. now, having worked a lifetime,

inflation has trapped them. they look around

steal a grape

chew on it.