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• Classic-Fiction

Bronte sisters,

Tolstoy, baseball, summers on the shore, arm-

wrestling, hockey, Thomas Mann, Vivaldi, Winston Churchill, Dudley

Moore, free verse,

pizza, bowling, the Olympic Games, the Three Stooges, the Marx

Brothers, Ives, Al Jolson, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Mickey

Mouse, basketball,

fathers, mothers, cousins, wives, shack jobs (although preferable

to the former),

and I don’t like the Nutcracker Suite, the Academy Awards, Hawthorne,

Melville, pumpkin pie, New Year’s Eve, Christmas, Labor Day, the

Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Good Friday, The Who,

Bacon, Dr. Spock, Blackstone and Berlioz, Franz

Liszt, pantyhose,

lice, fleas, goldfish, crabs, spiders, war

heroes, space flights, camels (I don’t trust camels) or the

Bible,

Updike, Erica Jong, Corso, bartenders, fruit flies, Jane

Fonda,

churches, weddings, birthdays, newscasts, watch

dogs, .22 rifles, Henry

Fonda

and all the women who should have loved me but

didn’t and

the first day of Spring and the

last

and the first line of this poem

and this one

that you’re reading

now.

from an old dog in his cups…

ah, my friend, it’s awful, worse

than that—you just get

going good—

one bottle down and

gone—

the poems simmering in your

head

but

halfway between 60 and

70

you pause

before opening the

second bottle—

sometimes

don’t

for after 50 years of

heavy drinking

you might assume

that extra bottle

will set you

babbling in some

rest home

or tender you

a stroke

alone in your

place

the cats chewing at

your flesh

as the morning fog

enters the broken

screen.

one doesn’t even think of

the liver

and if the liver

doesn’t think of

us, that’s

fine.

but it does seem

the more we drink

the better the words

go.

death doesn’t matter

but the ultimate inconvenience

of near-death is worse than

galling.

I’ll finish the night off

with

beer.

let ’em go

let’s let the bombs go

I’m tired of waiting

I’ve put away my toys

folded the road maps

canceled my subscription to Time

kissed Disneyland goodbye

I’ve taken the flea collars off my cats

unplugged the tv

I no longer dream of pink flamingoes

I no longer check the market index

let’s let ’em go

let’s let ’em blow

I’m tired of waiting

I don’t like this kind of blackmail

I don’t like governments playing cutesy with my life:

either crap or get off the pot

I’m tired of waiting

I’m tired of dangling

I’m tired of the fix

let the bombs blow

you cheap sniveling cowardly nations

you mindless giants

do it

do it

do it!

and escape to your planets and space stations

then you can fuck it

up there too.

trying to make it

new jock in from Arizona

doesn’t know this town

but his agent did get him a mount

in the first race

last Saturday

and the jock took the freeway

in

on the same day as

the U.S.C. vs. U.C.L.A. football

game

and got caught

in one of the two special lanes

which took him to the Rose Bowl

instead of the race

track.

he was forced to drive all the way

to the football game

parking lot

before he could turn

around.

by the time he got to the track

the first race

was over.

another jock had won with his

mount.

today out there

I noticed on the program that the

new jock from Arizona

had a good mount in the

6th.

then the horse became a late

scratch.

sometimes getting started

in the big time

is tantamount to

trying to raise an erection

in a tornado

and even if you do

nobody has the time

to notice.

the death of a splendid neighborhood

there was a place off Western Ave.

where you went up a stairway

to get head

and there was a big biker

sitting there

wearing his swastika jacket.

he was there to smell you out

if you were the

heat

and to protect the girls

if you weren’t.

it was just above the

Philadelphia Hoagie Shop

there in L.A.

where the girls came down

when things got

slow

and ate something

else.

the man who ran the

sandwich shop

hated the girls

he didn’t like to

serve them

but he was

afraid not

to.

then one day

I came by

and the biker wasn’t