The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (10 page)

 

I am fairly drunk and there is a man jumping

up and down on the floor in his shack next door

he’s rough on the floorboards and I listen to his

dance while my wife is in the can and Fidelio is on

our radio, and today at the track I lost $70 and a woman

got her foot caught in the escalator, and the drunks

hollered at the usher: REVERSE IT! THROW IT IN

REVERSE! meanwhile, the red blood and the gamblers

and

myself watching the tote for a meaningful flash and I

dumped it in

the wrong place.

now the man has stopped jumping on the floor and

has opened his bible. well, it has been a bad

summer for all of us. a particular feeling

a flailing feeling of too much. we are shocked

almost senseless with the demand to put on our

socks, we hang like paintings of blue-skinned

virgins before young boys in dementia, & it’s

too much hair on the neck and flowers dying in a

bowl. my wife comes out of the

can.

    are you all right? she

asks. yeah, I

say.

 

 

they speak of angels or she

speaks of angels

from a plateglass window overlooking the

Sunset Strip

(she has these visions)

(I don’t have these visions)

but maybe angels prefer people with

money

daughters of rich farmers who are dying of

throat cancer in Brazil.

myself—I keep seeing these

wingless creatures of mean story and dismal

intent

and she says

when I defame her

dream:

you are trying to

pull me down

by the wings.

 

 

she’s going to Europe in the summer—

Greece, Italy, most probably

Paris and she’s

taking some of her angels with

her.

not all

but some.

now there’s this half-Chinese boy who used to

sleep on fire escapes

the Negro homosexual who plays chess and

recited Shelley at the Sensualist

then there’s the one who has real talent with the

brush (Nickey) but who simply can’t get

started

somehow and

there’s also Sieberling who cries because he

loves his mother (actually).

 

 

many of these

angels

will leave town and

flow around the

Arch of Triumph

to be photographed or

to chase beetles at

9 rue Git-le-Coeur, and

it’s going to be a hot and

lonesome summer

for many of us when

the devil walks in and retakes Hollywood

once more.

 

 

schoolgirls in tight skirts and first heels

came

 

 

sparrows flew away and fat landlords parted from their

electric mirrors

 

 

skinny housewives with runny noses and dirty aprons

came

 

 

and the fire engine: polished wailing disorder spilling

intestines of water

came

 

 

firemen in helmets

firemen with axes

came

 

 

god, a tree 90 feet high

BURNING

A HOUSE BURNING RED

tolling

    lordward

the grass melting and yelling on the top of the

ground and

those smokesweet pictures of bluegray putting the

whole sky out of

place

 

 

and all the while nobody saying anything just

watching

what the flames did

like something busted out

finally and having its

say

 

 

we all came

together.

 

 

standing in the plaza I can hear speeches about a new

world—

men asking for their kind of love

while mine is a kind of pinch-eyed drag of

going on, for that which seems so important to them

seems worthless to me.

so

I go back to the hotel room

and look at the pitcher of water on the dresser

and the bits of glass hung on string

left in the window by a Mexican whore

to reflect what’s left of me

and this seems

sensible

as sensible as reading the history of the

Crimean War

as sensible as wax and women and

dogs.

I watch a fly and read the newspaper

then eat sausage and bananas

and an orange.

 

 

then I pull the shade on the speechmakers.

over the back of a chair are my

belt and necktie,

necktie knotted

for my throat

which is like a flower 80 feet high and

pumping out phrases of

bedlam.

mutilated forever at the age of

46. our dear sweet father said we’d come to

this.

 

 

he kept drawing fish

on sheets of paper

and I said,

Jack, what’s wrong?

but he wouldn’t answer

and his wife said

he won’t look for a job

that’s what’s wrong,

and I gotta stay with

the kids; I don’t know

how in the hell we’re

going to make it.

 

 

he kept drawing fish

on sheets of paper

and he wasn’t even drunk.

 

 

I went down and got 2

bottles of wine

and the old lady poured

them around.

 

 

and Jack drank his,

then cursed: this g.d.

ballpoint pen always runs

out of blood

just when I’m at the point,

the crux, just when I’m

finally burning

in the imbecile wax of fire…

he threw the pen

into a papersack full of empty bottles,

empty sardine and

bean cans, put on his coat

and walked out.

 

 

where’s he going?

I asked.

 

 

I don’t give a damn

where’s he’s going,

his old lady said.

then she pulled her dress back

and showed me a lot of leg;

it looked pretty good, I

have always been a leg man

but I walked over to the closet

and put on my coat.

 

 

where you going? she asked.

 

 

I’m going to look for a job,

I told her,

there’s an ad in the Times,

they need janitors for the

new Fleischman building.

 

 

I walked down the steps

and half a block North

to the nearest bar.

 

 

Jack was sitting there.

 

 

I don’t know, he said,

I think I’m going

to kill myself.

it doesn’t matter, I said,

it’s going to happen

anyhow.

 

 

we sat there the rest of the afternoon

drinking

and about 7 p.m. we left,

he with one with fire in her hair

and I with one with a limp

a reader of Henry James

who laughed out of the side

of her mouth.

 

 

it was 63 degrees

and not much left

of the world.

 

 

he came out for the team;

Ludwig V. Beethoven, blocking

half-back. he really knocked

them down. but he drank beer

and played the piano all night.

Schiller, you’re a freak, he

said. leave the ladies alone.

the ladies will always be the

same. don’t fret, when you

need one, she’ll be there.

 

 

and Tchaikovsky, he said,

take some vitamins. I don’t

mind that you’re a homo:

just stay away

from me. that’s the trouble

with all you guys:

you’re too

pale!

 

 

I took a lateral from G. B. Shaw

and ducked around the end;

Beethoven blocked out 3 men,

and as I went past

he said, I got a couple of

babes lined up for tonight;

don’t injure

anything

you might need

later…

I shot up the field

evading tacklers

like a madman. B. was

studying harmony, but

I doubted if he could

ever

make it. he was just

a fat

beer-drinking

German.

 

 

my snake’s red fingers

he said

and they took him off the couch

and put him on the stretcher

and carried him down

25 steps

and his woman crossed her legs

(I could almost see her beautiful crotch)

and lit a cigarette

and said

I just

can’t
kaant
see what possessed him,

and I slapped her across the face

flying the cigarette to the rug

like some Mars thing

and followed the stretcher

on down.

 

 

I’ve always lived on second and third floors or higher

all my life

but I got some woman pregnant

and since she wasn’t my wife

we moved over here—

we were in the back at first

2nd floor rear

as Mr. and Mrs.—

a new start—

and there was a madwoman in this

place and she kept the shades drawn

and hollered obscenities in the dark

(I thought she was pretty sharp)

but they took her away one day

and we moved in here and had the baby,

a beautiful skunk of a child with pale blue eyes

who made me swallow my heart like a cherry in a chilled drink,

but the woman decided I was insane too

and moved the child and herself to Hollywood

and I give them what money I can—

but most of the time I lay around all day

sweating in bed

wondering how much longer I can fool them

listening to my landlord outside

watering his lawn

46 years hanging on my bones

and big green tears cascade ha, ha,

down my face and are tabulated by my dirty pillow:

all those years shot through the head

assassinated forever

drunk senseless

hobbled and slugged in factories

poked with bad dreams

dripping away in mouse- and ghost-infested rooms

across an America without meaning,

boy o boy.

 

 

about 3 p.m. I get up

having failed to sleep but more than a few minutes

anyhow

and then I put on an old undershirt

crisp fresh torn shorts

and a pair of stolen army pants

and I pull up the shades

and sit a little back in a hard folding chair

near a window on the streetside

and then they come by,

young girls

fresh fluid divine intelligent

drinks of orange juice

rides in air-conditioned elevators,

in blue and green and yellow in motion

in red in waves

in squads and battalions of laughter

they laugh at me and for me,

old 46, at attention, pig green eyes

like a Van Gogh bursting and breaking

the trachea and tits of the earth and the sun,

my god, look, here I am

and no matter what I said to them

they would run away

I would be reported as an old goof

babbling in the marketplace for hard pennies—

they expect me to use the bathroom,

a shadow-picture for their singing flesh

and the pliers of my hand—

a good citizen jacksoff, votes, and looks at Bob Hope—

and even old maids

with husbands killed

making swivel chairs in industry

they walk by

in green in yellow in red

and they have bodies like high-school girls

they perch on their stilts and dare me to break

custom

 

 

but to have any of these would take weeks and months

of torture—introduction, niceties, conversation that

cleaves the soul like a rusty axe—

no, no, god damn it! no more!

 

 

a man who cannot adjust to society is called a

psychotic, and the boy in the Texas tower

who shot 49 and killed 15 was one,

although in the Marine Corps he got the o.k.

to go ahead—it’s all in the way you’re dressed

and if the beehive says the project

protects the Queen and Goodyear Rubber and so

forth,

but the way I see it from this window

his action was nothing extraordinary or

unexpected and psychiatrists are just paid liars

of a continuing social

disorder.

 

 

and soon I get up from the window

and move around

and if I turn on the radio

and luck on Shostakovich or Mahler

or sit down to type a letter to the president,

the voices begin all around me—

“HEY! KNOCK IT OFF!”

“YOU SON OF A BITCH! WE’LL CALL THE LAW!”

 

 

on each side of me are two high-rise apartments

things lit at night with blue and green lights

and they have swimming pools that everybody has

too much class to get into

but the rent is very high

and they sit looking at their walls

decorated with pictures of people with chopped-off

heads

and wait to go back to

WORK,

meanwhile, they sense that my sounds are not

their sounds—

66 people on each side of my head

in love with Green Berets and piranhas—

“GOD DAMN YOU, COOL IT!”

 

 

these I cannot see through my window

and for this I am glad

my stomach is in bad shape from drinking cheap wine,

and so for them

I become quiet

I listen to their sounds—

their baseball games, their comedies, their quiz shows,

their dry kisses, their kindling safety,

their hard bodies stuffed into the walls and murdered,

and I go to the table

take my madman’s crayons

and begin drawing them on my walls

all of them—

loving, fucking, eating, shitting,

frightened of Christ, frightened of poverty,

frightened of life

they crawl my walls like roaches

and I draw suns between them

and axes and guns and towers and babies

and dogs, cats, animals, and it becomes

difficult to distinguish the animal from the

other, and my whole body sweats, stinks,

as I tremble like a liar from the truth of things,

and then I drink some water, take off my clothing and

go to bed

where I will not sleep

first pulling down all the shades

and then waiting for 3 p.m.

my girls my ladies my way

with nothing going through and nothing coming in and

nothing going out, Cathedrals and Art Museums and

mountains wasted, only the salt of myself, some ants,

old newspapers, my shame, my shame

at not having

killed

(razor, carcrash, turpentine, gaspipe)

(good job, marriage, investments in the market)

what is left of

myself.