The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (2 page)

 

I shot off his left ear

then his right,

and then tore off his belt buckle

with hot lead,

and then

I shot off everything that counts

and when he bent over

to pick up his drawers

and his marbles

(poor critter)

I fixed it so he wouldn’t have

to straighten up

no more.

 

 

Ho Hum.

I went in for a fast snort

and one guy
seemed

to be looking at me sideways,

and that’s how he died—

sideways,

lookin’ at me

and clutchin’

for his marbles.

 

 

Sight o’ blood made me kinda

hungry.

Had a ham sandwich.

Played a couple of sentimental songs…

Shot out all the lights

and strolled outside.

Didn’t seem to be no one around

so I shot my horse

(poor critter).

 

 

Then I saw the Sheerf

a standin’ at the end a’ the road

and he was shakin’

like he had the Saint Vitus dance;

it was a real sorrowful sight

so I slowed him to a quiver

with the first slug

and mercifully stiffened him

with the second.

 

 

Then I laid on my back awhile

and I shot out the stars one by one

and then

I shot out the moon

and then I walked around

and shot out every light

in town,

and pretty soon it began to get dark

real dark

the way I like it;

just can’t stand to sleep

with no light shinin’

on my face.

 

 

I laid down and dreamt

I was a little boy again

a playin’ with my toy six-shooter

and winnin’ all the marble games,

and when I woke up

my guns was gone

and I was all bound hand and foot

just like somebody

was scared a me

and they was slippin’

a noose around my ugly neck

just as if they

meant to hang me,

and some guy was pinnin’

a real pretty sign

on my shirt:

there’s a law for you

and a law for me

and a law that hangs

from the foot of a tree.

 

 

Well, pretty poetry always did

make my eyes water

and can you believe it

all the women was cryin’

and though they was moanin’

other men’s names

I just know they was cryin’

for me (poor critters)

and though I’d slept with all a them,

I’d forgotten

in all the big excitement

to tell ’em my name

 

 

and all the men looked angry

but I guess it was because the kids

was all being impolite

and a throwin’ tin cans at me,

but I told ’em not to worry

because their aim was bad anyhow

not a boy there looked like he’d turn

into a man—

90% homosexuals, the lot of them,

and some guy shouted

“let’s send him to hell!”

and with a jerk I was dancin’

my last dance,

but I swung out wide

and spit in the bartender’s eye

and stared down

into Nellie Adam’s breasts,

and my mouth watered again.

 

 

She lays like a lump

I can feel the great empty mountain

of her head.

But she is alive. She yawns and

scratches her nose and

pulls up the cover.

Soon I will kiss her goodnight

and we will sleep.

and far away is Scotland

and under the ground the

gophers run.

I hear engines in the night

and through the sky a white

hand whirls:

good night, dear, goodnight.

 

 

he drank wine all night the night of the

28th. and he kept thinking of her:

the way she walked and talked and loved

the way she told him things that seemed true

but were not, and he knew the color of each

of her dresses

and her shoes—he knew the stock and curve of

each heel

as well as the leg shaped by it.

 

 

and she was out again when he came home, and

she’d come back with the special stink again,

and she did

she came in at 3 a.m. in the morning

filthy like a dung-eating swine

and

he took out the butcher knife

and she screamed

backing into the roominghouse wall

still pretty somehow

in spite of love’s reek

and he finished the glass of wine.

 

 

that yellow dress

his favorite

and she screamed again.

 

 

and he took up the knife

and unhooked his belt

and tore away the cloth before her

and cut off his balls.

and carried them in his hands

like apricots

and flushed them down the

toilet bowl

and she kept screaming

as the room became red

 

 

GOD O GOD!

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

 

 

and he sat there holding 3 towels

between his legs

not caring now whether she left or

stayed

wore yellow or green or

anything at all.

 

 

and one hand holding and one hand

lifting he poured

another wine.

 

 

To give life you must take life,

and as our grief falls flat and hollow

upon the billion-blooded sea

I pass upon serious inward-breaking shoals rimmed

with white-legged, white-bellied rotting creatures

lengthily dead and rioting against surrounding scenes.

Dear child, I only did to you what the sparrow

did to you; I am old when it is fashionable to be

young; I cry when it is fashionable to laugh.

I hated you when it would have taken less courage

to love.

 

 

There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks,

and outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like

insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev,

says the radio, and Jane Austen, Jane Austen, too.

 

 

“I am going to do her portrait on the 28th, while you are

at work.”

 

 

He is just this edge of fat and he walks constantly, he

fritters; they have him; they are eating him hollow like

a webbed fly, and his eyes are red-suckled with anger-fear.

 

 

He feels the hatred and discard of the world, sharper than

his razor, and his gut-feel hangs like a wet polyp; and he

self-decisions himself defeated trying to shake his

hung beard from razor in water (like life), not warm enough.

 

 

Daumier. Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril, 1843. (Lithograph.)

Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale.

 

 

“She has a face unlike that of any woman I have ever known.”

 

 

“What is it? A love affair?”

 

 

“Silly. I can’t love a woman. Besides, she’s pregnant.”

 

 

I can paint—a flower eaten by a snake; that sunlight is a

lie; and that markets smell of shoes and naked boys clothed,

and under everything some river, some beat, some twist that

clambers along the edge of my temple and bites nip-dizzy…

men drive cars and paint their houses,

but they are mad; men sit in barber chairs; buy hats.

 

 

Corot. Recollection of Mortefontaine.

Paris, Louvre.

 

 

“I must write Kaiser, though I think he’s a homosexual.”

 

 

“Are you still reading Freud?”

 

 

“Page 299.”

 

 

She made a little hat and he fastened two snaps under one

arm, reaching up from the bed like a long feeler from the

snail, and she went to church, and he thought now I h’ve

time and the dog.

 

 

About church: the trouble with a mask is it

never changes.

 

 

So rude the flowers that grow and do not grow beautiful.

So magic the chair on the patio that does not hold legs

and belly and arm and neck and mouth that bites into the

wind like the end of a tunnel.

 

 

He turned in bed and thought: I am searching for some

segment in the air. It floats about the people’s heads.

When it rains on the trees it sits between the branches

warmer and more blood-real than the dove.

 

 

Orozco. Christ Destroying the Cross.

Hanover, Dartmouth College, Baker Library.

 

 

He burned away in sleep.

 

 

they came down thru the marching,

down thru St. Paul, St. Louis, Atlanta,

Memphis, New Orleans, they came

down thru the marching, thru

balloons and popcorn, past drugstores

and blondes and whirling cats,

they came down thru the marching

scaring the goats and the kids in

the fields, banging against the minds

of the sick in their hot beds, and

down in the cellar I got out the

colt. I ripped a hole in the screen

for better vision and when the legs

came walking by on top of my head,

I got a colonel, a major and 3 lieutenants

before the band stopped playing;

and now it’s like a war, uniforms

everywhere, behind cars and brush,

and plang plang plang

my cellar is all fireworks, and I

fire back, the colt as hot as a

baked potato, I fire back and sing

sing, “Mine eyes have seen the glory

of the coming of the Lord; He is

tramping out the vintage…”