I stopped at the grocery and got a couple of
6 packs for Marie.
I began feeling so good that an hour later
I sat in the kitchen and opened
one of the beers.
I drank that and then another one
and then I went in and
killed the spider.
when Marie got home from work
I gave her a big kiss,
then sat in the kitchen and talked
as she cooked dinner.
she asked me what had happened that day
and I told her I had killed the
spider. she didn’t get
angry. she was a good
sort.
the end of a short affair
I tried it standing up
this time.
it doesn’t usually
work.
this time it seemed
to…
she kept saying
“o my God, you’ve got
beautiful legs!”
it was all right
until she took her feet
off the ground
and wrapped her legs
around my middle.
“o my God, you’ve got
beautiful legs!”
she weighed about 138
pounds and hung there as I
worked.
it was when I climaxed
that I felt the pain
fly straight up my
spine.
I dropped her on the
couch and walked around
the room.
the pain remained.
“look,” I told her,
“you better go. I’ve got
to develop some film
in my dark room.”
she dressed and left
and I walked into the
kitchen for a glass of
water. I got a glass full
in my left hand.
the pain ran up behind my
ears and
I dropped the glass
which broke on the floor.
I got into a tub full of
hot water and epsom salts.
I just got stretched out
when the phone rang.
as I tried to straighten
my back
the pain extended to my
neck and arms.
I flopped about
gripped the sides of the tub
got out
with shots of green and yellow
and red light
flashing in my head.
the phone kept ringing.
I picked it up.
“hello?”
“I LOVE YOU!” she said.
“thanks,” I said.
“is that all you’ve got
to say?”
“yes.”
“eat shit!” she said and
hung up.
love dries up, I thought
as I walked back to the
bathroom, even faster
than sperm.
moaning and groaning
she writes: you’ll
be moaning and groaning
in your poems
about how I fucked
those 2 guys last week.
I know you.
she writes on to
say that my vibe
machine was right—
she had just fucked
a third guy
but she knows I don’t
want to hear who, why
or how. she closes her
letter, “Love.”
rats and roaches
have triumphed again.
here it comes running
with a slug in its
mouth, it’s singing
old love songs.
close the windows
moan
close the doors
groan.
an almost made up poem
I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’s all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’m not jealous
because we’ve never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame—not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them that, and then awakens
in the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ve told
us, but listening to you I wasn’t sure. maybe
it was the upper case. you were one of the
best female poets and I told the publishers,
editors, “print her, print her, she’s mad but she’s
magic. there’s no lie in her fire.” I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’t happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn’t help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this.
blue cheese and chili peppers
these women are supposed to come
and see me
but they never
do.
there’s the one with the long scar along her
belly.
there’s the other who writes poems
and phones at 3 a.m., saying,
“I love you.”
there’s the one who dances with a
boa constrictor
and writes every four
weeks, she’ll
come, she says.
and the 4th who claims she sleeps
always
with my latest book
under her
pillow.
I whack-off in the heat
and listen to Brahms and eat
blue cheese with chili
peppers.
these are women of good mind and
body, excellent in or out of bed,
dangerous and deadly, of
course—
but why do they all have to live
up north?
I know that someday they’ll
arrive, but two or three
on the same day, and
we’ll sit around and talk
and then they’ll all leave
together.
somebody else will have them
and I will walk about
in my floppy shorts
smoking too many cigarettes
and trying to make drama
out of
no damned progress
at all.
problems about the other woman
I had worked my charms on her
for a couple of nights in a bar—
not that we we
re new lovers,
I had loved her for 16 months
but she didn’t want to come to my place
“because that other woman has been there,”
and I said, “all right, all right, what will we do?”
she had come in from the north and was looking for a
place to stay
meanwhile rooming with her girlfriend,
and she went to her rent-a-trailer
and got out some blankets and said,
“let’s go to the park.”
I told her she was crazy
the cops would get us
but she said, “no, it’s nice and foggy,”
so we went to the park
spread out the equipment and began
working and here came headlights—
a squad car—
she said, “hurry, get your pants on! I’ve got mine
on!”
I said, “I can’t. they’re all twisted-up.”
and they came with flashlights
and asked what we were doing and she said,
“kissing!” one of the cops looked at me and
said, “I don’t blame you,” and after some small
talk they left us alone.
but she still didn’t want the bed where that woman
had been,
so we ended up in a dark hot motel room
sweating and kissing and working
but we made it all right; but I mean,
after all that suffering…
we were at my place finally
that next afternoon
doing the same thing.
those weren’t bad cops though
that night in the park—
and it’s the first time I ever said that
about cops,
and,
I hope,
the last time I ever have
to.
T.M.
she lived in Galveston and was into
T.M.
and I went down to visit her and we made love
continually even though it was very warm
weather
and we took mescalin
and we took the ferry to the island
and drove 200 miles to the nearest
racetrack.
we both won and sat in a redneck bar—
disliked and distrusted by the natives—
and then we went to a redneck motel
and came back a day or two later
and I stayed another week
painted her a couple of good paintings—
one of a man being hanged
and another of a woman being fucked by a wolf.
I awakened one night and she wasn’t in bed
and I got up and walked around saying,
“Gloria, Gloria, where are you?”
it was a large place and I walked around
opening door after door,
and then I opened what looked like a closet door
and there she was on her knees
surrounded by photographs of
7 or 8 men
heads shaved
most of them wearing rimless spectacles.
there was a small candle burning
and I said, “oh, I’m sorry.”
Gloria was dressed in a kimono with flying
eagles on the back of it.
I closed the door and went back to bed.
she came out in 15 minutes.
we began kissing,
her large tongue sliding in and out of my
mouth.
she was a large healthy Texas girl.
“listen, Gloria,” I finally managed to say,
“I need a night off.”
the next day she drove me to the airport.
I promised to write. she promised to write.
neither of us has written.
Bee’s 5th
I heard it first while screwing a blonde
who had the biggest box in
Scranton.
I listened to it again as I wrote a letter
to my mother
asking for 5,000 dollars
and she mailed back
3 bottletops and
the stems of grandpop’s
forefingers.
The 5th will kill you
in the grass or at the track,
the kitten said,
walking across the popinjay
rug.
if the 5th don’t kill you
the tenth will,
said the Caliente hooker.
as they ran up the
beautiful catsup red flag
93 thieves wept in the
purple dust.
the 5th is like an
ant in a breakfastnook full of
swaggersticks and
june bugs
sucking
dawn’s orange juice coming.
and I took the 3 bottletops from my
mother and
ate them
wrapped in pages from
Cosmopolitan
magazine.
but I am tired of the
5th
and I told this to a woman in
Ohio once. I
had just packed coal up 3 flights
of stairs
I was drunk and
dizzy, and she said:
how can you say you don’t care
for something greater than you’ll
ever be?
and I said:
that’s easy.
and she sat in a green chair and
I sat in a red chair
and after that
we never made love
again.
103 degrees
she cut my toenails the night before,
and in the morning she said, “I think I’ll
just lay here all day.”
which meant she wasn’t going to work.
she was at my apartment—which meant another
day and another night.
she was a good person
but she had just told me that she wanted to
have a child, wanted marriage, and
it was 103 degrees outside.
when I thought of another child and
another marriage
I really began to feel bad.
I had resigned myself to dying alone
in a small room—
now she was trying to reshape my master plan.
besides she always slammed my car door too loud
and ate with her head too close to the table.
this day we had gone to the post office, a department
store and then to a sandwich place for lunch.
I already felt married. driving back in I almost
ran into a Cadillac.
“let’s get drunk,” I said.
“no, no,” she answered, “it’s too early.”
and then she slammed the car door.
it was still 103 degrees.
when I opened my mail I found my auto insurance
company wanted $76 more.
suddenly she ran into the room and screamed, “LOOK, I’M
TURNING RED! ALL BLOTCHY! WHAT’LL I DO!”
“take a bath,” I told her.
I dialed the insurance company long distance and
demanded to know why.
she began screaming and moaning from the
bathtub and I couldn’t hear and I said, “just a
moment, please!”
I covered the phone and screamed at her in the bathtub:
“LOOK! I’M ON LONG DISTANCE! HOLD IT DOWN, FOR CHRIST’S
SAKE!”
the insurance people still maintained that I owed them
$76 and would send me a letter explaining why.
I hung up and stretched out on the bed.
I was already married, I felt married.
she came out of the bathroom and said, “can I
stretch out
beside you?”
and I said, “o.k.”
in ten minutes her color was normal.
It was because she had taken a niacin tablet.
she remembered that it happened every time.
we stretched out there sweating:
nerves. nobody has soul enough to overcome nerves.
but I couldn’t tell her that.
she wanted her baby.
what the fuck.
pacific telephone
you go for these wenches, she said,
you go for these whores,
I’ll bore you.
I don’t want to be shit on anymore,
I said,
relax.
when I drink, she said, it hurts my
bladder, it burns.
I’ll do the drinking, I said.
you’re waiting for the phone to ring,
she said,
you keep looking at the phone.
if one of those wenches phones you’ll
run right out of here.
I can’t promise you anything, I said.
then—just like that—the phone rang.
this is Madge, said the phone. I’ve
got to see you right away.
oh, I said.
I’m in a jam, she continued, I need ten
bucks—fast.
I’ll be right over, I said, and
hung up.
she looked at me. it was a wench,
she said, your whole face lit up.