I have just spent one-hour-and-a-half
handicapping tomorrow's
card.
when am I going to get at the poems?
well, they'll just have to wait
they'll have to warm their feet in the
anteroom
where they'll sit gossiping about
me.
"this Chinaski, doesn't he realize that
without us he would have long ago
gone mad, been dead?"
"he knows, but he thinks he can keep
us at his beck and call!"
"he's an ingrate!"
"let's give him writer's block!"
"yeah!"
"yeah!"
"yeah!"
the little poems kick up their heels
and laugh.
then the biggest one gets up and
walks toward the door.
"hey, where are you going?" he is
asked.
"somewhere where I am
appreciated."
then, he
and the others
vanish.
I open a beer, sit down at the
machine and nothing
happens.
like now.
from the 1997 Black Sparrow New Year's greeting, "A New War"

the other day we were in a
bookstore in the mall
and my woman said, "look, there's
Bob!"

"I don't know him," I said.

"we had dinner with him
not too long ago," she said.

"all right," I said, "let's get
out of here."

Bob was a clerk in the store
and his back was to us.

my woman yelled, "hello, Bob!"

Bob turned and smiled, waved.
my woman waved back.
I nodded at Bob, a very
delicate blushing fellow.
(Bob, that is.)

outside my woman asked, "don't you remember him?"

"no."

"he came over with Ella. re- member Ella?"

"no."

my woman remembers everything.

I don't understand it, although
I suppose it's polite
to remember names and faces
I just can't do it
I don't want to carry all those
Bobs and Ellas and Jacks and Marions
and Darlenes around in my mind. eating and
drinking with them is difficult en- ough.
to attempt to recall them at will
is an affront to my well-
being.

that they remember me is
bad enough.

here comes the fishhead singing
here comes the baked potato in drag
here comes nothing to do all day long
here comes another night of no sleep
here comes the phone wringing the wrong tone
here comes a termite with a banjo
here comes a flagpole with blank eyes
here comes a a cat and a dog wearing nylons
here comes a machine gun saying
here comes bacon burning in the pan
here comes a voice saying something dull
here comes a newspaper stuffed with small red birds
with flat brown beaks
here comes a **** carrying a torch
a grenade
a deathly love
here comes a victory carrying
one bucket of blood
and stumbling over the berry bush
and the sheets hang out the windows
and the bombers head east west north south
get lost
get tossed like salad
as all the fish in the sea line up and form
one line
one long line
one very long thin line
the longest line you could ever imagine
and we get lost
walking past purple mountains
we walk lost
bare at last like the knife
having given
having spit it out like an unexpected olive seed
as the girl at the call service
screams over the phone:
"don't call back! you sound like a ****!"

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 Austin, Jane Austin, 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 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 Transonian, 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 that 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 ned of a tunnel.
He turned in bed and thought: I am searching for some
segment in the air. It floats about the peoples 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 his sleep.

I'll settle for the 6 horse
on a rainy afternoon
a paper cup of coffee
in my hand
a little way to go,
the wind twirling out
small wrens from
the upper grandstand roof,
the jocks coming out
for a middle race
silent
and the easy rain making
everything
at once
almost alike,
the horses at peace with
each other
before the drunken war
and I am under the grandstand
feeling for
cigarettes
settling for coffee,
then the horses walk by
taking their little men
away-
it is funeral and graceful
and glad
like the opening
of flowers.

drunk on the dark streets of some city,
it's night, you're lost, where's your
room?
you enter a bar to find yourself,
order scotch and water.
****** bar's sloppy wet, it soaks
part of one of your shirt
sleeves.
It's a clip joint-the scotch is weak.
you order a bottle of beer.
Madame Death walks up to you
wearing a dress.
she sits down, you buy her a
beer, she stinks of swamps, presses
a leg against you.
the bar tender sneers.
you've got him worried, he doesn't
know if you're a cop, a killer, a
madman or an
Idiot.
you ask for a *****.
you pour the ***** into the top of
the beer bottle.
It's one a.m. In a dead cow world.
you ask her how much for head,
drink everything down, it tastes
like machine oil.

you leave Madame Death there,
you leave the sneering bartender
there.

you have remembered where
your room is.
the room with the full bottle of
wine on the dresser.
the room with the dance of the
roaches.
Perfection in the Star ****
where love died
laughing.

lonely as a dry and used orchard
spread over the earth
for use and surrender.

shot down like an ex-pug selling
dailies on the corner.

taken by tears like
an aging chorus girl
who has gotten her last check.

a hanky is in order your lord your
worship.

the blackbirds are rough today
like
ingrown toenails
in an overnight
jail---
wine wine whine,
the blackbirds run around and
fly around
harping about
Spanish melodies and bones.

and everywhere is
nowhere---
the dream is as bad as
flapjacks and flat tires:

why do we go on
with our minds and
pockets full of
dust
like a bad boy just out of
school---
you tell
me,
you who were a hero in some
revolution
you who teach children
you who drink with calmness
you who own large homes
and walk in gardens
you who have killed a man and own a
beautiful wife
you tell me
why I am on fire like old dry
garbage.

we might surely have some interesting
correspondence.
it will keep the mailman busy.
and the butterflies and ants and bridges and
cemeteries
the rocket-makers and dogs and garage mechanics
will still go on a
while
until we run out of stamps
and/or
ideas.

don't be ashamed of
anything; I guess God meant it all
like
locks on
doors.

some want it, I don't want it, I
want to do whatever it is I do
and just do it.
I don't want to look into the
adulating eye,
shake the sweating
palm.
I think that whatever I do
is my business.
I do it because if I don't
I'm finished.
I'm selfish:
I do it for myself
to save what is left of
myself.
and when I am
approached as
hero or
half-god or
guru
I refuse to accept
that.
I don't want their
congratulations,
their worship,
their companionship.

I may have half-a-
million readers,
a million,
two million.
I don't care.
I write the word
how I have to
write it.

and, in the
beginning,
when there were no
readers
I wrote the word
as I needed to write the
word
and if all
the half-million,
the million,
the two million,
disappear
I will continue to
write the
word
as I always have.

the reader is an
afterthought,
the placenta,
an accident,
and any writer who
believes otherwise
is a bigger fool than
his
following.

here I am
             in the ground
                            my mouth
                            open
                       and
            I can't even say
                       mama,
                          and
the dogs run by and stop and ****
on my stone; I get it all
except the sun
and my suit is looking
                                   bad
and yesterday
                        the last of my left
                                              arm           gone
very little left, all harp-like
without music.

at least a drunk
in bed with a cigarette
might cause 5 fire
                             engines and
                             33 men.

I can't
           do
                any
                       thing.

but p.s. -- Hector Richmond in the next
tomb thinks only of Mozart and candy
caterpillars.
           he is
                 very bad
                            company.

I sit here on the 2nd floor
hunched over in yellow
pajamas
still pretending to be
a writer.
some ****** gall,
at 71,
my brain cells eaten
away by
life.
rows of books
behind me,
I scratch my thinning
hair
and search for the
word.
for decades now
I have infuriated the
ladies,
the critics,
the university
****-toads.
they all will soon have
their time to
celebrate.
"terribly overrated..."
"gross..."
"an aberration..."
my hands sink into the
keyboard
of my
Macintosh,
it's the same old
con
that scraped me
off the streets and
park benches,
the same simple
line
I learned in those
cheap rooms,
I can't let
go,
sitting here
on this 2nd floor
hunched over in yellow
pajamas
still pretending to be
a writer.
the gods smile down,
the gods smile down,
the gods smile down.
Black Sparrow "New Year's Greeting" 1992