It was disturbing enough to wake me in total darkness And I chose then in my kind of horror to go to the bathroom to *** Shaking my head Troubled In the wee hours Not again Why does this always happen to me?! Not only is he a ghost He’s a very old ghost So what am I supposed to do with that?
She was dead serious This voice in my head if you will Earnest ‘But you don’t understand’ she explains And I wonder where this is going? ‘He’s in love with you’
Okay? Now what?
There’s a list somewhere that I compiled years ago Of questions that never had the chance to be posed Although approved officially by Robert and perhaps by Bob as well I was going to revise it to make them even more Impressive Robert said that I was a genius but to stop showing off Questions concerning Jack, Mass media, The World War in which they never fought not for one second. I think now that I would like to have added Something regarding middle class conventions and their subsequent however reluctant disappointments And what it must have been like to aspire to them In the 40s When instead there was Times Square and The Village ****** and Bop Errant ****** activities And the San Remo Huncke suicided by misbegotten sidewalks And hapless blue precincts waiting
Robert mentioned a brief car ride taken in some Confederate State Maybe he was in the backseat and a joint was passed to him He who doesn’t indulge if you will Although pulmonary carcinoma would claim him in no time at all It was his finest moment Sandwiched gleeful between these two Literary Giants The radio not working Now they are all dead And I would like to think That they are together again encased in squeaky automotive Upholstery Somewhere unearthly
Laying in bed before sleep comes in the new year KNX newsradio read the press release Issued It was cancer It was terminal There would be nothing further and I said nothing the following morning Staring at a wall of books and climbing along on a rolling wooden step ladder This isn’t even my department The people coming through the door were grim and silent having bought their plane ticket to NY To sit by his bedside While he lay in coma With Bessie Smith records play softly nearby and atmospheric This was not a time for personal aspirations Nor nursing the loss of a regretfully jettisoned exchange And although I had been warned previously About a certain someone being prickly and possibly ****** and very short-tempered and I had wondered heretofore how it would all go down On the telephone The two of us had shared a brief ‘What is he looking at?’ moment That time here in LA He staring at me from a bit of a distance on the court And me in my chair with yet another cigarette, turning my head around to look behind me to see again nothing (God knows how many times) Until I An idiot Realized that it was me that was The subject of his eye And I thought again As I had done in the morning mirror My god My hair looks terrible
That list whereever it is Perhaps in that laptop That leans against my bedroom wall Dead on the floor over there to my left The one that I always pass On my way to the john The one that I stumble by in the dark, THAT list that exists still in my brain, THAT I still tinker with, THAT list exists I would like to think in both; a list of questions that will always have no answers. To Allen Who loves me.