"flophouse" poems
you haven't lived
until you've been in a
flophouse
with nothing but one
light bulb
and 56 men
squeezed together
on cots
with everybody
snoring
at once
and some of those
snores
so
deep and
gross and
unbelievable-
dark
snotty
gross
subhuman
wheezings
from hell
itself.
your mind
almost breaks
under those
death-like
sounds
and the
intermingling
odors:
hard
unwashed socks
****** and
*******
underwear
and over it all
slowly circulating
air
much like that
emanating from
uncovered
garbage
cans.
and those
bodies
in the dark
fat and
thin
and
bent
some
legless
armless
some
mindless
and worst of
all:
the total
absence of
hope
it shrouds
them
covers them
totally.
it's not
bearable.
you get
up
go out
walk the
streets
up and
down
sidewalks
past buildings
around the
corner
and back
up
the same
street
thinking
those men
were all
children
once
what has happened
to
them?
and what has
happened
to
me?
it's dark
and cold
out
here.
4.1k
Blandly mother
takes him strolling
by railroad and by river
--he's the son of the absconded
hot rod angel--
and he imagines cars
and rides them in his dreams,
so lonely growing up among
the imaginary automobiles
and dead souls of Tarrytown
to create
out of his own imagination
the beauty of his wild
forebears--a mythology
he cannot inherit.
Will he later hallucinate
his gods? Waking
among mysteries with
an insane gleam
of recollection?
The recognition--
something so rare
in his soul,
met only in dreams
--nostalgias
of another life.
A question of the soul.
And the injured
losing their injury
in their innocence
--a **** a cross,
an excellence of love.
And the father grieves
in flophouse
complexities of memory
a thousand miles
away, unknowing
of the unexpected
youthful stranger
bumming toward his door.
New York, April 13, 1952
3.4k
Alice and I were fudged fruiting inside Falstaffian freakish fleur–de–lys:
She inside a quack–aztec–tattooed tank,
Me inside a pendulous magenta harness with polydactyl–perverted plumes bespattered into it.
In the ****** **** of that kaput flophouse
We creosoted our conks all the cockatrices of the gorge–de–pigeon,
Inside crotches, Jacuzzis and homocentric Action Men.
Alice, with the pornographic bend sinisters in the teeth of her poltergeistish fajita crocodile,
Smacked of the plug–ugly poofter of a south–south–west by south sackful sandbank.
I cemented the jaundiced dangler of an ostrich to my prick.
With that and my uncut fiddlestick of knobs
I was the idiosyncratic and wholehogging sadomasochistic slapper!
We banged the bush streaming proboscis in tentacle
Through smorgasbords of hermaphrodites and high muck–a–mucks
While Ravi Shankar’s idioglossias and cockchafers juddered our titbits.
Our Moonies were classically cracked flabelliform by the time we disinterred them.
Alice managed to fornicate incognito white elephant on behalf of myself
And we were passionately on the back of the dingdong, naked as our Moonies.
We kept one’s pecker up wrapped up in the shadowgraph
Athwart ever-strangling girdles of formaldehyde, ozone, fomenter and widow’s weeds,
Athwart polytetrafluoroethylene–pricked precipices and then down to the butts
Where we both came to a sticky end on our jockstraps and leered at the ballet dancers
That we then penetrated rhythmically by elongating tumescent our gang banging tentacles.
Through comfortable French knickers I burped, “Thank you for ****** me everywhere, Alice”.
In the soporific honeypotspunk, aped on the ooze,
I could smell that her **** had made her ******* type soap flakes break the sound barrier,
Splashing out a ***** whale seed skirting her jowls.
“You’re fragrant, flypaper”, she rapped.
The Government gabble that little green men who hammer out the sexagenarians weren’t on board.
Inside spleen of the spliffs, inside spleen of my gangrenous Pollyanna, I will over one’s dead body evacuate.
I will over one’s dead body evacuate.
Mar 22, 2010
Mar 22, 2010 at 4:09 PM UTC
I remember you spirt in the Chelsea Flophouse
you were opening one's lips so gorgeous and so creamy
greasing me stamen on the unfucked bonk
while the bangers let it rip in the alley
Those were the diseased minds and that was Newfangled York
we were squirting for the wads and the meatballs
and that was gobbled snog for the creamers inside Gloria
centrifugally stiff is thus those of White House Nazis
Ah but you copulated telescopic didn't you basket case
you just acidified your jockstrap on the shoulders of the scrum
you copulated telescopic I never once heard you use sign language
I input you, I don't intake you
I input you, I don't intake you
and all of that balling hard on
I remember you spirt in the Chelsea Flophouse
you were gorilla—like your ****** *********** was absolute epic
you leaked me again you frocked slap—up old salt
but for me you would **** an unzipping
And shaving your tongue because the creatures lust after us
who are barked at by the Daleks of *** appeal
you Rohypnolled yourself you emitted jet so what?
we are radioactive salvo we shoot full of holes the stride piano
*** one fine morning you copulated telescopic didn't you cocker
you just blunted your extremity on the cattle
you copulated telescopic I never once smelled you emit
I intake you, I don't input you
I intake you, I don't input you
and all of that balling hard on
I don't mean to insinuate that I slobbered over you peanuts
I can't withhold *********** of each crouched ****
I remember you spirt in the Chelsea Flophouse
that's oodles I don't even kick—start you that thick and fast
Mar 29, 2010
Mar 29, 2010 at 3:36 PM UTC
Click them off like
rosary beads
with accossiated prayers.
Smudge the dreams
into the eiderdown,
And divide them down
in ironed out
layers.
Line them up and
gobble them with listless
tea.
I am your prediction!
(said in shushes,
quite benediction)
I want to drop like stingless bees.
I am Addiction to Tranquility.
How jealous I am!
Watching him fall on his ****
as I begin the solitary farce
of trying to close my
eyes.
I watch his chest slowly sink and rise.
How beautiful -
to be cut down,
like grass.
Flophouse drapes of
cigarette smoke
hang from the ceiling in
billows.
A headache clings and
holds me close as
daylight stumbles
like a ghost,
and settles her questions
on my pillows.
The tragic thing about each morning
Is that I greet each sleepy dawn
with the dry and
pinkened threat of tears.
Sleepers – do you know the
might of what you do
each ******* night?
The oblivion in half your years?
The fiction of your wild frontiers?
The obliteration and presentation
of all your garbled
Freudian fears?
Do you know the glamour in what you do?
Do you know what I’d give to be like you?
To live and somehow not be here?
To close my eyes?
To disappear?
Sep 2, 2013
Sep 2, 2013 at 9:24 AM UTC
There are stains on the walls and mattress.
The linens have more holes than a cheese grater.
Spent cigs burned into the dresser and
the light is dim.
Oh, Flophouse
you are truly great.
The Holy Bible would be ashamed.
The moans and groans fill the room with one night pleasure.
The walls are cracking and the carpet is cheap.
For a couple bucks,
there is a hour of
"What just happened?"
Feb 25, 2015
Feb 25, 2015 at 8:13 PM UTC
I had been sober for
awhile and was getting that
itch to drink.
I couldn't recall the
degradation and misery of
the last drunk a few months
earlier.
It was spring, and I was standing
outside of the flophouse, I was
staying at.
Just then, a big sunflower of
a woman walked by.
"Hi Jenny," I said.
We had a past.
Not much of one though.
It resembled a Dali painting that
had been soaking in the rain.
We ended up in a motel with a
bottle of Absinthe.
Jenny wasn't much of a drinker,
No problem, more for me.
Jenny wasn't much of a
conversationalist, and half-lit on
robust ***** neither was I.
I walked around the room talking
about Hemingway and Van Gogh,
Fitzgerald and Picasso.
Jenny wasn't interested in them.
She wanted me to score her some dope.
She said, "If you want this ***** you
will buy me an eight ball."
I didn't.
I wanted to write, but I was too drunk.
We wanted different things and neither
of us
found them that night.
And later at about 3 am when I got
up to **** I could have sworn I saw the
picture of Van Gogh on the box of Absinthe
laughing.
Mar 23, 2025
Mar 23, 2025 at 6:45 PM UTC
When I discovered ****** he was a ***
living in a flophouse hoping to make it big
as an artist. He sold postcards on the street
going from cafe to cafe making a few coin.
When I discovered Basquiat he was a ***
Living on the street hoping to make it big
as an artist. He sold postcards on the street
going from cafe to cafe making a few bills.
When I discovered Van Gogh, he was a stalker;
when I discovered Lautrec he was a pervert;
when I discovered Baudelaire, he was a ******
likewise Coleridge & de Quincey. When I
discovered Wilde He was doing hard time.
When I discovered Burroughs, he was on the
run for ****** When I discovered Hunter S.
Thompson, he was already fireworks. When
I discovered Hart Crane he had already jumped
overboard. When I discovered Walt Whitman,
he was 'Old Gray Beard'. When I discovered
Dickinson, she was alone listening to Mabel
through the wall having multiple *******
When I discovered Bret Hart, Twain had ruined
his career. I never met Edgar Allen Poe. Many
great artists were pedophiles; the smooth pure
skin of a vivacious child can be soothingly
aesthetic & physically pleasurable. Artists &
poets get ***** too, in an almost transcendental
way. The human body touches & caresses itself.
Women generally don't appreciate being grabbed,
mauled & molested unless they are as equally
passionate abut the moment. But artists & poets
are always ready to unmask their id. The human
body has no such mask. It is a fleshy meat puppet
buffeted by fate. Steak has no choice, says the cow.
Feb 7, 2019
Feb 7, 2019 at 1:49 PM UTC