Another typing exercise for me, and some words for you all. From what I can tell, this was published only in renaissance 3 Vol. 1, No. 3, 1962: It's a good one, indeed.
information upon an empire of coins
the legs are gone and the hopes -- the lava of outpouring,
and I haven't shaved in sixteen days
but the mailman still makes his rounds and
water still comes out of the faucet and I have a photo of
myself with glazed and milky eyes full of simple music
in golden trunks and 20 oz. gloves when I made the semi-finals
only to be taken out by a German brute who should have been
locked in a cage for the insane and allowed to drink blood.
Now I am insane and stare at the wallpaper as one would stare
at a Dali or an early Picasso (he has lost it), and I send out
the girls for beer, the old girls who barely bother to wipe
their asses and say, well, I guess I won't comb my hair today;
it might bring me luck. well, anyway, they wash the dishes and
chop the wood, and the landlady keeps saying let me in, I can't
get in, you've got the lock on, and what's all that singing and
cussing in there? but she only wants a piece of ass, she pretends
she wants the rent
but she's not gonna get either one of 'em.
meanwhile the skulls of the dead are full of beetles and Shakes-
peare rants and old footbal scores like S.C. 16, N.D. 14 on a John
Baker field goal.
I can see the fleet from my window, the sails and the guns, always
the guns poking their eyes in the sky looking for trouble like young
L.A. cops who haven't even shaved yet, and the young sailors out
there, sex-hungry trying to act tough, trying to act like men
but really closer to their mother's nipples than to a true evalu-
ation of existence. I said, god damn it, that
the legs are gone and the outpourings too. beneath my brain
they snip and snap and
pour oil
to burn and fire out early dreams
darling, says one of the girls, you've got to snap out of it,
we're running out of MONEY. How do you want
your toast?
white or dark?
a woman's a woman, I say, and I put my binolulars between her
kneecaps and I can see where
empires have fallen
I wish I had a brush, some paint, some paint and a brush, I say.
why? asks one of the
whores.
BECAUSE RATS DON'T LIKE OIL! I scream.
(I can't go it. I don't belong here. I listen to radio programs
and people's voices talking and I marvel that they can get excited
and interested over nothing) and I flick out the lights, I
tear the shades down and I light my last cigar
the dreamjump down the Empire State Building
into the thickheaded bullbrained mob with the hard-on attitude
already forgotton the dead of Normandy, Lincoln's stringy beard,
all the bulls that have died to flashing red capes,
all the love that has died in real women and real men
while fools have been elevated to the trumpet's succulent sneer
and I have fought red-handed and drunk
in slop-pitted alleys
the bartenders of this rotten land.
and I laugh, I can still laugh, who can't laugh when the whole thing
is so ridiculous
that only the insane, the clowns, the half-wits,
the cheaters, the whores, the horseplayers, the bankrobbers, the
poets...are interesting?
in the dark I hear the hands reaching for the last of my money
like roaches nibbling at paper, automatic, feelers of inbred
helpnessless, a false drunken God asleep at the wheel...
a quarter rolls across the floor, and I remember all the faces and
the football heroes, and everything is meaning, and an editor
writes me, you are good
but
you are too emotional
the way to whip life is to quietly frame the agony,
study it and put it away to sleep in abstracts.
is there anything less abstract
than dying everyday and
on the last day?
the door closes and the last of the great whores are gone
and they are all great, somehow no matter how they have
killed me, they are great, and I smoke quietly
thinking of Mexico, the rotten horses, of Havana and Spain
and Normandy, of the jabbering insane Japs winning whether
they lived or died, of my dead friends, of no more friends
ever; and the voice of my Mexican buddy saying, you won't die
you won't die in the war, you're too smart, you'll take care
of yourself.
I keep thinking of the bulls. the rotten bulls, dying everyday.
the whores are gone. the shells have stopped for a moment.
fuck everybody.
