Chapter 2
The noon hour whistle Vibrates the walls Of the hollow heavens To the cab; the thermos-well Of soup, sitting on your lap, you cannot see, but You feel its stillness Stagnating and absorbing The contaminating minerals Of the tin, walling in the contents; And still you want to turn on the ignition To finish out one more complete day In the twenty-three years here Of hard work. The quandary then snaps, and you escape. When out of the valley you enter the truck And close the door-- The second time harder, and it latches. You turn the key And the truck bounces to the highway. You stop at the sign; Stop the motor while Still on the dirt road; But in the end turn left, again, Home.
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Maddog (Or Death to the Barbie-Dame Image)
You said that it happened--that day you ran away From a self you buried underneath the ice-packed snow,
All those cold years ago--when your last friend, then Had put an end to the Gabriele whom I've never known. This Friend, like yourself a Barbie Dame, became totally lame and Withdrew out the door when you needed more hands to keep Your epileptic roommate From smashing her head on the floor.
Gabriele, held together by the stitching of hate-- The plastic-eyed polar bear with the stiff arms That the factory of the human race mutantly created-- This time it will be you who shall feel the wall of artificial Fur ripped from its threads, and your stuffing falling out. For a little maddog on top of four joints Makes a person see the unsealed human fragments That had been smoothed over in time Like a million and some bone fractures The milk of approval had swum into and covered over for looks.
For me fragmenting came yesterday when I saw a welcome mat Iced over and yet I entered: Your house was hot and your oven smelled of baking meatloaf Although you had said that you could not be domesticated. And then I saw your bottle of wine Standing at attention before two glasses. The pledge that bowing to anything or anyone was wrong...that people Were only needed to gain the most bare Of physiological and psychological needs (pitstops to being human)--this was gone. Gone with your hair brushed and your skin smelling of perfume For some other man than me.
Come on Gabriele, the gal that used to chew tobacco and Spit it into an empty beer can... The gal with the deep dark-ocean eyes... The maddog gal, grip that wine glass now. For Gabriele, you smile at everyone with meaning You are as together as a feather when a hurricane is in town, And when the hangover's over and your own insight has Fragmented you from a million pieces to a billion, My stiff polar bear arms Shall poke and not embrace.
I sit back at this party I am hosting-- My back firmly pushing against the back of my chair, And my head and eyes cocked. You all are the performers this time... And Gabriele, you are the main attraction, Attracted, after this night, to the omni-present sense of your Smashed self; and me-- Sensitive little me in no man's land Where no man wanted to grasp me from... And no woman-- Mended back together in thy survivalistic polar bear image.
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Becky's Demon
"Something happened. i don't have those visions anymore." And you believe with a mind like Papa believed with When i told him i could see things Clearly before they actually Were.
His back and forth pacing from those same two windows-- Which had been like a toy soldier powered on a human battery With a three minute's stand at one, and then the next,
Suddenly stopped. For i was different. You anointed me And cast me out. i was alone. You caused me to hide Beside a pitchfork in the shadows of the corners of the barn. Yes. Papa stopped. His eyes moved. i'd never seen his eyes move Before. They stared down at me. My child's eyes Below--and he aimed his for them as a fisher for prey in clear waters. i backed up behind the pipe of the kitchen stove.. But with one stretch he reached his arm over Like a bear's paw that in force comes down like a Redwood.
my knee aching as if broken, i crutched up From the other side of the room, beside the door.... Then, bending on my knees the next conscious second-- Feeling the blood of knee caps sticking to hay and dirt-- Seeing the sun poke like sticks through rafters and cobwebs-- Thinking i grabbed a hold on the sunlight which could Lift me Up like a rope; but grasping the pitchfork-- Raising the pitchfork-- Pitching the pitchfork-- After hearing the creaking and scraping of the opening barn door Plowing The top soil of the dry earth. Thinking: he would never kill my shadowy corner.
II And in this plush chair of the Bishop's office i sit a decade And a half later--a Salem witch of the west explaining her Dull, trembling self before three Mormon men bending above me. But you don't understand me, as if anyone ever has. i had psychic abilities. But you don't want them, so they're Gone; And i'm good. i no longer believe, Bish'y, that I saw Benson Dying And Yourself rising above the Twelve. But You're still scared of me. You only want to anoint me And cast me out. You only want me to hide in a barn, And belong to shadows. You call my abilities a possession of a demon.
Papa doubted i could see; and you see me as perverted.
But you do see that i see... That i have something with some power. You and the Missionaries lay your hands on me... me who left my Protestant roots so as to be rooted in your Family. You put your cold hands on my forehead, Trying to vacuum out my psychic abilities, Which i tell you are no longer-- Trying to take away my saying that i'm okay... i'm good. Speak to me. Don't cast me out and leave.
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Where, Oh Where, Did The Mall-Lady Go?
They wanted her to drop her thoughts As naturally as her underpants fell, after they were Over the hips, so the steaming winds of her daily showers Could clear her of encroaching stain As she had been cleared away.
They were a function, ignorant of their thinking, charting Charts. She felt she would have to ignore these doctors and Nurses in the mental ward. She would have to ignore the pacing patients Asking cigarettes from her. The hall was rectangular. Everyone moved rectangularly.
She would go to dreams of past realities Where she was watching the shoppers' reflections As they passed mall's little fountains-- Different types of people-reflections but all silvery In the still of the waters, Happy and part of the lives of the mall. She would imagine herself sitting on a metal bench-- packages of her new clothing pulling on arms and chest
Like the recalling torpor that came more easily To her lower legs; the weight of the mink that arched Her aching shoulders more like a lady; And a small sack of chocolate stars Touching her upper neck-- Wondering what packages her fellow-creatures Bought to be brought home and to whom They brought them to. And then, as the locks of solitude clicked in her consciousness, Came the wondering of where, oh where, Did the Mall-Lady go?
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Savior-Searcher In The Bible-Belt
I can see you in those dry moments, then As clearly as if I were there: staring at the cracks Of the white ceiling above the bedpost, wondering if You will slip down three flights to the outer darkness
Like your ex-Mormon roommate, here. Your visual mind, Against your will, probably thinks about your squirm That a few moments ago squirmed you of your juice, Wiggled her skirt back on, resurfaced the lip-spit Crackup in her concrete of makeup, and wordless, Walked like a princess out the door. As the last of the ecstatic vibrations tides you in the rear You arise from the raft of the mattress. Then you cover up your nakedness, And move to the light of the living room.
And then I actually see you, Don, in the hour that you had told Me to step back in. You are bending over the end-table stained In the blood of wine. Sunlight, stripped silver from the grey Clouds, pours through the window to the table. To your right a nine of swords card of a man pierced in the Back gleams as it walls the card of your future lovers., And the redness of Doctrines and Covenants to the far left of That table also looks pure in the light. You do not see me. Your mind is racked in screwing the pack For an answer. You turn another Tarot Card In the order your destiny is to be read.
Your sad eyes look up And your languid voice says that you are late For your meeting with the local Bishop... A meeting to straighten up your fucking life. I laugh! In bitterness that shakes my intestines, I laugh! Another hillbilly man Has lifted his head above the rest--a foot up from the jug-- And has blown his breath into the air Which 'naps another young and fragmented one To the call of being holy. But before you arise You turn the gleaming card of number four-- Your eyes in a more motionless trance than before.
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New England Washing (Mental Account, Some day of Gorbechev, 1987)
Another hour. There is no circulation Beneath the steering wheel for my feet. Outside myself There is the last of the sun at dusk But like the conquering Hsuing-Nu Pushing themselves beyond a Great Wall and through an eternal Gathering, it is hardly felt. There is nothing great to trouble me And nothing substantial descends on my senses, Giving me thoughts other than the fact I'm thinking nothing: Only A flock of birds in the corner of my left eye Blend down with the grey skies As if the fence barricading The farm land does not pertain to them; Thoughts of the center line And not going over it. Days of Gorbechev, the radio speaks of, But not his nights--where, one time He may have smashed A big, red cigarette in an ashtray With an action stiff and slow; And as he stood up the mattress of his bed may have Raised to touch his rear, again, Like a quick and soothing give-me-five handshake; And opening a window of the embassy To escape the stuffy dryness Of electric heat to his suite, He may have let the cool American air Attack him with the smells and sights Of its diplomatic car exhausts, Grey and orange from street lamps And store lights...and how The nation breathed for once as it moved.
The third: road; cows, like islanders; Multi-tinted bladed fields broken by acres Of forests and pastures; a black-sun scene with Car lights; a vision blurred and pebbled Through the windshield-- A truck passes my pinto; Muddy water slapping its face; Its stick eyes smoothing it To a duller complexion. It isn't yet Christmas And I am going home. My parents one day drooped In front of all, and were old-- We should be having much to say... I, thinking like them, with The mind of the world, And us smiling unhappily And speaking none of that: But a lot will be said. I am a bum. One of their hearts shall give in And their marriage will be a farce... Even in car accidents the married Die separately. And then the widowed Mother, smoking the cigars of her husband, And coughing them as the husband had done But in the apartment of the son, might Visit away her life: I would Bring her there, thanking God for a reason Not to try hiding all of me in some pussy As in daylight the main part Goes into underwear.
This is their town Far from trays with saucers And plates and spoons and forks (Sometimes hardened in scalloped potatoes Or bent) and knives and glasses (Glasses sometime with folded bread inside)... But forever coming down the belt for the Dumping and washing...the trays that disappear In a square hole and come out clean Will continue regardless if I am there. Men fuck virgins; a child-worker Is born and all is holy. There is nothing great to trouble me: The rains that drop and drift next To streets in gutters, take away Smashed Pepsi cups and beer cans Without intent, bound God knows where, But out of sight.
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The San Franciscan's Night Meditations
When I am at a dead-lock In your rear and the language of my body Will not come from The third element of the soul, What am I to say?-- 'ALL BUT ONE DEAD: Mexican immigrants celebrating the Stowing away on a 120 degree boxcar With urine in their stomachs, Acknowledging capitalistic thirsts... Sigue sobre pagina".. Double hubble The peso is in trouble And to Mars America plans Jumping over the moon, And all this has disturbed me!"
The night is full of impulses To live and to run and seep heavily Into its dark robes of Silence and morbid rightness; And as I, again, try to thrust on dryly-- A log without a river traveling it To the product of lumber-- and hope to create love in The smackings of night, Like anyone else, I know that soon I am to apologize for lack Of an ejaculation, And will promise to have a counselor Tame me to the exclusion of All but work and lust.
Sounds of people Kicking around the Night of early morning Beneath my lover's window; And I withdraw under the sheet, lying flat with the dead moonlight.
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The Philosophy Of Rita And Herb
Staring fixed at the rows Of flowered Wallpaper a pale gray In the dark efficiency-- The three walls still absent To her consciousness As a shadow of silver lightning Fades the greyness Of one portion in her view-- The "schitzophrenic" lifts up a cigarette hidden behind An ashtray and the flat ground Of ashes on the table, which Skid and resurface with her Hot breathing. She thinks they are Continents drifting, and herself Upon them. From feeling stiff and pushed under-- Numb to the point of a corpse-- With insecurity enough not to remember, Even, her ABC's, Rita runs into the night Where outside of a window She blesses the workers making Colonial bread.
An old man in a cowboy hat, Herb, Is saddled on the wooden railing of a porch To an apartment complex: seated there beside a remembrance Of a young woman like Rita. And in the spitting fumes; bad-muffler sounds; The rocking phallicism in radio music of passing cars,
He feels he has to move or die And gets down To his pickup.
And Rita, upon dawn and upon the end of rain, Walks the streets again after tiring, Ready to go back and confront the curfew-conscious Group home, and the "zero" on her record full of Zeros. She worries about carrying in her womb A mini-Herb with scabs of grey hair And little pot-holes in his tiny face, Though she is still a virgin.
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Estivation
Weekends in Tranquility Park-- With the downtown buildings, hallways of giants clustered, Exhaling the coolness echoed From the rectangular mouths of doors Opened and closed by cityers-- A coolness came over my thoughts The way lack of wind contains The hastening of Yosemite's flames.
There, diurnal and punctual, she crossed That small area of grass, fountains, and cement Which were generally buffeted more fully by sun and adjacent Sounds, moving the park more than Bush and Dukakis' Presence. "WALK" was always lit when la chica Approached the street, carrying her library books. When would she, artificial and pneumatic, Who like Houston's miniature stop-lights While going to work, veer my movements To slide off a plane ticket and be led Through and from burning Amazons And green-house climactic changes-- Through wasted ozone and my own depleted life-- The breath of her mouth my only nourishment.
Masking tape From hurricane threats Remains at the edges of windowpanes; Palm trees, below, are hybrid to cement; Thuc Nguyen's business report figures Blend and bury themselves as distant sounds; The staff meeting and this cigarette industry are gone. Slid off a plane ticket caught in life's winds Restless No friends for real All wanting something from me The outside world has nothing Except life-ending amusements of Sex to escape void The dead have some solidity of truth About what happens after life Even if they are not aware of it, And the rest breathe in fables Everything is surely unchanged in Springfield, Mo., where I was raised, But none of it is mine Nothing is ours--humanity drifts along And intersects briefly in alliances My friends Are co-workers whom I must expire My life with civilly As we light cigarettes And bitch of no new raises
When would she pull on my arm Tugging me thoroughly into breaking glass Of the 12th floor conference room To fall, putting me out violently, When I can no longer dream
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Mid-West Hymn of Aten
Aten, where it is throned on the television beneath the window, Sees above and below and says nothing: It enjoys the woman secretary and the road constructor
Who from opposite shifts of the sun Come to it, the cat; Follow the roaming in its mansion; Pensively laugh as it clings to hundred dollar drapes;
Feed it holiday popcorn on the throne; And close the drapes that the cat, Aten Had opened by its tugging, And will open again: Opening below Where the woman, statue of her liberty Wedged in a mud layered hill of snow Ankle-thrusts The tilt of her body after a moment of standing still: Face looking in the trash receptacle that her flabby Breasts rest on the rim of and point toward; head bowed To the tin; And mind distinguishing between good and Bad trash. Her hands raise from the snow-blended
Mixture to push back the hair that was intimate with trash. She raises her head and glances up at the sky that She had noticed a few seconds earlier; and wonders Of the person who would throw away a nightgown And wilted plants, dented but unopened cat food, And scattered baby pictures-- But the cold wind pushes further into her rashed cheeks; And she drops the gown before she can mentally conceptualize The woman's possible image She digs further and...
And opening Above where Two crossing jet Had each made an element Of a cross in the skies--- A third, now, and the Heavens appear to play Tick-tack-toe with their bad arts, Or do not know how to push out caulk neatly When hoping to seal out the heavens.
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McConico
Through the hazy waters Of his hot bath, looking, he thought That his woman's pubic hairs Should naturally have come out More permed like his, Regardless of her color.
The door being shut and locked With a rifle in front--still he heard From the living room a forum of senators' Televised voices discussing laws of limits In openness and freedoms And ramifications. He did not understand-- As the mirrors steamed, dripped Down from the air conditioning's touch, and resteamed When it shut off; And when he wondered what home owners Had used the bathtub before And what disease might be Dropping from the cracks around the faucet--that The fags would push down the American way of life. He did not argue that if they were isolated From the mainstream, their liquids might get off on any Products as they worked for the cost of their isolation In, for example, a barren region of Texas; And that the isolated would, by the testing of the Virus, be proven witches So there would not have to be witch hunts-- No, he just felt their destruction.
And he thought of his woman In the bedroom, waiting, and became Forgetful of anything But the desire to have her. They had that freedom. The American constitution Said so---freedom to live and breathe And fuck and fuck.. Fuck so hard that the penis would Knive through the condom And spray-paint the man's name On the dull walls of the vagina. They had that freedom--those inalienable rights-- Her to be banged and to squeal To her friends that she was in love And him to white pussy And a gal that he could call his own... His woman. And if the initial M got ready To graffito-crawl his way out-- A problem for the rest of their years--- She could erase it, not remembering it With any more significance than Having clipped a broken end Of a fingernail. She had that right. Her man said so, and so said The American constitution.
His shift in Toastmaster Had for that day ended, And so now he could rest in waters; Focus on the bubbles that rose When he farted; and let the memories Of the entire day be released to rise and fall Like the steam. He would have to scrub himself Good before going to his woman: She understood money With its charm of a cocaine high-- Although the need for dominance And the breaking of rules Made her love him Who still did not supply her with all of her needs-- But the composite smell of the factory and the drugs That he sold after each shift Would lessen the good feelings that made That understanding.
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Beauty Shop Motif
Taking the boat two hundred miles With her Ozark loving husband Not having the key And why I don't use The hair dye she prescribed-- The one I had bought from Her last time-- I say, "Yes, Honey" And watch her lips through the mirror speed on. My back aches in the chair stiff as a board. Have I gotten as old as this? Have I started saying, "Yes, Honey?" Conscious of slight pains and discomforts-- Words as silent racing of lips. Another shampoo is ground harder In the grey hair of my scalp. The long gray weeds that grow out of it Will be chopped off another two inches more Than what I asked her to do.
In a room of old women, like me, Who let the buzz of dryers And loud beautician speakers Keep their minds active from remembering, My bored and wayward eyes See in the mirror (Now seated in a once empty chair next to mine) A young one: Her fidgeting body willfully captivated; Hair held high and hostage; Curlers stiffly tightened; Bulges diluvial by Cylenderic Bottle Held ungodly above her head And squeezed by gentle but firm hands Of a male beautician-- And I remember that the noxious liquid Dribbles under Cotton Crowns Around one's head As the eyes water from the sting Of this thing called love. Somehow I want to warn her Although she may not be a stranger To being whitewashed In a man's liquids And the click-of-the heels logic Of women, as if One's whole damaged life Can be bounced from a mirror In and to all women Like an SOS.
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Sculpting of Winds
It was as if certain people came in. Those disliked were Disregarded and the rest kind of circled in and out But at the time in and a small period out were associated with And considered part of that person's reality by himself The way a cat brushes against certain familiarities Agreeable enough as it goes for its meal, And so I befriended places.