“If I came back into your life
with a new name and story
even say as a supernumerary?
Would you recognize me?”

DRUG WARS
(a chap book)

Coventry
It was not the shape of my pelvis that made me bet
but anyway, you won, you can run faster...
so I’ll stay for one night at your cabin
out on Coventry Lake.
(and to think I hardly know you)
Driving to your place I was so alert,
leaving the car, a chill ran up my legs
stillness of falling snow.
No lights across the lake.
The stories about the graveyard, our mutual acquaintances,
Caesar Franc’s symphony consumed the pitch-black room
Organ tones soft then dreadful
Like clouds moving behind the moon
wooden floor, hooked rug, a match
you – pfttd! -lit- blew out
brought the ember so close to my face
speaking of a woman who’d been frozen for a million years
found inside a cave...and could I feel her?
(the ember waned so very slowly)
How the edges of
things had all gone livid
like your sardine breath grown insulin and caustic.
My throat was sore from whispering
but do you know what finally gripped me?
was it on the mantle just above my head
as you stood above me and behind me and slightly to my left?
The old, old axe you’d found and would I like to see it?
Or, your reaching…
Reaching for it?
Sure I had to call you, I was almost scared to death...
You won the Berryman prize that year, I attended the presentation
and heard his poems on Henry.
I felt such affection and would have liked to show him
but it seemed so simple-minded and I a nincompoop..
Then I heard he’d killed himself, jumped out, off, waving...
From a bridge.
I sent fall leaves to Henry
in translucent envelopes
addressed them to the other,
and went to him and danced, danced for him and Henry
I danced for him and Henry.


Dogsbody
(for John Berryman)
Yappit wants to be a wag
upon a pal who doesn’t sag
A pal who’s smart and doesn’t brag can give the hag
the slip instead of sip
and save the lip
Don’t mention it again.
And if that’s not enough for you
The time to start is now and then,
Let YES and NO proceed:
I’ll lift your name from mud and rut
and fit it to your face anew
from whence it cleans my ear and tongue
It is not far, it is not near
but could be
and
Yappit
only learns
once.


Cricket
Heavenly cricket, oh cricket chirp
It seems my cricket went silent
Bare feet beat melodious patter and slap
on wooden floor
Clean clothes blew lively ghosts
In sun drenched wind.
Einstein at the dance hall
With goose gloves1, his divining rod
lay soft with dust.
Brown eyes and leaves,
leaves and brown eyes.
Dust, dust, bright raker.
Dear Titian, I’m such a mutton!
It seems I don’t understand a word you say!
If I just hadn’t been born with flys on my face.
(An ort is a piece of God)
Your testicle a stone calculus
like a planchette on a Ouija board
me, a third year divinity student on a “toute”
I didn't bring it up
but I did put it down
LaBrea tar pits, glub blub

1 Einstein at the dance hall with goose gloves -origin unknown


Chinese Poem
How can I tell my body that
you were only pretending and were not fast,
that you preferred another or, to dance like Shiva
than lie placed with only me?
When my friends all go away or worse,
and the neighbors lace violin wires
in my throat
to pull me into their predatory rings
and you are not here to stop them...
What can I tell my body?
What can I tell my soul
that made this body of dreams,
once bright and comely
a happy thing,
diligent and lovingly bent
that it was never loved.

Bauble
The earth was a bauble dangling from her ear
the space around it was volumetric and solid
as her oaken wooden form.
Her arm stretched out before her
as if pulled by a leash
tethered to some unseen and potent beast,
and leaning backwards
she made a powerful diagonal
as she glided by me…left to right.

Stadium
And as I climbed that wall
dust rising, snorts, and sounds of movement
drove me up, UP.
My labyrinth was simple, there was no choice at all,
the beast was another thing.
My fingers ached clutching at those walls
of garbage and the like,
empty caulking tubes, cigar butts, candy wrappers,
cans, bottles, common things,
old worn out painting brushes.
Plastered there together and
the way it all kept crumbling made me plenty queasy,
this faulty Coliseum.
As I neared the top the shrieks below subsided
and at the very crest, I dared to look around
There below was an Indian squaw
dark, erect
heavily astride a buffalo
walking in a circle.
Ordinary, classical
(quiet moon’s penumbra)
and distant as a woman
lost in thought
taking out the garbage.

The Good Old Days
(Benjy’s pasture sold for Quintin’s Harvard and Caddy’s wedding -April
1910)
Before Quintin committed suicide (June 1910)
He smashed his grandfather’s watch-
‘mausoleum of all hope and desire’.
In his Harvard room
-gift from his father
and twisted off the hands.
At the hardware store he bought two 6-pound flat irons
then consulted a watch maker, drowning his own clock’s tick
with the uncalibrated tic-tic-tic-tic of the watch shop
and boarded a trolley out of Harvard Square,
broken watch still ticking in his pocket.
On a foot bridge, three boys were fishing.
Under the foot bridge,
Quintin hid the flat irons wrapped like a pair of shoes.
Quintin asked the time:
(-‘a drowned man’s shadow is always watching for him in the water’)1
The boys –pointed to the Unitarian church.
In Watertown below the clock tower of the Unitarian church
in arched double Venetian hand-blown stain-glass windows,
Mary was feeding a lamb.
In a bake shop,
Quintin met and befriended a hungry dirty
black-eyed waif with very greasy pigtails,
who would not speak but only stared and ate,
-Julio’s sister,
for whom he bought an ice cream
and was subsequently arrested
“You steala my seester”
and fined one dollar and then six more-no receipt.
1974
When we moved east, mid summer, our first night in Watertown
you insisted we walk down to the Charles
to see the river rats plop-splish
into the black water.
From the foot bridge was a particularly good vantage spot.
We lived on Main Street beside a liquor store
on a curve in the road.
For one year I worked in Cambridge,
an hour away by trolley (Quintin’s trolley) to Harvard Square
and subway on to Kendall Square.
You worked closer at a junk mail factory.
When I’d get home you would already be
nursing a beer and mulling over a poem.
Our nightly walk, up the hill and around the church,
the Unitarian church, Faulkner’s church, Quintin’s...
always made me ache even before they tore it down,
for lack of funds to fix it. That was fall.
For $250 I could have bought ‘Mary feeding the lamb’
the arched double Venetian hand-blown stain-glass window,
and I actually had that much for the first time
but it seemed way-way too fishy.
Early summer I quit my job, we celebrated.
Next morning queasy, hung-over,
I took the graduate records exam
in a study room at Harvard.
Light sifted in high above and hung in mid air.
I wondered why they didn’t turn on the lights.
-After, I picked flowers that grew along the Charles
near the place where we let our goldfish out,
arranged them in the fish bowl
painted the whole next day-
“Flowers in a fish bowl”
We had company that night for dinner.
He brought wine, you read a poem,
he read a philosophical piece, his own,
about a boy and a man
about a man.
1 from Sound and the Fury, Faulkner.

Sylvia
Some say Sylvia died of Ted Hughes
others claim it was her mother.
I contend it was World War III and
some excessive relation to ovens.
-something regarding ‘Girls Gone Equine’
and a stasis without a beginning.
We can surely conclude, thanks to Ted Hughes
that it wasn’t a Six-toed Sloth.
But could be
tincture of house robe and a triple case
of Smith College
and Johnny Panic
and Diamond Eyes.

The Six-toed Sloth
The man with double-jointed feet could not out run
the team of paraplegics in their motorized wheel chairs
nor could he handle the man with the double-jointed hands
who went away to live in the woods.

Dr. Kraft and the Inquisitors
One black male.
The rest female, some gay, some not
was our graduate class. (Patty Hearst was not a member.)
Whose experiment I’d like to know? To what end?
Whose criterion? Whose cash? Cashing in...
on life insurance premiums
accident settlements, and rehab,
or our very own mediocre working millionaire Yaley.
Emmons’ father paid her way and Barbara was rubbing it in.
Some dangling Frenchy and a Pennsylvanian mistake,
I mean BIG TIME, I’m talking Matisse!!
“Congratulations,
we’ve selected you to BE our next teaching modality
(which means “no” you cannot have the job.)”
At the start she felt somewhat transposed.
Later trading books became stunning
(like watching your life pass before your eyes).
How the birds flew on cold winter mornings.
How the professor entered her ear with his machine
and left a sound trapped there and pretended to be another.
The Hari Krishnas served meals, spread fleas and burned incense
The spring was pungent and muffled, dizzying and black the earth.
She came to the beginning and the end of her lineage
and then came Dr. Kraft and the Inquisitors.

NO Hoax
Most people think that Patricia Hearst was some hapless heiress
from the publishing industry,
a debutante with a big daddy and three closets, and,
incidentally, victim of the SLA, Simbonese Liberation Army
who were, of course, a group of black radicals from the 60’s.
but
maybe she’d just have ...preferred ….Yale?
“Patricia Hearst” as the hoax:
perpetrated by Berkeley and Yale
some help from U-MASS thrown in...(Who wouldn't?)
That she was several -not one.....
An anorexic ‘twin’ who painted stripped sticks
or pastel croquet balls
for Masters degrees at U-MASS and Yale respectfully
The U-MASS twin entered the program so drug riven
her brains quit at about 80 IQ....
mouth gaping though still able
to ‘brother’ it around to steal the ‘family’ jewels
(In a Renaissance Art history class, no less!) and
the day before school started
but don't worry….
the teachers all got overtime.
Well, it turns out
the SLA was not an army of black radicals
They numbered eight- were mostly white,
their first act was to murder a black school superintendent.
As for Patricia after all the terror and anguish
though never having been a drug head,
her brains gave out too,
After all the terror and anguish
Somehow
(like in the movie Kansas City?)
she did reclaim her (own)
head and
this time with an IQ of 140.
(and without the morphine,
Hollywood)

Terrorist Dormitory
I lost my brains too-earlier
Storrs, Connecticut 1966
Not to morphine or smack
I was not kidnapped
I was simply …at a bad time
Unprepared, mesmerized, mesmorialized (birthday-party-ed ) hypnotized
, strangled and sometimes despised…
My dad worked at the pentagon.
I traveled the path of least resistance
and there was much resistance
2-3 months is all it took to dislocate my head most completely
-soon I spent all my time
locked in a struggle meeting with my one association
who was master of rhetoric, guitar songs &
prison-grade interpersonal social skills-
Her mother was a warden.
beyond confusing –nauseating in fact
for a mostly obedient healthy unword-ly person but
I refused to give up trying, and therefore
systematically enforced new wordful-solutions and styles
-hard, cool, wasted …
upon my previously graced yet comprehensive existence,
fa la, Oh poise
(strangled physiology) …
I sought to fail.
Instead of classes I drank coffee-smoked cigarettes
tutored by the Campus Restaurant intellectual,
Ted Clark, a minor player in the Viet Namese war
who had almost earned four separate bachelors degrees
and who was also almost celibate.
I myself had one romance who briefly reestablished my thinking
& my reason only to take/go away again.
That something was going on was clear
Strangle/dumb clear
denial remained preferential
(claim asserted without foundation).
And the foundation? Apparently my humiliation, that is:
-the war, her dis-advantage/skill and the comeliness of my own
extraction, and also too its labor.
What ever it was-
one thing that it was not - was egalitarian.…
the flaws? It was the counterpoint: physiology
plus the secrecy and the numbers
“Egalitarian-ism” maybe…Fish in a barrel.
I nearly died of hepatitis and disappointment…
neither needles nor pies (see later)
but from caring for the afflicted-
at nearby Mansfield Training School.
Their wet hands still touch my legs and hands
a job I nearly died of…
I survived however and
became again
and for which reason
… again again
and worse at Amherst ‘76.
Not at all the friendly thrump of Roethke’s weed extraction kit
But a complete and enforced dislocation
Of the central mechanism.

Sable Suit
Have you ever dated a hit-man? (Body guard?)
For all intents? and purposes?
Or had a psychiatrist for all intensive purposes?
Whose hit- man? Whose purposes?
Why did you refuse me my own identity
and instead turn the world into a shrinking cocoon?
Of “smoothes” and “jaggeds”, “milk” and “sequins”,
“sequins” and “knives”?
The various drug thrills which weren’t at all thrilling.
(Priestly botch! )
The vicarious drug thrills which weren’t at all thrilling.
(and how I found out?) (And HOW I found out?)
Or that coarse leaden trollop who could sting like a bee?
How you went on...such high flown chat!
“As the pendulum swings: compassion/refinement...”
Whose compassion? Whose refinement?
Just where do you work and what are you?
For a while I decided that you were twins.
The good one who only came once
and the other who I saw most often,,,
then there was a third who was somehow
larger and maybe part wolf.
Twins or a team?
You wanted to make love to me
wearing your Sable Suit.

Sylvania-dot Germans
Have you met them yet?
The Sylvania dot Germans?
They’re very sexy, often Faustian in nature
And they can tie you up...from the inside!
Each entry feels like a tiny mosquito bite
as they weave their webs.
Then the webs shrink
contorting your face and twisting your neck.
For their most famous trick,
they suck up all the light around them
and in the dark spaces they create
are swarms of tiny blue “poons”.
Their eyes are usually blue too
and when you look at them
-POP-
You’re blinded

Unpromising but Young
Sitting across the table like a grouper or a large mouthed bass
I couldn’t bear it, it’s
drugs or me baby, and I left
on a greyhound bus-You retrieved me two days later.
Three years later ‘76
I’m the one myopic, gelded
not on street drugs but MEDICALLY prescribed:
(Stellazine and mace!)
For all your clout: (….unpromising but young)
Exchange student to Mexico- high school,
College roommate-Jamaican,
Tripped through Irvine and Laguna Beach
on LSD and poetry, poverty and brough-ha-ha
(Castaneda, Ratch and Peters),
Your dad-Director of the San Bernardino County Hospital…for real
Your home across the street!
Your dad, wondering if I’m an heir apparent, wife?
Or a medical statistic?
Or worse- a collateral disadvantage?
One son floating silhouetted under water tangled
In the seaweed and with sun,
The other, as before, unpromising but young
(Hepatitis from a hospital pie -you thought - it could be needles)…the
one unpromising son,
who wrote smart poems about
the problems of the things
that really should not…be done.
-Sitting under a cherry tree
I heard LIGHT at the age of four (It roars)…
and was scolded by the old lady across the street
for stealing bright and happy flowers.
40 years later I returned .
The hospital across the street, now owned my old house
& were using it for storage!
Completely packed with undiscarded rubbish, out dated instruments and
medical devices.
My room stacked to ceiling with
blue waffle mattresses
-used-
the kind they put under people after major operations…
wall to wall it was stacked
completely to the ceiling.
For all your clout…I see it now
I think the reason you cried so much
Was because you
were part of it too.

Drug Wars
The only thing worse than psychiatry is death
(even that’s debatable...but not at the time)
No, I never took a psychiatrist willingly
it was more like Brother Rabbit hiding in the briar patch
trying to keep things straight
except for all the drugs and questions.
Fiction would have been easier and a whole lot safer.
My first shrink, he had a bad heart and
wore metal seashells around his neck.
The second died and came back as an Abbot.
My last psychiatrist had a Rhodesian ridgeback for a pet.
This dog had such poise and stature,
to say nothing of his size and sense of humor.
I concluded his mission was to limit the ill
caused by his owners. It was a powerful commission.
And sure enough, he contracted a man-sized disease
and withdrew like a shadow into the tool shed.

Majestic Abbey
It was a strange congregation.
I remember one Roshi who raised his hand,
to cradle his neck, to prevent paralysis,
(a possible byproduct of simple conversation)
and who insisted that “celibacy” was even...
no, far, far better than sex.
Full grown men who wore stained underwear,
wept in the mornings,
and who braved sleet storms to walk the streets of other people’s towns.
The Abbess herself once pretended to be a gynecologist!
And they all had pets.
Some of the women were not quite right,
and the men were slow.
And their canticles, their translations; unrecognizable!
But it was a Majestic Abbey with a sky blue as Tibet
and the ground daft with incantations.
See them here, all posed together,
in this photograph with their pets,
and with two wolf men behind the back row.

My Fury
He could imitate my gestures.
It was scary at first
I groping from posture to posture
and he, gliding unhampered
from one elongated pose to another.
The declining balance of each new arrangement
a friction of inertia and
a room gone prickly with worn out spaces.
Sometimes he’d assume the shape of people that I knew
or his voice would betray some other.
I myself might feel possessed.
(I was an easy mark in his neighborhood).
There were times I’d seen him walk through it
Like a stick man on one skate,
and once when I considered withdrawing my affection
I saw his face break inward.

Oliver
For a long time I sat pondering
between the rows of vegetables and flowers.
a hawk was circling over head and
a newly turned plot of earth
lay open there before me.
I was reluctant to leave, but really had no choice.
I stood shaking the inertia,
savoring the drama
and horse and girl came galloping
in my direction.
I knew she did not mean to stop.
When I could taste the dust
In leg cage
under horse belly
I lost all interest,
and turning my gaze away
I found you
standing on a hill
Silhouetted
by your own
prodigious brilliance.

Fire
Surprised by a door left open at dusk
In a dream, the battery gone dead
You came to me once
Through a door within a dream
Fire beyond your silhouette
Flesh flaked from your face
Like paint from an old canvas
(He felt like locusts and burning fields)
The paint I remember
It was in another dream
Fresh and dappled.
Would I betray the trees
If I told you
I live for unrequited love.

Zohra Breaks Bread
Like a maelstrom of chocolate chips, the dough boy, the blob,
Zohra Rabinowitz descends over hills
bangled, belly first, bullying insults and threats,
gobs goobers of double chocolate to celebrate her fast,
She’s champion of vicarious fate.
Gardenias, Aroma therapy,
It’s a command performance.
Zohra COOS, Zohra AAHS
Now Zohra shall dance
dressed in ficus dependicus and finger rattles,
a fat belly dance.
Her father’s attendant chooses off one guest
two days later or was it before -?- the cellist and composer
take the plunge -poor sport- off the Golden Gate Bridge
ALL THAT JAZZ
And rugs on the roof.
“Party’s over.”
Shoefly, the talking dog growls with a nudge,
“I’m Pooka, I’m Aristeides, I’m guard, I’m the Judge.”
(Oppenheimer, Cahill, and the Japanese fuzz.)
So Sally...sally forth.
Good Night Irene, keep the psychiatrist,
the bugs,
the statue and the dust.
So it is when Zohra, Zohra, Zorha breaks bread.
Zohra whose sons shall
own
The land of the Dead.

AND BALDER-DASH
Hector protect her,
it’s Robert Nestor
and French technocracy
selling L-S-Democracy, Dunkin’ Retards.
William Bennett says,
“Play or Forget It!”
“We can’t fix these ‘chines, they’s rut.
You job hoppin’ fly!”
Teats brass-o-vhal and Rhu-le fall, Stylus out of date.
An’ dis black dog got blood on his muzzle,
an’ teese sharp as Ta-Mayo.”
“Who dat, when I say, who dat?”
Zantan’s Plantains, damn Richard Burger!
.deez boys got no sense of respectability
dey hallucinate dey’s girls. Shakin’ included.
an’ who keep steal ma pen…
cils? Coronado pharmacist?
Libbbesque poka-dot? De glass roots?
Greed
is incurable!
What beats dogs can’t paint never.
Kramer don’t want no dogs ‘cept Bitters.
oughta bite Hayden or Livy, can’t think straight.
Pro-druggery: WHAT?
NO TACO STANDS ON THE MOON?
deez sex fiends is ‘pulsive

(PS: Dear Richard, Come Visit. You can stay as long as you like.
Rules are: No smoking inside, no girls and no drugs.)

At the Museum of Art in Romance, Texas
In Raushenburg’s cave
Claus Oldenburg has tethered his horse: Existential.
14 tons of hemp rise,
not like dinosaurs in fog
passing close to round port hole windows
or the queasy spot of grease
under young men’s beds
but like San Diego tilt-ups and Wesselman
Barbie dolls with sun tan lines revealed.
Outside the luna moth crouches
on giant rusted lips and Phillip
Morris*
has signed on as spiritual materialist
to dangle the horse’s tail down
the throats of passing
lady acrobats.
The seventeen year old
begins writing her first novel.
It is about
a woman hitchhiking out of town,
who has no car, the woman
who is hitchhiking out of town,
because there has been a nuclear accident.
On the first page she falls in love
with the man who picks her up AND
who does not have Aids.
.Do you suppose that Oldenburg is an egotist braggart
whose constitutional pursuit of happiness is cheese?
Happiness is like the old joke;
Meet you at the corner? The one about the walls?
How much depends on a comely oyster girl fawning
digging potatoes in Hungary? Another,
also alcoholic, jeering, with BIG
beer filled teats?
another with beer filled teat?
or the young biologist?
painting nicotine behind the ears
of 50% of the mice whose tails
he splices to the remaining 50%.
And some of the black girls
are scuffing dirt
in certain people’s faces.
* a subsidiary of Kraft food

Hate Comes in Flavors
(written just before the first Gulf war)
Everyone’s fighting again and I’d like to smite
someone too...like you Craigie, smack you in the head,
see your brains fall out down wind for a change.
Everyone’s fighting again and I’d like to stop
someone too, hate comes in flavors, yeah you -Craigie
see your brains fall out …like the neighbor.
a Police said, “a wife shot herself...”
Solemn they were prowling over the grounds
of the big white house, modern, Mexican,
like a heap of spilled boxes, fully equipped
outdoor lighting, a hippie dish on top
and a blond in a knee length red formal
receding round one side
like a moon on a wire.
It was the night before Thanksgiving Day,
“...She shot Herself in the head.”

I’m in the South now, the real South
walking out on the planks through the fen
‘till the highway disappears
wondering will I get trapped, cut-off
disappearing into the forest of swamp trees
with their roots like knuckles
mountains of knuckles rising up out of the mire
of “Don’t litter” things.
I’m in the South now, it’s only January
but it’s the South steaming up at me all the way
wondering will I get trapped out here
will the walkway terminate?
Hark! Some house floats out there on the still waters
An escape route? Not at all.
On the highway, the wind off the cars
Is like bones and knives
My pelvis; a bowl of squirming maggots.
the Cousins just don’t learn.
DEVIANT!
POSSE!
Durn it, Kerflooie, WESCAC, Smack!
Marooned
in your seedy battles
with emancipation.

The Stakes are High
Will I be remembered as a famous schizophrenic
Or, as the chick that they dosed?
The chick that they thwarted and dosed?
Thwarted, hypnotized and dosed?
The chick with the Volkswagon?
The ‘chick’ who survived the CIA and the FBI,
the anti-CIA, the anti-FBI, Universitydom (twice),
the Art Club (I was not a member), Fellini tomatoe-head, the Biscotti
Brothers,
Christianhood, the Harry Krishnas, Chris Anderson-
Chris Anderson, the Linda 500, Concord, Marin County and
the Girl Scouts of the United States of America?
A pathogenic lifeguard with a loose screw?
or the chick that they set-up and blamed (for what?)
the chick that they dosed?*
that they tried to kill
that they tried to get to kill herself
that they black-balled, spit at…
the chick that they gamed over, fomented around
The chick that they sought out, left out
the chick that they left in the dust? Laughing?
Talk about “Get a life”?
And surely, it’s malpractice to treat someone for mental illness
When you know they’ve been dosed.
And to conspire…further?
And who did convince (even me at first, then) them, everyone
That it’s SO…
Your gosh durned flunked craziness?
Call it lead time…my disbelief…my devastation…my erstwhile innocence
Decades… Oh, how messy!
For decades they dosed….*
Most people though, you know, can be wooed, persuaded
redirected, coerced, silenced, bought, bribed, bedazzled,
tamed, conned, discredited, threatened, moved or eliminated.
Certainly…certainly….certainly …rendered unavailable.
Well I was dosed*
and I was followed
and I was beset by an indigenous or imported scum
who manifest most everywhere.
I was used like a croquet ball.
I want back wages!
How dare I? Say I daren’t?
So long ago
Sigmund Hirsh let him out of the brambles
only to harness him to the whole thespian society!
and don’t forget
the ‘You-Were-There’ customs office.
And by the way....I was not homeless...
...I was hunted.

(* dosed in Amherst ’76-77, in Idyllwild ’78 and later, in San Rafael
‘79-’80, in San Francisco at a restaurant, in Pine Cove often in the
80’s, once or twice in Fort Worth ’89, once in Boston)

The Shadow Recedes
Do I need a mirror? Do I need a lens
A stethoscope? A probe? A fingerprint kit?
Where shall I start? In trying to write a self-portrait?
Painting is blind but then hits the mark,
makes magic, transcends
enters worlds apart.
Any dumb cow can paint while
a writer’s skill rests in lieing.
I am less than I was
In the absolute sense
And finally…
The shadow recedes.
END

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