Reality Sandwiches: 1953-1960 Read online

  pavement a dark Turkish bath the cornice gapes at midnight

  Seattle! -- department stores full of fur coats and camping

  equipment, mad noontime businessmen in gabardine coats talk-

  ing on streetcorners to keep up the structure, I float past, birds

  cry,

  Salvation Army offers soup on rotting block, six thousand

  beggars groan at a meal of hopeful beans.

  1956

  PSALM III

  To God: to illuminate all men. Beginning with Skid Road.

  Let Occidental and Washington be transformed into a

  higher place, the plaza of eternity.

  Illuminate the welders in shipyards with the brilliance of

  their torches.

  Let the crane operator lift up his arm for joy.

  Let elevators creak and speak, ascending and descending in

  awe.

  Let the mercy of the flower's direction beckon in the eye.

  Let the straight flower bespeak its purpose in straightness --

  to seek the light.

  Let the crooked flower bespeak its purpose in crookedness --

  to seek the light.

  Let the crookedness and straightness bespeak the light.

  Let Puget Sound be a blast of light.

  I feed on your Name like a cockroach on a crumb -- this

  cockroach is holy.

  Seattle 1956

  TEARS

  I'm crying all the time now.

  I cried all over the street when I left the Seattle Wobbly Hall.

  I cried listening to Bach.

  I cried looking at the happy flowers in my backyard, I cried at

  the sadness of the middle-aged trees.

  Happiness exists I feel it.

  I cried for my soul, I cried for the world's soul.

  The world has a beautiful soul.

  God appearing to be seen and cried over. Overflowing heart of

  Paterson.

  Arctic, 1956

  READY TO ROLL

  To Mexico! To Mexico! Down the dovegrey highway, past

  Atomic City police, past the firey border to dream

  cantinas!

  Standing on the sunny metropolitan plateau, stranger prince

  on the street, dollars in my pocket, alone, free --

  genitals and thighs and buttocks under skin and

  leather.

  Music! Taxis! Marijuana in the slums! Ancient sexy parks!

  Continental boulevards in America! Modern downtown

  for a dollar! Dungarees in Les Ambassadeurs! And

  here's a hard brown cock for a quarter!

  Drunkenness! and the long night walks down brown streets,

  eyes, windows, buses, interior charnels behind the

  Cathedral, lost squares and hungry tacos, a calf's head

  cooked and picked apart for meat,

  and the blackened inner roofs and tents of the Thieves'

  Market, street crisscrossed on street, a naked hipster

  labyrinth, stealing, pausing, loitering, noticing drums,

  purchasing nothing

  but a broken aluminum coffee pot with a doll's arm sticking

  up out of the mouth.

  Haha! what do I want? Change of solitude, spectre of

  drunkenness in paranoiac taxicabs, fear and gaiety of

  unknown lovers

  coming around the empty streetcorner dark-eyed and watching

  me make it there alone under the new hip moon.

  S.F. 1956

  WROTE THIS LAST NIGHT

  Listen to the tale of the sensitive car

  who was coughed up out of earth in Pittsburgh.

  She screamed like a Swedish Prime Minister

  on her first flight down the red neon highway,

  she couldn't stand the sirens and blind lights

  of the male cars Fords Oldsmobiles Studebakers

  -- her assembly line foreman had prophecied wild wreck

  on Sunset Boulevard headlights & eyeballs broken fenders &

  bones.

  She rode all over Mexico avoiding Los Angeles

  praying to be an old junkie in a bordertown graveyard

  with rattley doors and yellow broken windowpanes

  bent license plate weak brakes & unsaleable motor

  worn out by the slow buttocks of teen-age nightmare

  panting under the impoverished jissom of the August moon,

  Anything but that final joyride with the mad producer

  and his bombshell intellectual star on the last night up from

  Mexicali.

  SQUEAL

  He rises he stretches he liquefies he is hammered again

  He's divided in shares he litters the floor of the Bourse

  He's cut by adamantine snips and sent by railway car

  Accumulated on the margin by bony Goldfinger has various

  Visions of being an automobile consolidates

  The fortune of spectral lawyers heirs weep over him

  He melts he undergoes remarkable metamorphoses peculiar

  Hallucinations he coughs up debentures beaten

  By immense hammers in a vast loft pours in fire spurts

  Upward in molten forges he levels he dreams and he cools

  And the present adjusted steel squints.

  A hunchback tuberculosis salesman drives him cackling to St

  Louis

  In the rain Hack no will of his own Creep next resale Crank

  San Pedro tomorrow St Joe Squeak will it never end Hohokus --

  Crashes into a dirty locomotive the bastard never

  Mind stock averages decline slightly here's the mechanic

  Blam the junkyard Help the smelter later a merger pressure

  accumulates

  He's had it now Eek he's an airplane Whine he wants to go home

  Suddenly he dives on the market like a bomb.

  1958

  AMERICAN CHANGE

  The first I looked on, after a long time far from home in

  mid Atlantic on a summer day

  Dolphins breaking the glassy water under the blue sky,

  a gleam of silver in my cabin, fished up out of my jangling

  new pocket of coins and green dollars

  -- held in my palm, the head of the feathered indian, old

  Buck-Rogers eagle eyed face, a gash of hunger in the cheek

  gritted jaw of the vanished man begone like a Hebrew

  with hairlock combed down the side -- O Rabbi Indian

  what visionary gleam 100 years ago on Buffalo prairie

  under the molten cloud shot sky, 'the same clear light 10000

  miles in all directions'

  but now with all the violin music of Vienna, gone into

  the great slot machine of Kansas City, Reno --

  The coin seemed so small after vast European coppers

  thick francs leaden pesetas, lira endless and heavy,

  a miniature primeval memorialized in 5c. nickle candy-

  store nostalgia of the redskin, dead on silver coin,

  with shaggy buffalo on reverse, hump-backed little tail

  incurved, head butting against the rondure of Eternity,

  cock forelock below, bearded shoulder muscle folded

  below muscle, head of prophet, bowed,

  vanishing beast of Time, hoar body rubbed clean of

  wrinkles and shining like polished stone, bright metal in my

  forefinger, ridiculous buffalo -- to New York.

  Dime next I found, Minerva, sexless cold & chill, ascend-

  ing goddess of money -- and was it the wife of Wallace Stevens,

  truly?

  and now from the locks flowing the miniature wings of

  speedy thought,

  executive dyke, Minerva, goddess of Madison Avenue,

  forgotten useless dime that can't buy hot dog, dead dime --

  Then we've George Washington, less pri
mitive, the snub-

  nosed quarter, smug eyes and mouth, some idiot's design of the

  sexless Father,

  naked down to his neck, a ribbon in his wig, high fore-

  head, Roman line down the nose, fat checked, still showing his

  falsetooth ideas -- O Eisenhower & Washington -- O Fathers --

  No movie star dark beauty -- O thou Bignoses --

  Quarter, remembered quarter, 40c. in all -- What'll you

  buy me when I land -- one icecream soda? --

  poor pile of coins, original reminders of the sadness,

  forgotten money of America --

  nostalgia of the first touch of those coins, American

  change,

  the memory in my aging hand, the same old silver reflec-

  tive there,

  the thin dime hidden between my thumb and forefinger

  All the struggles for those coins, the sadness of their re-

  appearance

  my reappearance on those fabled shores

  and the failure of that Dream, that Vision of Money

  reduced to this haunting recollection

  of the gas lot in Paterson where I found half a dollar

  gleaming in the grass --

  I have a $5 bill in my pocket -- it's Lincoln's sour black

  head moled wrinkled, forelocked too, big eared, flags of announce-

  ment flying over the bill, stamps in green and spiderweb black,

  long numbers in racetrack green, immense promise, a

  girl, a hotel, a busride to Albany, a night of brilliant drunk in

  some faraway corner of Manhattan

  a stick of several teas, or paper or cap of Heroin, or a $5

  strange present to the blind.

  Money money, reminder, I might as well write poems to

  you -- dear American money -- O statue of Liberty I ride en-

  folded in money in my mind to you -- and last

  Ahhh! Washington again, on the Dollar, same poetic

  black print, dark words, The United States of America, innumer-

  able numbers

  R956422481 One Dollar This Certificate is Legal Tender

  (tender!) for all debts public and private

  My God My God why have you foresaken me

  Ivy Baker Priest Series 1935 F

  and over, the Eagle, wild wings outspread, halo of the

  Stars encircled by puffs of smoke & flame --

  a circle the Masonic Pyramid, the sacred Swedenborgian

  Dollar America, bricked up to the top, & floating surreal above

  the triangle of holy outstaring Eye sectioned out of the

  aire, shining

  light emitted from the eyebrowless triangle -- and a desert

  of cactus, scattered all around, clouds afar,

  this being the Great Seal of our Passion, Annuit Coeptes,

  Novis Ordo Seculorum,

  the whole surrounded by green spiderwebs designed by

  T-Men to prevent foul counterfeit --

  ONE

  S.S United States, 1958

  'BACK ON TIMES SQUARE, DREAMING OF TIMES SQUARE'

  Let some sad trumpeter stand

  on the empty streets at dawn

  and blow a silver chorus to the

  buildings of Times Square,

  memorial of ten years, at 5 AM, with

  the thin white moon just

  visible

  above the green & grooking McGraw

  Hill offices

  a cop walks by, but he's invisible

  with his music

  The Globe Hotel, Garver lay in

  grey beds there and hunched his

  back and cleaned his needles --

  where I lay many nights on the nod

  from his leftover bloody cottons

  and dreamed of Blake's voice talking --

  I was lonely,

  Garver's dead in Mexico two years,

  hotel's vanished into a parking lot

  And I'm back here -- sitting on the streets

  again --

  The movies took our language, the

  great red signs

  A DOUBLE BILL OF GASSERS

  Teen Age Nightmare

  Hooligans of the Moon

  But we were never nightmare

  hooligans but seekers of

  the blond nose for Truth

  Some old men are still alive, but

  the old Junkies are gone --

  We are a legend, invisible but

  legendary, as prophecied

  NY 1958

  MY SAD SELF

  To Frank O'Hara

  Sometimes when my eyes are red

  I go up on top of the RCA Building

  and gaze at my world, Manhattan --

  my buildings, streets I've done feats in,

  lofts, beds, coldwater flats

  -- on Fifth Ave below which I also bear in mind,

  its ant cars, little yellow taxis, men

  walking the size of specks of wool --

  Panorama of the bridges, sunrise over Brooklyn machine,

  sun go down over New Jersey where I was born

  & Paterson where I played with ants --

  my later loves on 15th Street,

  my greater loves of Lower East Side,

  my once fabulous amours in the Bronx

  faraway --

  paths crossing in these hidden streets,

  my history summed up, my absences

  and ecstasies in Harlem --

  -- sun shining down on all I own

  in one eyeblink to the horizon

  in my last eternity --

  matter is water.

  Sad,

  I take the elevator and go

  down, pondering,

  and walk on the pavements staring into all man's

  plateglass, faces,

  questioning after who loves,

  and stop, bemused

  in front of an automobile shopwindow

  standing lost in calm thought,

  traffic moving up & down 5th Avenue blocks

  behind me

  waiting for a moment when. . . .

  Time to go home & cook supper & listen to

  the romantic war news on the radio

  . . . all movement stops

  & I walk in the timeless sadness of existence,

  tenderness flowing thru the buildings,

  my fingertips touching reality's face,

  my own face streaked with tears in the mirror

  of some window -- at dusk --

  where I have no desire

  for bonbons -- or to own the dresses or Japanese

  lampshades of intellection --

  Confused by the spectacle around me,

  Man struggling up the street

  with packages, newspapers,

  ties, beautiful suits

  toward his desire

  Man, woman, streaming over the pavements

  red lights clocking hurried watches &

  movements at the curb --

  And all these streets leading

  so crosswise, honking, lengthily,

  by avenues

  stalked by high buildings or crusted into slums

  thru such halting traffic

  screaming cars and engines

  so painfully to this

  countryside, this graveyard

  this stillness

  on deathbed or mountain

  once seen

  never regained or desired

  in the mind to come

  where all Manhattan that I've seen must disappear.

  NY 1958

  The music of the spheres -- that ends in Silence

  The Void is a grand piano

  a million melodies

  one after another

  silence in between

  rather an interruption

  of the silence

  Tho the music's beautiful

  Bong Bong Bon----
-

  gnob

  gnob

  gno-----

  THE circle of forms

  Shrinks

  and disappears

  back into the piano.

  BATTLESHIP NEWSREEL

  I was high on tea in my foc'sle near the forepeak hatch listening to the stars

  envisioning the kamakazis flapping and turning in the soiled clouds

  ackack burst into fire a vast hole ripped out of the bow like a burning lily

  we dumped our oilcans of nitroglycerine among the waving octapi

  dull thud and boom of thunder undersea the cough of the tuburcular machinegunner

  flames in the hold among the cans of ether the roar of battleships far away

  rolling in the sea like whales surrounded by dying ants the screams the captain mad

  Suddenly a golden light came over the ocean and grew large the radiance entered the sky

  a deathly chill and heaviness entered my body I could scarce lift my eye

  and the ship grew sheathed in light like an overexposed photograph fading in the brain.

  1959

  I BEG YOU COME BACK & BE CHEERFUL

  Tonite I got hi in the window of my apartment

  chair at 3: AM

  gazing at Blue incandescent torches

  bright-lit street below

  clotted shadows looming on a new laid pave

  -- as last week Medieval rabbiz

  plodded thru the brown raw

  dirt turned over -- sticks

  & cans

  and tired ladies sitting on spanish

  garbage pails -- in the deadly heat

  -- one month ago

  the fire hydrants were awash --

  the sun at 3 P.M. today in a haze --

  now all dark outside, a cat crosses

  the street silently -- I meow

  and she looks up, and passes a

  pile of rubble on the way

  to a golden shining garbage pail

  (phosphor in the night

  & alley stink)

  (or door-can mash)

  -- Thinking America is a chaos

  Police clog the streets with their anxiety,

  Prowl cars creak & halt:

  Today a woman, 20, slapped her brother

  playing with his infant bricks --

  toying with a huge rock --