Another Way to Play Read online

  comfortable anywhere used to make me

  feel insecure, I’m getting over that,

  I used to feel obliged to apologize

  for or defend people whose goals I

  shared even though I might not like

  them or their tactics, I’m getting

  over that too, I’ve learned to love

  or at least appreciate a lot of things

  I used to despise or ignore, I’ve had

  trouble getting it up and trouble

  keeping it down, I’m tired of a lot

  of things but curious about more, I’m

  tired of this but that’s history now.

  March 1974

  Washington DC

  CHARISMA

  (O Press 1976)

  LISTEN

  for Caitlin Lally

  pianos in the clouds

  showering us with music

  of a kind

  not often appreciated

  and us here under the covers

  MORE THAN

  for Joan Manson

  it was more than “the fifties”

  you were more than “fabulous”

  I was more than a “punk”

  we had more than “young love”

  that was more than “right”

  and I remember more than

  they said I would

  SONNET FOR MY 33rd

  Bridget Bardot

  Abbott & Costello

  Hound Dog

  The Dickey Bird Song

  The Girl Can’t Help It

  T.S. Eliot

  Cassius Clay

  JFK

  Thelonious Sphere Monk

  On The Waterfront

  Bird

  Pope John XXIII

  Ezra Pound

  Clifford Brown

  TESTIMONY

  for Robert Slater

  when he was young

  they called him the carpetbagger

  because whenever he went south

  he fucked them up

  now he can fuck them up

  without even moving

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I cant sing too good

  but I can write good

  I cant play too good either

  but I can write good

  I cant last at anything too long

  even writing

  but when I do it

  it’s something

  and writing something

  is always adding something

  and that’s supposed to be good

  I can make love okay

  but I cant do it forever

  or too long with the same person

  unless I really convince myself it’s love

  and then it’s good

  but not always good even then

  but when I write about it it’s great

  and the writing is good

  I’m not too good with languages

  though I’m finally learning some Spanish

  and I studied German, French, and Latin

  but still, even English gives me trouble

  I just go on speaking and writing

  my brand of American

  and the writing is good

  sometimes it’s very good

  I was never very good at sports

  even indoor sports

  not enough patience for pool or shuffleboard

  but I can always write

  and I write good

  I’ve never been able to make much money

  I haven’t tried too hard but

  I’ve thought about it very hard

  and tried some

  but I’ve always been able to write

  and write good

  sometimes I wish I was a wealthy man

  or a famous musician

  or a great painter or something like that

  but I never wished I was a writer

  I just knew one day I was

  and that I was good

  and so I wrote

  and keep writing

  and keep reading what I write

  and even when it’s terrible

  I know it’s good

  CATCH MY BREATH

  (Salt Lick Press 1978)

  NEED

  I used to argue with my father

  None could be more sincere than mine

  want to do something different

  no place

  Viet Nam

  that was later with my wife

  Max Ernst David Smith etc. then

  Father Knows Best had me scared

  where was the USA big rocks & cars

  long white highways & afternoon dark bars

  & my neighborhood

  nobody knew anything

  especially if anyone else asked

  my father never asked so why should I

  I don’t know

  I just did

  & that would start the arguments until

  somebody died of cancer or suicide

  I got a job playing piano

  washing dishes or recreational therapist

  James Moody wrote Last Train From Overbrook

  my father opened my mail when I was 21

  and hadn’t lived at home for over three years

  still muttering about the rubber in my wallet

  when I was 15

  or the address of the sweet black girl

  when I was 15

  or the way the priests wanted me out of school

  when I was 15

  or the noise I made re entering their atmosphere

  when I was 15

  or the guilt I felt among the civilized

  when I was 15

  or the nightly rituals of Bridget Bardot fantasies

  when I was 15

  my father was born in the last century

  and if I’m allowed I’ll live into the next

  that’s enough to forgive anyone for

  from RUNNING AWAY

  you all anxiously

  tore the bouquets from your

  wrists and tight little tits

  In the morning the telephone wires

  resembled hot nerves in a dying

  Indian’s spine as he watches a

  white man cut off his nuts for

  an unusual tobacco pouch. This

  [ . . . ]

  seeing more ways in more ways

  of seeing

  and getting jacked up for it

  EMPTY CLOSETS

  1.

  When it comes time.

  Take it away, demand that could make a marshmallow loud.

  Everywhere, children who didn’t want to go anywhere.

  “I usta just wail on that mutha fucka.

  Now that mutha fucka just wails on me.”

  “IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL”

  carrying a silo full of animals around in his arms.

  “I don’t know what I want to be.”

  The fallen parallel lines of white.

  You break down in a grin. Leather,

  the spider behind. Either. Yet and still.

  “I was a fool who thought woman had to be in love with

  somebody else to be worth anything to me. In fact

  blew me away.”

  It was a case of love at first sight

  and the case was closed. And the pale old men say,

  “loosen.”

  Okay, touching and then opening the wounds

  for the salt you always carry. This many times

  I’ve been awake all night and we continue to act

  as though we were sleeping. My heritage is

  the way you look tonight.

  Covering that black was. I got a job. Something forced home

  and beat my head on the wall, a fragile, gnawed, paganism in

  the back:

  Mecca.

  “Of course we are all one. Rocknroll music any KARATE! hah,

  rubbers, the parking lot’s legs as miles on t
he kids. Be big,

  be busy, be the walls.”

  Your eyes and eyes. Outside the elevator one night.

  Ready this time for liberation you know what that means.

  Your name has come up again and again. This is

  the Bob Dylan one this is the Janis Joplin one this is

  the John Coltrane one this is the Charlie:

  YOU CAN’T EVEN SPELL LEROI JONES NEW NAME???

  Goodly inclinations. Stop it. Knowing what you care about.

  D) Your kit.

  Resting night loons behind your cock.

  Try to do anything to us.

  There’s something beautiful Mao.

  For all?

  The little good in everything.

  White sisters are coming home with or without Ted Joans.

  The fat black sparrow with way to marry a beautiful and

  black woman on orders of the commander who wanted me.

  On a lonely airstrip in the great NorthWest the dig it I

  can kick your ass and commies all wear grey brain change

  until you a white dog bite yourself there, up there.

  Listening to Marion Brown shit I don’t know. He said son

  I love to touch inside my cells.

  “White and short and stocky ones.”

  Round shoulders a new guy came. I walked up to the big

  country boy. I never saw Nutsy, Andre, or Dolores again.

  It was the year they discovered Jim Carroll.

  “Everything is quiet. My hand feels pretty bad.”

  Getting them together

  because I love. And now it’s me.

  2

  July 2nd and suddenly ungrateful! Old one

  we demand the sun on my ass. It comes out at night.

  Half shit the rest sugar.

  “I jus tellsem I don know what it mean

  but I sure know what it do.”

  “WORLD’S LARGEST PRAIRIE DOG 8,000 POUNDS”

  Ted’s case.

  He waspingly gruff embraces steel snow. Common stew whore.

  One is enough.

  No more annexing the gris-gris. Me they generally call

  THE SHELF. They call him DRY the way your balls feel

  when you been put away AGAIN. She forgives the future

  when we take out each others’ eyes

  to fill in the blanks. Blue gorges.

  “Way uptown on a hundred, hanging from my action back, you’re

  supposed to watch tv.”

  Once a year the sharks would come to

  singular execution of snow fields,

  o, in piles behind the early fifties.

  On top of that we move around,

  gored silver following ourselves. Getting fucked.

  JUST LET ME DO IT

  (Vehicle Editions 1978)

  VIOLETS

  That Spring there were no violets . . .

  only in the shops,

  where, captive, they wilted too soon

  and were too dear.

  The Woolworth stores sold plastic ones:

  everlasting,

  not too expensive. I bought some;

  you seemed delighted.

  They’re here, still, beside your picture.

  2: TALKING

  Lee, it’s more than the organ music that

  defines the organs inside my body / it’s

  as though you were walking around the in

  side of my eyes until you found yourself

  IN HARLEM IN 1961

  for Bambi

  I didn’t think about it

  I was in harlem with you

  it was 1961 and we were

  alone, in love, uptown

  way uptown on a hundred

  and thirty something street

  heading downtown where

  people didn’t stare, that’s

  all the way down although

  even there, on weekends

  if you went out they

  might look a little bit

  longer than they would

  not midtown times square

  where out of state sailors

  on leave left their spit

  hanging from my action back

  skinny shoulders three

  button high front french

  sport coat from klines on

  the square in newark back

  in jersey where the rest

  of the squares didn’t want

  me back no more, or you

  saying white and black

  don’t mix like sheep and

  horses like cement and

  fertilizer like your face

  and their stomachs like

  the way we walked down

  that dark street after mid

  night with our hands in

  each other’s feeling fine

  and these little kids not

  more than twelve years out

  on the street not more

  than twenty strong stopped

  us and asked me what the

  fuck I was doin up there

  out there walkin around

  with you like there was

  nothing to it but to do it

  and I said what I’m doing

  is walking on the street

  with the woman I love and

  I sounded a little afraid

  not enough to look like I

  wouldn’t be ready to go down

  if I had to but enough to

  let everybody know I wasn’t

  any hero including myself

  and you looked mad afraid

  and smiling at the same time

  and some one of the others

  not the leader said, shit,

  let the dude and his woman

  alone man and they did

  THEIR IMAGINATION SAFE

  you, wing like across the bright animals

  I taste the metal of my death, your tongue

  (remember Sonny Rollins blowing with Thelonious Monk at the Five

  Spot)

  one foot stiffens with muscle cramp

  on your tongue

  that dark inside

  we love to fill

  but pray each day

  will open up to someone new

  & beautiful & loose like dreams

  my mouth opens like a floor, walk around in it

  flash cards flash: Open / Relax / Lie back / Wider /Relax / Be filled

  we are fine together, one safe smell

  in it the metal of what dies in us each day

  the rinse of knowing who we are

  what honor we can give

  they are afraid to know

  brother, stretch across my map your face & ass & toes

  insert your A’s & B’s into my Y’s and Z’s

  lie back again with me before we go

  & go with me to where they can’t imagine

  taste death & know what they cannot know

  we are each other’s children

  alchemists

  midwives

  peasants

  in each others crevices creating seed from shit & loving it

  (there are those who have never been afraid of the dark)

  I am wide & divided as vulnerable as a lamb to be stroked or slaughtered

  & you slaughter me with the stroke of your tongue & cheek at my cheek

  & cheek & the reach of dark between

  where is the machine invented to

  capture this art

  in our hearts brothers

  in our hearts

  SO

  I wait and wonder

  what I’d do

  if someone said pick your 60 best poems.

  Pick all of them? Or any?

  Maybe commit suicide, but everyone would say

  “It’s because he’s really gay,” or maybe

  “really not gay.”

  *

  Read Anne Waldman and Terence Winch,

  Bruce Andrew
s and Adrienne Rich, wonder what might happen

  to me this summer if I go away, or stay here in Washington DC

  where you can see Watergate live!

  *

  If you want to know the truth today’s my birthday

  and though I often feel older, and sometimes appear younger

  I’m 31, and like everything else that too can be fun

  or a bummer, a drain on the cosmic energy, depending on what?

  If you know the answer you win the future;

  if you don’t the future is ours to lose or—

  whatever happened to the old way of construction?

  Well, one line still follows another, and my voice moves

  between each space, and when I think of you I sweat,

  or maybe just imagine myself like a cartoon troublemaker

  big beads of perspiration jumping out from my skin as I

  cringe behind the fence that the bully is about to

  throw a bomb over, or drop an anvil over, or just put his

  meaty fist through and right on into my scared shitless grin,

  the analogy resting on our mutual vulnerability—

  that’s poetry isn’t it?

  *

  Of course I don’t talk like this.

  I talk like this.

  *

  And now it’s time to go back to THE HISTORY OF ROCK’N’ROLL

  which means it’s my night to cook dinner for “the house”—

  collective—and it’s gonna be smoked sausage cooked in peppers

  and mushrooms and carrots, maybe some onions, and beans

  for protein, or something nutritional. I picked the sausage

  because it seemed to be looking at me in the Safeway,

  not exactly the way I was looking at one of the cashiers,

  a young man with curly blonde hair and nice build

  who seemed to have a down home kind of friendliness,

  or the woman with the little girl the same size as Miles,

  who is a little smaller than Caitlin, both of whom were

  pulling on my pants leg for pennies for gumballs as I watched

  the curve of the woman’s arm as she placed each

  well thought over item on the counter behind my

  vibrational buying and didn’t even notice how much I fell in love

  with her arm and felt guilty for objectifying a part of her

  although she might all be like her arm and then I might

  fall in love with all of her, but that would cause problems,