The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills Read Free Page B

for the riot was we kept getting beans
    and a guard grabbed a colored boy who threw his on the floor
    and somebody touched a button
    and everybody was grabbing everybody;
    I clubbed my best friend behind the ear
    somebody threw coffee in my face
    (what the hell, you couldn’t drink it)
    and I got out to the yard
    and I heard the guns going
    and it seemed like every con had a knife but me,
    and all I could do was pray and run
    and I didn’t have a god and was fat from playing
    poker for pennies with my cellmate,
    and the warden’s voice started coming over the cans,
    and I heard later, in the confusion,
    the cook raped a sailor,
    and I lost my shaving cream, a pack of smokes
    and a copy of The New Yorker;
    also 3 men were shot,
    a half dozen knifed,
    35 put in the hole,
    all yard privileges suspended,
    the screws as jittery as L.A. bookies,
    the prison radio off,
    real quiet,
    visitors sent home,
    but the next morning
    we did get our mail—
    a letter from St. Louis:
    Dear Charles, I am sorry you are in prison,
    but you cannot break the law,
    and there was a pressed carnation,
    perfume, the looming of outside,
    kisses and panties,
    laughter and beer,
    and that night for dinner
    they marched us all back down
    to the beans.
     

meanwhile
     
     
    neither does this mean
    the dead are
    at the door
    begging bread
    before
    the stockpiles
    blow
    like all the
    storms and hell
    in one big love,
    but anyhow
    I rented a 6 dollar a week
    room
    in Chinatown
    with a window as large as the
    side of the world
    filled with night flies and neon,
    lighted like Broadway
    to frighten away rats,
    and I walked into a bar and sat down,
    and the Chinaman looked at my rags
    and said
    no credit
    and I pulled out a hundred dollar bill
    and asked for a cup of Confucius juice
    and 2 China dolls with slits of eyes
    just about the size of the rest of them
    slid closer
    and we sat
    and we
    waited.
     

a poem is a city
     
     
    a poem is a city filled with streets and sewers
    filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,
    filled with banality and booze,
    filled with rain and thunder and periods of
    drought, a poem is a city at war,
    a poem is a city asking a clock why,
    a poem is a city burning,
    a poem is a city under guns
    its barbershops filled with cynical drunks,
    a poem is a city where God rides naked
    through the streets like Lady Godiva,
    where dogs bark at night, and chase away
    the flag; a poem is a city of poets,
    most of them quite similar
    and envious and bitter…
    a poem is this city now,
    50 miles from nowhere,
    9:09 in the morning,
    the taste of liquor and cigarettes,
    no police, no lovers, walking the streets,
    this poem, this city, closing its doors,
    barricaded, almost empty,
    mournful without tears, aging without pity,
    the hardrock mountains,
    the ocean like a lavender flame,
    a moon destitute of greatness,
    a small music from broken windows…
     
 
    a poem is a city, a poem is a nation,
    a poem is the world…
    and now I stick this under glass
    for the mad editor’s scrutiny,
    and night is elsewhere
    and faint gray ladies stand in line,
    dog follows dog to estuary,
    the trumpets bring on gallows
    as small men rant at things
    they cannot do.
     

the cat
     
     
    the hunter goes by my window
    4 feet locked in the bright stillness of a
    yellow and blue
    night.
     
 
    cruel strangeness takes hold in wars, in
    gardens—
    the yellow and blue night explodes before
    me, atomic, surgical,
    full of starlit
    devils…
     
 
    then the cat leaps up on the
    fence, a tubby dismay,
    stupid, lonely,
    whiskers like an old lady in the
    supermarket
    and naked as the
    moon.
     
 
    I am temporarily
    delighted.
     

hermit in the city
     
     
    Idle in the forest of my room
    with tungsten trees, owl boiling coffee,
    webs cowled in gold over windows
    staring outward into hell;
    cigarette breath: statues of perfection,
    not stuffed or whirled in cancers
    of ranting;
    engines and wheels crawl to gaseous
    ends along the sabre-tooth;
    my trees climb with