Anonymous
People would ask:
Why don't you write
about your feelings?
But I don't have any
I'd say, I drove
the little bastards
out.
They made lousy tenants.
They left their garbage
in the halls and argued
with each other through
the windows of my soul.
They were all fat
and working class.
I paid a torch
to gut the tenement.
They were jumping
off of ledges to escape
the smoke and heat.
My brain
became a den for
every kind of dope.
For a month now
I've been kicking,
and the feelings coming
down made me raise my
hand the other day in
rehab and say: My feelings
have come back. I'm
scared."
I'm raising my hand now.
I'm qualifying here, in
this poetry reading, this
church of human frailty:
years ago, I gave myself
like a virgin to emotion
and the asshole bit my neck.
I binged for years,
a cannibal vampire,
on coldness.
But today, without some trust,
I'll die unknown to myself.
I pray my feelings forgive me
for all their homeless nights.
The graveyard made them
hard.
For all I know, they've gone
to ex-cons, with angry
tattoos on their arms.
For all I know,
after the burn-out
they worked me
like a street
suckering strays
through lonesome
doors.
For all I know,
they joyrided my heart
into walls
and stripped my hopes
like hubcaps
and threw the spare
parts down a hole.
Because, as I get behind
my sobriety, and start
the engine up,
my courage sputters,
my dreams are low on gas,
and fate, like some
dumb punk,
had punctured
my good years.
Hobo
Mouth
I went to a dentist in Oakland
He pulled out four of my teeth
But first, he said:
"Here's a toothbrush. A little
brushing would avoid this
Your mouth stinks like a
goddamned hobo."
I didn't say much. As he went
to work on me he talked
of freight yards
From the shape of my teeth
and my sunbleached
flannel shirt and Giants
baseball cap I guess
he thought
I sleep in a boxcar
or something
When he tugged
I didn't flinch. He kept asking
"Is that O.K.?" as he tore each
bloody tooth loose from my head
and I'd nod: "Sure"
And when it was done I was so glad
he didn't demand payment up front
that I slipped out with a mumbled "thanks"
and only gradually, as I rushed home
did the shock of it set in
Why, a good third of my smile was gone!
What would Diane, my main squeeze think?
That's what I mainly cared about
Well, she didn't care
Not so bad, she grinned
You look like a
tattooed and toothless
pornographic pirate
which turned her on,
I hope
She phoned
some free clinics
and dental schools around,
told them I'm in need and got me
an appointment
to go have a bridge built for nothing
And through all this
I laughed
I laughed to split my sides
you know, when things get hard
I laugh till I cry
and then laugh some more
with the kind of laugh that makes
skinny students face tanks in defiance
of tyrants
the kind of laugh that
lifts up drunken homeless guys from gutters
and presses cash into their fists
a laugh that fucks with love
and sticks its howling head from freightcars
doors
to smell the flowers
and I don't think it matters if
my teeth rot or I never write a poem ever
again
It's the kind of laugh that amuses itself
at the annihilation of the universe
And you don't need white teeth for that
American
Cruiser
It is a thirty-six passenger bus
A tarnished silver bullet
shot from the barrel of the past
Anybody can afford to board it
so only the poor do, the fugitive, the lost
The rest fly
The ones with credit cards, homes and jobs,
friends and telephones and no time
for the long, lonely roads of America
It does not carry those
who will not trust
to sit beside a stranger in ragged clothes,
who cannot endure a sufferer too long,
those ragamuffin clowns and tattered acrobats
who work the medicine shows and freak stalls
around the American big top
Once I flew above the ranges and mountains,
the gas pump towns and speed traps
where lives burn like ignited fuel
with heat and stink and smoke
Once, I pushed the button on my seat,
reclined and gazed through a porthole
at space as thin, blue and unlivable
as my soul
I descended to my appointments drunks
but it was not just booze that sent me crashing
through the tent
I fell to see the land below,
beneath the belly of the plane,
the gameboard where fires burn ignored
I fell to be reborn from
the belly of a bus
And at first the gloom and boredom
of the trip was a punishment
At first each mile was a year
My pride rebelled against
this crapgame of ravaged character
this savage speeding palace of bad luck
But then I looked into the eyes
of those around me
and they stared back with hunger --
pinched hankering in supermarket aisles,
with the guilt of unmanicured fingers
trailed larcenous along
the rusted rim of bargain basement bins
Their eyes gave back irises cracked
and dulled by unobtainable shoes
and even before I saw clear through to the
psyches behind them (tracked like
needle arms, running with shame sores
and wounds of woodgrain alcohol)
their eyes glowed with the uncontrolled
horizontal roll of broken black
and white TVs
We barreled along at the speed limit
encased in tons of tired metal
on threadworn tires
to destinations as unknown
to us as the dust
on Mars
We were fugitive
past houses with big deep dish satellite
antennas and shiny economy cars
parked in garages
We peered, friendless,
at steam-ironed people in pastel-colored
summer clothes, gathered on lawns,
with cocktail heads leaned close in gossip
We peered envious
at soap-scrubbed families leaving
storybook churches for baseball
picnics of chicken and potato salad
We saw our own reflections
pass in shop windows as
we sped through Steven Spielberg
suburbs where lovable, good-natured
aliens with glowing fingers can land
unharmed and share a child's bedroom
but where cops would check our I.D.'s
and throw us into lock-up for vagrancy
if we didn't keep
going, so we kept on going,
and our heads sunk sad
against the dying day
burnishing the windowpanes
I had time to think
and unrelenting locomotion
I had the names of towns to remember:
Smith Mills, Belle Fontaine, Graysport,
Grabell, Liverett, Cascilla Junction,
Johnsonville, Sharky, Black Bayou, and
Saints Rest
I had steel mills in Pittsburgh
Fairways in Bloomington
Endless fields of Des Moines
Prairies stitched with abandoned stagecoach
trails
around Larimer
Simulated Wild West gunfights in Butte
A million-to-one shot on a one
hour stopover in Reno
I had the old forties-make silver
colored Airstream bus parked
on rusted rims behind an Arbys
in Salt Lake City, that I swore
someday to come back and buy
I had all that and sixty dollars
rolled in a tight wad secured
by a rubber band in my jeans pocket
And I had the moment I woke
somewhere on the California borderline
at daybreak
Around me lay
cowhide-colored hills furred with heather
and dimly outlined grazing cows
and the Pacific sky chasing the night
all the way to Asia
I drew myself upright in my seat
to collect myself for the ever-
nearing end of the ride
and as I had never known on other days,
I had the morning
(c) 1998,
by Alan Kaufman
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