style="font-size:15px;"> crossing the waterfull of the indolent
and rich
passing from this place to that
with their hearts gone
and their guts empty
like Xmas turkeys
the great blue sky above
wasted
all that water
wasted
all those
fingers, heads, toes, buttocks,
eyes, ears, legs, feet
asleep in
their American Express Card
staterooms.
it’s like a floating tomb
going nowhere.
these are the floating dead.
yet the dead are not ugly
but the near-dead surely
are
most
surely are.
when do they laugh?
what do they think about
love?
what are they
doing
midst all that water?
and where do they seek
to go?
no wonder
Tony phoned and told me that
Jan had left him but that he was all right;
it helped him he said to think about other great men
like D. H. Lawrence
pissed off with life in general but still
milking his cow;
or to think about
T. Dreiser with his masses of copious
notes
painfully constructing his novels which then made
the very walls applaud;
or I think about van Gogh, Tony continued, a madman
who continued to make great paintings as the
village children threw rocks at his
window;
or, there was Harry Crosby and his mistress
in that fancy hotel room, dying together, swallowed by
the Black Sun;
or, take Tchaikovsky, that homo, marrying a
female opera singer and then standing in a freezing
river hoping to catch pneumonia while she went mad;
or Dos Passos, after all those left-wing books,
putting on a suit and a necktie and voting Republican;
or that homo Lorca, shot dead in the road, supposedly
for his politics but really because the mayor of that
town thought his wife had the hots for the poet;
or that other homo Crane, jumping over the rail of the boat
and into the propellor because while drunk he had
promised to marry some woman;
or Dostoyevsky crucified on the roulette wheel with
Christ on his mind;
or Hemingway, getting his ass kicked by Callaghan
(but Hem was correct in maintaining that F.
Scott couldn’t write);
or sometimes, Tony continued, I remember that guy
with syphilis who went mad and just kept rowing in
circles on some lake—a Frenchman—anyhow, he
wrote great short stories …
listen, I asked, you gonna be all
right?
sure, sure, he answered, just thought I’d phone, good
night.
and he hung up
and I hung up, thinking Jesus
Christ no wonder Jan left
him.
she undressed in front of me
keeping her pussy to the front
while I lay in bed with a bottle of
beer.
where’d you get that wart on
your ass? I asked.
that’s no wart, she said,
that’s a mole, a kind of
birthmark.
that thing scares me, I said,
let’s call
it off.
I got out of bed and
walked into the other room and
sat on the rocker
and rocked.
she walked out. now, listen, you
old fart. you’ve got warts and scars and
all kinds of things all over
you.
