Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

And You Know What Thought Did

If you could eat frost, you might think
it would crunch like an apple. You might think

that it forms in fruit like a snowflake forms
in the air. Crisp, and clear. Not so.

Frost in the flesh of an apple runs soft
and brown, and it California they smoke it out

with stove-like affairs that burn wood,
oil, paraffin or coal. Strange then, that

Californian apples are so sweet; so fresh;
because if you could eat smoke you might think

it would taste like a kipper. Not frost.

I Live in Fear...

I live in fear of letting people down.
Last winter, someone leaked the blueprint for a plan
to put the town back on the map:
that everyone should stand and strike a match
at midnight on the shortest, darkest day,
then photograph it from an aeroplane. No way:

the workers wouldn’t break bread with the upper class,
the wealthy wouldn’t mingle with the mob,
the worthy knew a thing or two about sulphuric gas.

It came to pass that only one man struck; a man whose job
or game was civil unrest and civil dissent, but who claimed
to be lighting his pipe in any event,
a man whose face turned purple as he spoke.

I know very well that man doesn’t smoke.

A Safe Rule...

A safe rule in life is: trust nobody.
That’s the first, and secondly,
the man with 20/20 vision who achieves the peak
of Everest (forgetting for now the curve
of the Earth), looks east and west and gets
a perfect view of the back of his head.

Third, there will always be
that square half-inch or so of unscratchable skin
between the shoulder blades, unreachable
from over the top or underneath. And fourth,

as I once heard said, don’t go inventing
the acid that will eat through anything
without giving some thought
to a jar to keep it in.

I'm Dreaming...

I'm dreaming of that work, Man Seated Reading
at a Table in a Lofty Room, and while I sleep
a virus sweeps the earth, and when I wake I see
the population of the world is

me.

I take the observation suite in Emley Moor Mast  
to watch the skyline from the Appalachians to the Alps;
those signs of life, a thousand miles away perhaps,
are nothing more than fireflies nesting in the grass
across the fell.

I manage very well, become a master in the arts
of food and drink and heat and light,
but then at night, with no one in the world
to cut my throat, I lock and latch
and bar and bolt the windows and the hatch.

Those Bastards...

Those bastards in their mansions:
to hear them shriek, you'd think
I'd poisoned the dogs and vaulted the ditches,
crossed the lawns in stocking feet and threadbare britches,
forced the door of one of the porches, and lifted
the gift of fire from the burning torches,

then given heat and light to streets and houses,
told the people how to ditch their cuffs and shackles,
armed them with the iron from their wrists and ankles.

Those lords and ladies in their palaces and castles,
they'd have me sniffed out by their beagles,
picked at by their eagles, pinned down, grilled
beneath the sun.

Me, I stick to the shadows, carry a gun.

Ankylosing Spondylitis...

Ankylosing meaning bond or join
and spondylitis meaning of the bone or spine.

That half explains the cracks and clicks,
the clockwork of my joints and discs,
the ratchet of my hips.

I’m fossilising - every time I rest
I let the gristle knit, weave, mesh.

My dear, my skeleton will set like biscuit overnight, like glass, like ice,
and you can choose to snap me back to life before first light,
or let me laze until the shape I take becomes the shape I keep.

Don’t leave me be. Don’t let me sleep.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold:

her hardest hue to hold.

Her first leaf's a flower

but only so an hour.

But then leaf subsides to leaf,

so Eden sank to grief.

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Let Me Put it This Way

Let me put it this way:
if you came to lay

your sleeping head
against my arm or sleeve,

and if my arm went dead,
or if I had to take my leave

at midnight, I should rather
cleave it from the joint or seam

than make a scene
or bring you round.

There,

how does that sound?

The Air

What is this dark and silent caravan
that being nowhere, neither comes nor goes;
that being never, has no hour or span;
of which we can say only that it flows?
How was it that this empty datastream,
this cache of dead light could so lose its way
it wandered back to feed on its own dream?
How did that dream grow to the waking day?
What is the sound that fades up from the hiss,
like a glass some random downdraught had set ringing,
now full of its only note, its lonely call,
drawing on its song to keep it singing?
When will the air stop breathing? Will it all
come to nothing, if nothing came to this?

Animal Graves

The mower flipped it belly up,

a baby garter less than a foot long,

dull green with a single sharp

stripe of pale manila down its back,

same color as the underside

which was cut in two places,

a loop of intestine poking out.

It wouldn't live,

so I ran the blades over it again,

and cut it again but didn’t kill it,

and again and then again,

a cloud of two-cycle fuel smoke

on me like a swarm of bees.

It took so long

my mind had time to spiral

back to the graveyard

I tended as a child

for the dead ones, wild and tame:

fish from the bubbling green aquarium,

squirrels from the road,

the bluejay stalked to a raucous death

by Cicero the patient, the tireless hunter,

who himself was laid to rest

one August afternoon

under a rock painted gray, his color,

with a white splash for his white splash.

Once in the woods I found the skeleton

of a deer laid out like a diagram,

long spine curved like a necklace of crude, ochre spools

with the string rotted away,

and the dull metal shaft of the arrow

lying where it must have pierced

not the heart, not the head,

but the underbelly, the soft part

where the sex once was.

I carried home the skull

with its nubs of not-yet-horns

which the mice had overlooked,

and set it on a rock

in my kingdom of the dead.

Before I chopped the little snake

to bits of raw mosaic,

it drew itself

into an upward-straining coil,

head weaving, mouth open,

hissing at the noise that hurt it.

The stripe was made

of tiny paper diamonds,

sharp-edged but insubstantial,

like an x-ray of the spine

or the ghost beginning to pull away.

What taught the snake to make itself

seem bigger than it was,

to spend those last few seconds

dancing in the roar

and shadow of its death?

Now I see, though none exists,

its grave:

harebells withered in a jar,

a yellow spiral

painted on a green-black stone,

a ring of upright pine cones for a fence.

That’s how the deer skull lay in state

until one of the neighborhood dogs

came to claim it,

and carried it off to bury

in the larger graveyard of the world.

Stereotypes

I’m a fullblooded

West Indian stereotype

See me straw hat?

Watch it good

I’m a fullblooded

West Indian stereotype

You ask

if I got riddum

in me blood

You going ask!

Man just beat de drum

and don’t forget

to pour di rum

I’m a fullblooded

West Indian stereotype

You say

I suppose you can show

us the limbo, can’t you?

How you know!

How you know!

You sure

you don’t want me

sing you a calypso too

How about that?

I’m a fullblooded

West Indian stereotype

You call me

happy-go-lucky

Yes that’s me

dressing fancy

and chasing women

if you think ah lie

bring yuh sister

I’m a fullblooded

West Indian stereotype

You wonder

where do you people get such riddum

could it be the sunshine

My goodness

Just listen to that steelband

Isn’t here one thing

you forgot to ask

go on man ask ask

This native will answer

anything

How about cricket?

I suppose you’re good at it?

Hear this man

good at it!

Put de willow

in me hand

and watch me stripe

de boundary

Yes I’m a fullblooded

West Indian stereotype

that’s why I

graduated from Oxford

University

with a degree

in anthropology

Migrant in London

Sand under we feet long time.

Sea divided for we, you know,

how we turned stragglers to Mecca.

An' in mi hangin' drape style

I cross worl' centre street, man.

An' busy traffic hoot horns.

I see Big Ben strike

the mark of my king town.

Pigeons come perch on mi shoulder,

roun' great Nelson feet.

I stan' in the roar, man,

in a dream of wheels

a-vibrate shadows.

I feel how wheels hurry in wheels.

I whisper, man you mek it.

You arrive.

Then sudden, like, quite loud I say,

'Then whey you goin' sleep tonight?'

My Arrival

Showing the creature I landed
I slipped from my mother’s womb
flesh connected, laced in a blood-spatter.

My father waited with a bottle of rum.

The moon floated somewhere.
The sea drummed and drummed our coastline.
Mullets darted in wooded steams. 

A good night to end our labour – Saturday.

The country-midwife held me up,
‘Look. Is yu third boy child!’
My mother asked, ‘Him all right?’

 

‘Yes – all eyes, all ears.
Yes – all hands, all feet.’
My mother whispered, ‘Thank God.’
My granny said, ‘My Jim-Jim.
My husband! You come back?’ 

 

I slept.
Roosters crowed
all around the village. 

In the sun’s hot eye
my umbilical cord was dressed
with wood ash, castor oil and nutmeg
and buried under a banana-sucker.
There, a tree made fruits, all mine.

Autobiography

I am leading a quiet life   

in Mike’s Place every day   

watching the champs

of the Dante Billiard Parlor   

and the French pinball addicts.   

I am leading a quiet life   

on lower East Broadway.   

I am an American.

I was an American boy.

I read the American Boy Magazine   

and became a boy scout   

in the suburbs.

I thought I was Tom Sawyer   

catching crayfish in the Bronx River

and imagining the Mississippi.   

I had a baseball mit

and an American Flyer bike.

I delivered the Woman’s Home Companion   

at five in the afternoon

or the Herald Trib

at five in the morning.

I still can hear the paper thump   

on lost porches.

I had an unhappy childhood.   

I saw Lindbergh land.

I looked homeward

and saw no angel.

I got caught stealing pencils

from the Five and Ten Cent Store   

the same month I made Eagle Scout.

I chopped trees for the CCC   

and sat on them.

I landed in Normandy

in a rowboat that turned over.

I have seen the educated armies

on the beach at Dover.

I have seen Egyptian pilots in purple clouds   

shopkeepers rolling up their blinds   

at midday

potato salad and dandelions

at anarchist picnics.

I am reading ‘Lorna Doone’

and a life of John Most

terror of the industrialist

a bomb on his desk at all times.

I have seen the garbagemen parade   

in the Columbus Day Parade

behind the glib

farting trumpeters.

I have not been out to the Cloisters   

in a long time

nor to the Tuileries

but I still keep thinking

of going.

I have seen the garbagemen parade   

when it was snowing.

I have eaten hotdogs in ballparks.

I have heard the Gettysburg Address   

and the Ginsberg Address.

I like it here

and I won’t go back

where I came from.

I too have ridden boxcars boxcars boxcars.   

I have travelled among unknown men.   

I have been in Asia

with Noah in the Ark.

I was in India

when Rome was built.

I have been in the Manger

with an Ass.

I have seen the Eternal Distributor   

from a White Hill

in South San Francisco

and the Laughing Woman at Loona Park   

outside the Fun House

in a great rainstorm

still laughing.

I have heard the sound of revelry   

by night.

I have wandered lonely

as a crowd.

I am leading a quiet life

outside of Mike’s Place every day   

watching the world walk by

in its curious shoes.

I once started out

to walk around the world

but ended up in Brooklyn.

That Bridge was too much for me.   

I have engaged in silence

exile and cunning.

I flew too near the sun

and my wax wings fell off.

I am looking for my Old Man   

whom I never knew.

I am looking for the Lost Leader   

with whom I flew.

Young men should be explorers.   

Home is where one starts from.   

But Mother never told me

there’d be scenes like this.

Womb-weary

I rest

I have travelled.

I have seen goof city.

I have seen the mass mess.

I have heard Kid Ory cry.

I have heard a trombone preach.   

I have heard Debussy

strained thru a sheet.

I have slept in a hundred islands

where books were trees.   

I have heard the birds   

that sound like bells.

I have worn grey flannel trousers

and walked upon the beach of hell.

I have dwelt in a hundred cities

where trees were books.

What subways what taxis what cafes!

What women with blind breasts

limbs lost among skyscrapers!

I have seen the statues of heroes

at carrefours.

Danton weeping at a metro entrance

Columbus in Barcelona

pointing Westward up the Ramblas

toward the American Express   

Lincoln in his stony chair   

And a great Stone Face   

in North Dakota.

I know that Columbus   

did not invent America.

I have heard a hundred housebroken Ezra Pounds.   

They should all be freed.   

It is long since I was a herdsman.

I am leading a quiet life   

in Mike’s Place every day   

reading the Classified columns.

I have read the Reader’s Digest

from cover to cover

and noted the close identification

of the United States and the Promised Land

where every coin is marked   

In God We Trust

but the dollar bills do not have it

being gods unto themselves.   

I read the Want Ads daily   

looking for a stone a leaf   

an unfound door.

I hear America singing

in the Yellow Pages.

One could never tell

the soul has its rages.

I read the papers every day   

and hear humanity amiss

in the sad plethora of print.

I see where Walden Pond has been drained   

to make an amusement park.   

I see they’re making Melville   

eat his whale.

I see another war is coming   

but I won’t be there to fight it.   

I have read the writing

on the outhouse wall.

I helped Kilroy write it.

I marched up Fifth Avenue

blowing on a bugle in a tight platoon   

but hurried back to the Casbah   

looking for my dog.

I see a similarity

between dogs and me.

Dogs are the true observers   

walking up and down the world   

thru the Molloy country.

I have walked down alleys   

too narrow for Chryslers.

I have seen a hundred horseless milkwagons   

in a vacant lot in Astoria.

Ben Shahn never painted them   

but they’re there

askew in Astoria.

I have heard the junkman’s obbligato.   

I have ridden superhighways   

and believed the billboard’s promises   

Crossed the Jersey Flats

and seen the Cities of the Plain

And wallowed in the wilds of Westchester

with its roving bands of natives

in stationwagons.

I have seen them.

I am the man.   

I was there.   

I suffered

somewhat.

I am an American.

I have a passport.

I did not suffer in public.

And I’m too young to die.

I am a selfmade man.

And I have plans for the future.

I am in line   

for a top job.

I may be moving on

to Detroit.

I am only temporarily

a tie salesman.

I am a good Joe.

I am an open book

to my boss.

I am a complete mystery

to my closest friends.

I am leading a quiet life

in Mike’s Place every day   

contemplating my navel.

I am a part

of the body’s long madness.

I have wandered in various nightwoods.   

I have leaned in drunken doorways.

I have written wild stories

without punctuation.

I am the man.

I was there.   

I suffered   

somewhat.

I have sat in an uneasy chair.

I am a tear of the sun.   

I am a hill

where poets run.

I invented the alphabet

after watching the flight of cranes   

who made letters with their legs.

I am a lake upon a plain.   

I am a word

in a tree.

I am a hill of poetry.   

I am a raid

on the inarticulate.

I have dreamt

that all my teeth fell out   

but my tongue lived   

to tell the tale.

For I am a still

of poetry.

I am a bank of song.   

I am a playerpiano

in an abandoned casino   

on a seaside esplanade   

in a dense fog

still playing.

I see a similarity

between the Laughing Woman

and myself.

I have heard the sound of summer   

in the rain.

I have seen girls on boardwalks   

have complicated sensations.   

I understand their hesitations.

I am a gatherer of fruit.   

I have seen how kisses   

cause euphoria.

I have risked enchantment.   

I have seen the Virgin   

in an appletree at Chartres

And Saint Joan burn

at the Bella Union.

I have seen giraffes in junglejims

their necks like love

wound around the iron circumstances   

of the world.

I have seen the Venus Aphrodite   

armless in her drafty corridor.   

I have heard a siren sing   

at One Fifth Avenue.

I have seen the White Goddess dancing   

in the Rue des Beaux Arts   

on the Fourteenth of July   

and the Beautiful Dame Without Mercy   

picking her nose in Chumley’s.   

She did not speak English.   

She had yellow hair

and a hoarse voice

I am leading a quiet life   

in Mike’s Place every day   

watching the pocket pool players   

making the minestrone scene   

wolfing the macaronis   

and I have read somewhere   

the Meaning of Existence   

yet have forgotten

just exactly where.

But I am the man

And I’ll be there.

And I may cause the lips   

of those who are asleep   

to speak.

And I may make my notebooks   

into sheaves of grass.   

And I may write my own   

eponymous epitaph

instructing the horsemen   

to pass.

Everybody's Doing It

In Hawaii they Hula
They Tango in Argentina
They Reggae in Jamaica
And they Rumba down in Cuba,
In Trinidad and Tobago
They do the Calypso
And in Spain the Spanish
They really do Flamenco.

In the Punjab they Bhangra
How they dance Kathak in India
Over in Guatemala
They dance the sweet Marimba,
Even foxes dance a lot
They invented the Fox Trot,
In Australia it's true
They dance to the Didgeridoo.

In Kenya they Benga
They Highlife in Ghana
They dance Ballet all over
And Rai dance in Algeria,
They Jali in Mali
In Brazil they Samba
And the girls do Belly Dancing
In the northern parts of Africa.

Everybody does the Disco
From Baghdad to San Francisco
Many folk with razzamataz
Cannot help dancing to Jazz,
They do the Jig in Ireland
And it is really true
They still Morris dance in England
When they can find time to.

Sometime During Eternity...

Sometime during eternity

                                                       some guys show up   

and one of them

                      who shows up real late

                                                       is a kind of carpenter   

      from some square-type place

                                              like Galilee

          and he starts wailing

                                          and claiming he is hip

            to who made heaven

                                       and earth

                                                      and that the cat

                   who really laid it on us

                                                 is his Dad

          And moreover

             he adds

                         It’s all writ down

                                              on some scroll-type parchments   

          which some henchmen

                  leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres   

                a long time ago

                                       and which you won’t even find   

         for a coupla thousand years or so

                                                 or at least for

      nineteen hundred and fortyseven

                                                      of them

                            to be exact

                                             and even then

         nobody really believes them

                                                   or me

                                                            for that matter

          You’re hot

                         they tell him

          And they cool him

          They stretch him on the Tree to cool

                         And everybody after that

                                                               is always making models   

                                          of this Tree

                                                          with Him hung up   

          and always crooning His name

                                     and calling Him to come down   

                                 and sit in

                                                 on their combo

                           as if he is the king cat

                                                            who’s got to blow   

                      or they can’t quite make it

                      Only he don’t come down

                                                         from His Tree

          Him just hang there

                                       on His Tree

          looking real Petered out

                                          and real cool

                                                             and also

                   according to a roundup

                                                    of late world news   

             from the usual unreliable sources

                                                               real dead

The World is a Beautiful Place

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half bad
if it isn't you

Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen

and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to

Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
'living it up'
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling

mortician

The Death of the Loch Ness Monster

Consider that the thing has died before we proved it ever lived
   and that it died of loneliness, dark lord of the loch,
fathomless Worm, great Orm, this last of our mysteries -
    haifend ane meikill fin on ilk syde
     with ane taill and ane terribill heid -
and that it had no tales to tell us, only that it lived there,
     lake-locked, lost in its own coils,
waiting to be found; in the black light of midnight
     surfacing, its whole elastic length unwound,
and the sound it made as it broke the water
     was the single plucked string of a harp -
this newt or salamander, graceful as a swan,
     this water-snake, this water-horse, this water-dancer.

Consider him tired of pondering the possible existence of man
      whom he thinks he has sighted sometimes on the shore,
and rearing up from the purple churnhing water,
      weird little worm head swaying from side to side,
he denies the vision before his eyes;
      his long neck, swan of Hell, a silhouette against the moon
his green heart beating its last,
      his noble, sordid soul in ruins.

Now the mist is a blanket of doom, and we pluck from the depth
      a prize of primordial slime -
the beast who was born from some terrible ancient kiss,
      lovechild of unspeakable histories,
this ugly slug half blind no doubt, and very cold,
      his head which is horror to behold
no bigger than our own;
      whom we loath, for his kind ruled the earth before us,
who died of loneliness in a small lake in Scotland,
      and in his mind’s dark land,
where he dreamed up his luminous myths, the last of which was man.