Two PoemsLet’s Watch This Liver-Colored Devil
LET’S watch this liver-colored devil, making his way down Lovers’ Lane.
I want to watch him walk up the wall at the dead end of Lovers’ Lane.Let the wicked man and the wicked woman shut their complaining mouths.
I shall come round to them presently, shall give them a pond in which to mate.They are dreaming, these uplifters. They look for great things from a foolish people.
They are still operating at the level of “the truth shall set you free.”Let the poet boy write his own language, and I don’t mean his mother tongue.
Let him write the language that results from having his precious ego SOCKED in the eye.I used to think I favored the old horsetrader’s attitude towards beauty:
A squinting, shrewd, and capitalist eye.—What a lie!I came back to NYU and said, “New York: always something to look at.”
And I meant one enslaving beautygirl after another.Ah, the lewd toddler’s a natural thief, and whatever he steals he puts in his mouth.
He is perpetually finding pearls to pop into his obscenely white oral oyster.A book is a dead thing: take it to bed, you’re asleep in a minute.
Whereas, if a friend is lying next to you, talking—you stay up all the night.That’s the way to write, MADRID! Be like a pillow-talking friend—
No More Epigrams Against Sluts
A good friend, full of question and answer, head propped up on one hand . . .
NO more epigrams against sluts. For it galls me to have to hear
These pig men and buccaneers complaining against every little unauthorized blowjob.In my village, hoarding wisdom is forbidden; it’s considered criminal
To pile up supplies you yourself can never use.The science of subdivision, of cutting things up smaller and smaller,
Tells us there’s an almost-eternity between the needleprick and the sting.We put a glue-trapped mouse in a bag, press it still, and give it one hammerstroke.
Is no one provoked by the thought that we’re creating an eternity of pain—?There is another kind of obsessional flirting: got nothing to do with sex.
It has to do with trying to toggle the balance of authority.I have no objection to people’s being fascinated by beauty; I object
To the way people respect it, the way they fall silent in its presence.Men are in all things perverse! They neigh like Buggeranthes to jam
The three-pronged electrical plug into the double-dimpled outlet.But where the wire staves of a whisk intersect is filth and corrosion’s worksite.
Likewise, the shadow one casts on oneself is Wicked Cupid’s bull’s-eye . . .MADRID you will not escape censure, for all your hide-and-seek irony.
The very ambiguity is obnoxious.