“Oh yeah? Well, I’ve nothing to hide ... OUT!”
“It’s not my fault! I’m not the cause of it all!”
“OUT!”
Then Beauty ... ah, Beauty—
... but you’re a killer; Beauty kills!”
there was no money to throw out.
“I’m just a rumor spread by life ... ”
Writ on the Eve of My 32nd Birthday
a slow thoughtful spontaneous poem
by Gregory Corso
I am 32 years old
and finally I look my age, if not more.
Is it a good face what’s no more a boy’s face?
It seems fatter. And my hair,
it’s stopped being curly. Is my nose big?
The lips are the same.
And the eyes, ah the eyes get better all the time.
32 and no wife, no baby; no baby hurts,
but there’s
lots of time.
I don’t act silly any more.
And because of it I have to hear from so-called friends:
“You’ve changed. You used to be so crazy so great.”
They are not comfortable with me when I’m serious.
Let them go to the Radio City Music Hall.
32; saw all of Europe, met millions of people;
was great for some,
terrible for others.
I remember my 31st year when I cried:
“To think I may have to go another 31 years!”
I don’t feel that way this birthday.
I feel I want to be wise with white hair in a tall library
in a deep chair by
a fireplace.
Another year in which I stole nothing.
8 years now and haven’t stole a thing!
I stopped stealing!
But I still lie at times,
and still am shameless yet ashamed when it comes
to asking for money.
32 years old and four hard real funny sad bad wonderful
books of poetry
—the world owes me a million dollars.
I think I had a pretty weird 32 years.
And it weren’t up to me, none of it.
No choice of two roads; if there were,
I don’t doubt
I’d have chosen both.
I like to think chance had it I play the bell.
The clue, perhaps, is in my unabashed declaration:
“I’m good example there’s such a thing as called soul.”
I love poetry because it makes me love
and presents me life.
And of all the fires that die in me,
there’s one burns like the sun;
it might not make day my personal life,
my association with
people,
or my behavior toward
society,
but it does tell me my soul has a shadow.
--------------------------------------------------------------
The Bad Old Days
by Kenneth Rexroth
The summer of nineteen eighteen
I read The Jungle and The
Research Magnificent. That fall
My father died and my aunt
Took me to Chicago to live.
The first thing I did was to take
A streetcar to the stockyards.
In the winter afternoon,
Gritty and fetid, I walked
Through the filthy snow, through the
Squalid streets, looking shyly
Into the people’s faces,
Those who were home in the daytime.
Debauched and exhausted faces,
Starved and looted brains, faces
Like the faces in the senile
And insane wards of charity
Hospitals. Predatory
Faces of little children.
Then as the soiled twilight darkened,
Under the green gas lamps, and the
Sputtering purple arc lamps,
The faces of the men coming
Home from work, some still alive with
The last pulse of hope or courage,
Some sly and bitter, some smart and
Silly, most of them already
Broken and empty, no life,
Only blinding tiredness, worse
Than any tired animal.
The sour smells of a thousand
Suppers of fried potatoes and
Fried cabbage bled into the street.
I was giddy and sick, and out
Of my misery I felt rising
A terrible anger and out
Of the anger, an absolute vow.
Today the evil is clean
And prosperous, but it is
Everywhere, you don’t have to
Take a streetcar to find it,
And it is the same evil.
And the misery, and the
Anger, and the vow are the same.
--------------------------------------------
A Letter to Yvor Winters
by Kenneth Rexroth
Again tonight I read “Before Disaster,”
The tense memento of a will
That’s striven thirty years to master
One chaos with one spirit’s skill.
As usual, disaster has returned.
Its public and its private round
Are narrow enough—we will have learned
Them quite by heart before we’re underground.
Tonight Orion walks above my head
While I pace out my human mile;
At noon the same immeasurable tread
Will move toward Atlas from the Nile.
He too returns upon his ordered path,
While change seeps through his interstellar veins—
The Bull before him in immobile wrath,
The sword and cloud of light against his reins.
These thin imagos that abide decay,
The minds of Winters, Rexroth, and their like,
To fight these senile beasts what else have they
Than “clouds of unknowing,”
Swords that shall not strike?
----------------------------------------
A Valentine for Ben Franklin Who Drives a Truck in California
by Diane Wakoski
I cut the deck
and found a magician
driving a mack truck
down the California grapevine.
His eyes were glistening Japanese beetles,
and his hands were surveyors of the moon.
He pulled a carnation
out of his sleeve,
and offered me a ride.
I took the flower and said I was leaving
to be an illusionist. He said
he specialized in cards
and sleight of hand.
I touched his mouth and ears
with my lips,
“Keep on truckin,”
I said.
But he laughed and told me a bedtime story.
His body was an elm.
His mouth was filled with grapes.
His hands turned my body into new honey.
Now I am home alone,
reading directions
for sawing a beautiful woman in half.
First you start with a mirror . . . .
Before I turn down
the crisp sheets of my bed,
I shuffle the tarot deck.
But the magician is missing.
Is he
still driving the freeways of California?
Or is he
only an illusion
in my own
magician’s
head?
-----------------------------------------------------
Belly Dancer
by Diane Wakoski
Can these movements which move themselves
be the substance of my attraction?
Where does this thin green silk come from that covers my body?
Surely any woman wearing such fabrics
would move her body just to feel them touching every part of her.
Yet most of the women frown, or look away, or laugh stiffly.
They are afraid of these materials and these movements
in some way.
The psychologists would say they are afraid of themselves, somehow.
Perhaps awakening too much desire—
that their men could never satisfy?
So they keep themselves laced and buttoned and made up
in hopes that the framework will keep them stiff enough not to feel
the whole register.
In hopes that they will not have to experience that unquenchable
desire for rhythm and contact.
If a snake glided across this floor
most of them would faint or shrink away.
Yet that movement could be their own.
That smooth movement frightens them—
awakening ancestors and relatives to the tips of the arms and toes.
So my bare feet
and my thin green silks
my bells and finger cymbals
offend them—frighten their old-young bodies.
While the men simper and leer—
glad for the vicarious experience and exercise.
They do not realize how I scorn them;
or how I dance for their frightened,
unawakened, sweet
women.
----------------------------------------------------
Uneasy Rider
by Diane Wakoski
Falling in love with a mustache
is like saying
you can fall in love with
the way a man polishes his shoes
which,
of course,
is one of the things that turns on
my tuned-up engine
those trim buckled boots
(I feel like an advertisement
for men’s fashions
when I think of your ankles)
Yeats was hung up with a girl’s beautiful face
and I find myself
a bad moralist,
a failing aesthetician,
a sad poet,
wanting to touch your arms and feel the muscles
that make a man’s body have so much substance,
that makes a woman
lean and yearn in that direction
that makes her melt/ she is a rainy day
in your presence
the pool of wax under a burning candle
the foam from a waterfall
You are more beautiful than any Harley-Davidson
She is the rain,
waits in it for you,
finds blood spotting her legs
from the long ride.
