Last night I dreamed I ran through the streets of New York Looking for help for you, Nicanor. But my few friends who are rich or influential were temporarily absent from their penthouses or hotel suites. They had gone to the opera, or flown for the weekend to Bermuda. At last I found one or two of them at home, preparing for social engagements, absently smiling, as they tried on gown after gown
As the dead prey upon us, they are the dead in ourselves, awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you, disentangle the nets of being!
I pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused. I thought the tires looked as though they only needed air. But suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires were masses of rubber and thread variously clinging together
Back in the early fifties el Chonito and I were on the Way to the bote when we heard the following dialogue:
Police car radio:Pachuco rumble in progress in front of Lyceum Theatre. Sanger gang crossing tracks heading for Chinatown. Looks big this time. All available Westside units . . .
Cop to partner driving car: Take your time. Let ’em wipe each other out.
Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains. The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads. But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child You shout, 'The swifts are back!'
Sure enough, bolt nocks bow to carry one sky-scyther Two hundred miles an hour across fullblown windfields. Swereee swereee. Another. And another. It's the cut air falling in shrieks on our chimneys and roofs.
The messenger runs, not carrying the news of victory, or defeat; the messenger, unresting, has always been running, the wind before and behind him, across the turning back of earth, leaving his tracks across the plains, his ropes hanging from the ledges of mountains; for centuries, millennia, he has been running carrying whatever it is that cannot be
Four white heifers with sprawling hooves trundle the waggon. Its ill-roped crates heavy with fruit sway. The chisel point of the goad, blue and white, glitters ahead, a flame to follow lance-high in a man’s hand who does not shave. His linen trousers like him want washing.
People getting divorced riding around with their clothes in the car and wondering what happened to everyone and everything including their other pair of shoes And if you spy one then who knows what happened
A few years back and they told me Black means a hole where other folks got brain/it was like the cells in the heads of Black children was out to every hour on the hour naps Scientists called the phenomenon the Notorious Jensen Lapse, remember? Anyway I was thinking about how to devise
Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear my head about this poem about why I can’t go out without changing my clothes my shoes my body posture my gender identity my age my status as a woman alone in the evening/ alone on the streets/alone not being the point/ the point being that I can’t do what I want to do with my own body because I am the wrong
Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy, Until I labour, I in labour lie. The foe oft-times having the foe in sight, Is tir’d with standing though he never fight. Off with that girdle, like heaven’s Zone glistering, But a far fairer world encompassing. Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear, That th’eyes of busy fools may be stopped there. Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime, Tells me from you, that now it is bed time. Off with that happy busk, which I envy, That still can be, and still can stand so nigh. Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals, As when from flowery meads th’hill’s shadow steals. Off with that wiry Coronet and shew
My brother comes home from work and climbs the stairs to our room. I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop one by one. You can have it, he says.
The moonlight streams in the window and his unshaven face is whitened like the face of the moon. He will sleep long after noon and waken to find me gone.
the weather is hot on the back of my watch which is down at Finkelstein’s who is gifted with 3 balls but no heart, but you’ve got to understand when the bull goes down on the whore, the heart is laid aside for something else, and let’s not over-rate the obvious decency for in a crap game you may be cutting down
[FOR WARREN WINSLOW, DEAD AT SEA] Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts of the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. I
The house in Broad Street, red brick, with nine rooms the weedgrown graveyard with its rows of tombs the jail from which imprisoned faces grinned at stiff palmettos flashing in the wind
the engine-house, with engines, and a tank in which young alligators swam and stank, the bell-tower, of red iron, where the bell gonged of the fires in a tone from hell
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