Burning in Water, Drowing in Flame Read Online Free PDF

carwash
    a toothpull
    a wristwatch, cufflinks
    a pocket radio
    tweezers and cotton
    a cabinet full of iodine,
    not wanting cocktail parties
    a front lawn
    sing-togethers
    new shoes, Christmas presents
    life insurance, Newsweek
    162 baseball games
    a vacation in Bermuda.
    not wanting not wanting,
    and I judge the purple flowers
    better off than I
    the lizard better off
    the dark green hose
    the ever grass
    the trees the birds,
    the cats dreaming in the butter
    sun are
    better off than
    I, getting into this old coat now
    feeling for my cigarettes
    car keys
    a roadmap back,
    going out
    down the walk
    like a man to be executed
    walking toward it
    surely,
    going into it
    without guards
    driving toward it
    racing at it
    70 miles per hour,
    jockeying
    cussing
    dropping ashes
    deadly ashes of every
    deadly thing
    burning,
    the caterpillar knows less
    horror
    the armies of ants are
    braver
    the kiss of a snake
    less ravenous,
    I only want the sky
    to burn me more and more
    burn me out
    so that the sun begins at
    6 in the morning
    and goes past midnight
    like a drunken door always open,
    I drive toward it
    not wanting it
    getting it getting it
    as the cat stretches
    yawns
    and rolls over into
    another dream.
     

something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you…
     
     
    we have everything and we have nothing
    and some men do it in churches
    and some men do it by tearing butterflies
    in half
    and some men do it in Palm Springs
    laying it into butterblondes
    with Cadillac souls
    Cadillacs and butterflies
    nothing and everything,
    the face melting down to the last puff
    in a cellar in Corpus Christi.
    there’s something for the touts, the nuns,
    the grocery clerks and you…
    something at 8 a.m., something in the library
    something in the river,
    everything and nothing.
    in the slaughterhouse it comes running along
    the ceiling on a hook, and you swing it—
    one
    two
    three
    and then you’ve got it, $200 worth of dead
    meat, its bones against your bones
    something and nothing.
    it’s always early enough to die and
    it’s always too late,
    and the drill of blood in the basin white
    it tells you nothing at all
    and the gravediggers playing poker over
    5 a.m. coffee, waiting for the grass
    to dismiss the frost…
    they tell you nothing at all.
     
     
    we have everything and we have nothing—
    days with glass edges and the impossible stink
    of river moss—worse than shit;
    checkerboard days of moves and countermoves,
     
     
    fagged interest, with as much sense in defeat as
    in victory; slow days like mules
    humping it slagged and sullen and sun-glazed
    up a road where a madman sits waiting among
    bluejays and wrens netted in and sucked a flakey
    grey.
    good days too of wine and shouting, fights
    in alleys, fat legs of women striving around
    your bowels buried in moans,
    the signs in bullrings like diamonds hollering
    Mother Capri, violets coming out of the ground
    telling you to forget the dead armies and the loves
    that robbed you.
    days when children say funny and brilliant things
    like savages trying to send you a message through
    their bodies while their bodies are still
    alive enough to transmit and feel and run up
    and down without locks and paychecks and
    ideals and possessions and beetle-like
    opinions.
    days when you can cry all day long in
    a green room with the door locked, days
    when you can laugh at the breadman
    because his legs are too long, days
    of looking at hedges…
     
     
    and nothing, and nothing. the days of
    the bosses, yellow men
    with bad breath and big feet, men
    who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk
    as if melody had never been invented, men
    who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and
    profit, men with expensive wives they possess
    like 60 acres of ground to be drilled
    or shown-off or to be walled away from
    the incompetent, men who’d kill you
    because they’re crazy and justify it because
    it’s the law, men who stand in front of
    windows 30 feet wide and see nothing,
    men