“I was left with myself and had to do the one thing I could to survive. I knew it would be difficult to write, very difficult, but I set about doing it.”

“Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.”

I’m frightened. You too?

I gather you were in the lobby 
Minutes before. 
Terrifying to almost see you again.   

The crocodile is eating the new barman! 
There’s a leg sticking out of its mouth.
Waiter, I’d like another one while I take in this gorgeous sunset.

I was walking down Roupell Street,
Avoiding all the drunks.
I live in a little house 

The ringing telephone sobs to be picked up and when I do 
It’s someone I love but don’t see anymore,
Calling from her car to ask 

My God, what a beautiful New York day!
If only getting old would go away!
Wings that used to lift me like a hawk

Each of us is also a ghost. 
Most you can see.
They look like the person you are.

I like to be dead.
That’s what the dead say.
I’d rather be dead than so-called alive.

This is a different sort of space race.
To the stars through adversity!
A right hook to the jaw, and the planet sees stars!

When even getting a haircut seems too much,
And trimming your toenails and fingernails takes too much strength,
When more than you have is what’s required,

Bring back the all-girls boarding schools for pedigreed girls
Where, morning and night, girls dressed and undressed.
Luxurious lawns and trees rode to hounds.

I wake each morning
To the sound of awful coughing   
Coming from the street

A man walks briskly away from his body
And from feeling slightly sick on a blazingly fall day.
The sky is fresh perfection, without a cloud of illness.

Some people say sex is like riding a rainbow.
Maybe theirs is.
I say I fall on a grenade each time.

Suddenly I’m ready to eat the world,
Starting with the food on my plate.
The waiter asks if everything’s all right.

I wear a suicide belt I detonate
And make my City of Light 
A coprophagic tomb. 

A man unzipping his fly is vulnerable to attack.
Then the zipper got stuck.
An angel flies in the window to unstick it.

I had a stroke and I’m not me.
I’ve been disfigured horribly.
Little did you know that I

The man ejaculates a blood-red rose.
The woman looks on in astonishment.
The sun pours in

The technician squeezes the bulb to tighten the cuff
To take my blood pressure for a second time today
Next to the professional scales I stood on that showed I weighed enough

You wonder who in the world are the people who actually use stool cards.
They’re the very same scum who sell drugs to little kids in school yards.
The doctor tells you do this, do that.

On the other side of the street, the buildings sit on smoke,
About to lift off—it’s spring!
Cosmonauts and astronauts comfortably in their apartments in armchairs

I don’t read.
I read Rilke and bleed.

Plop the live lobster into boiling water and let it scream.
You both turn red. 
Of course you have to eat it dead. 

Snow is falling on Broadway 
Through weeping willows of fog.
I know that my Redeemer liveth  

I’m a stallion standing in my stable stall asleep.  
Horses do that and their standing sleep is deep.
A woman with a whip waits for me to wake

At seventy-seven I reached my prime.
But seventy-eight was also absolutely great.
And then came fab seventy-nine and continuing to climb.

I’m from St. Louis and Budweiser.
I’m from the Seidel Coal and Coke Company and the Mississippi.
I’m from the old streets near Forest Park,

I live a life of appetite and, yes, that’s right,
I live a life of privilege in New York,

You’re born that way—or else you’re not.
It’s snowing—or else it’s hot.
It’s like the strangeness, that’s also natural,

Putting my lenses in, I see No Man’s Land in the mirror—
Which makes me think of times in Tokyo so long ago 
When, on some subway station platform, in a crowd,

I turn into the man they photograph.
I think I’ll ask him for his autograph.

The time is coming when it won’t be maintenance.
The time is coming when it won’t be minimal.
I walk with my long-dead dog up a hill.

I have a friend who has a friend 
Who asked her to place her hand
And place a flower on Samuel Beckett’s grave

I’m going out for a stroll and a bite and won’t take myself with me.
Look after me while I’m gone, will you.

The city sleeps with the lights on.
The insomniac wants it to be morning.

I move my body meat smell next to yours,
Your spice of Zanzibar. Mine rains, yours pours—
Sex tropics as a way to not be dead.

This is what it’s like at the end of the day.
But soon the day will go away.

And says huskily, “Don’t tell anybody
I said that your carotid is extraordinary.”

 

I walk on water in my poems, using the lily pads
Of the sidewalk homeless as stepping-stones.

The second woman shines my shoes.
The other takes my order, curtsies. Thank you, sir.
Others stand there in the rain so I can mount them when I choose.

A shiver of lightning buckles the sidewalk.
Love cracks my sternum open

How lonely to be understood
And have to kill, how lovely.

Excuse me a minute.
The angel is black as a crow.

Believed only in art.
Believed in tête-à-têtes.
Believed in walks to the top of the hill.

 

A Narrator will read the numbers and text aloud starting with this statement:

1. Three spotlighted women stand stage center on an otherwise dark stage. Two of them elegantly dressed in black, the third naked. All are white-haired, in their fifties or older.

It sang without a sound: music that
The naive elm trees loved. They were alive.
Oh silky music no elm tree could survive.

The honey, the humming of a million bees,
In the middle of Florence pining for Paris;
The whining trembling the cars and trucks hum

Gulls spiral high above
The porch tiles and my gulf-green, 
Cliff-hanging lawn, with their 

Look how the sunlight enters the bedroom and my dream. / Look how the radio alarm attacks me with an ax.

A man unzipping his fly is vulnerable to attack.
Then the zipper got stuck.
An angel flies in the window to unstick it.
A drone was monitoring all this
In real time
And it appears on a monitor on Mars,
Though of course with a relay delay.
One of the …