Be cute.
Don't stay up all night watching
parades on the Very Very Very Late Show.
Don't ka·ka in your uniform.
And what about all the good generals,
the line old aristocratic lighting men,
the brave Junkers, the brave Rommels,
the brave von Silverhaired Ambassadors
who resigned in '41?
Wipe that smirk off your face.
Captain Marvel signed the whip contract.
Joe Palooka manufactured whips.
Li'l Abner packed the whips in cases.
The Katzenjammer Kids thought up experiments.
Mere cogs.
Peekaboo Miss Human Soap.
It never happened.
0 castles on the Rhine.
0 blond SS.
Don't believe everything you see in museums.
126 1
I said WIPE THAT SMIRK including
the mouth-foam of superior disgust.
I don't like the way you go to work every morning.
How come the buses still run?
How come they're still making movies?
I believe with a perfect faith in the Second World War.
I am convinced that it happened.
I am not so sure about the First World War.
The Spanish Civil War-maybe.
I believe in gold teeth.
I believe in Churchill.
Don't tell me we dropped fire into cribs.
I think you are exaggerating.
The Treaty of Westphalia has faded like a lipstick
smudge on the Blarney Stone.
Napoleon was a sexy brute.
Hiroshima was Made in Japan out of paper.
I think we should let sleeping ashes lie.
I believe with a perfect faith in all the history
I remember, but it's getting harder and harder
to remember much history.
There is sad confetti sprinkling
from the windows of departing trains.
I let them go. I cannot remember them.
They hoot mournfully out of my daily life.
I forget the big numbers,
I forget what they mean.
I apologize to the special photogravure section
of a I945 newspaper which began my education.
I apologize left and right.
I apologize in advance to all the folks
in this fine wide audience for my tasteless closing remarks.
I 1 27
Braun, Raubal and him
Hitler and his ladies
(I have some experience in these matters),
these three humans,
I can't get their nude and loving bodies out of my mind.
T H E B U S
I was the last passenger of the day,
I was alone on the bus,
I was glad they were spending all that money
just getting me up Eighth Avenue.
Driver! I shouted, it's you and me tonight,
let's run away from this big city
to a smaller city more suitable to the heart,
let's drive past the swimming pools of Miami Beach,
you in the driver's seat, me several seats back,
but in the racial cities we'll change places
so as to show how well you've done up North,
and let us find ourselves some tiny American fishing village
in unknown Florida
and park right at the edge of the sand,
a huge bus pointing out,
metallic, painted, solitary,
with New York plates.
uB 1
T H E R E S T I S D R O S S
We meet at a hotel
with many quarters for the radio
surprised that we've survived as lovers
not each other's
but lovers still
with outrageous hope and habits in the craft
which embarrass us slightly
as we let them be known
the special caress the perfect inflammatory word
the starvation we do not tell about
We do what only lovers can
make a gift out of necessity
Looking at our clothes
folded over the chair
I see we no longer follow fashion
and we own our own skins
God I'm happy we've forgotten nothing
and can love each other
for years in the world
1 129
H O W T H E W I N T E R G E T S I N
I ask you where you want to go
you say nowhere
but your eyes make a wish
An absent chiropractor
you stroke my wrist
I'm almost fooled into
greasy circular snores
when I notice your eyes
sounding the wall for
dynamite points
like a doctor at work on a TB chest
Nowhere you say again in a kiss
go to sleep
First tell me your wish
Your lashes startle on my skin
like a seismograph
An airliner's perishing drone
pulls the wall off our room
like an old Band-aid
The winter comes in
and the eyes I don't keep
tie themselves to a journey
like wedding tin cans
Ways Mills
November z963
P R O P A G A N D A
The coherent statement was made
by father, the gent with spats to
keep his shoes secret. It had to
do with the nature of religion and
the progress of lust in the twentieth
century. I myself have several
statements of a competitive
coherence which I intend to spread
around at no little expense. I
love the eternal moment, for
instance. My father used to remark,
doffing his miniature medals, that
there is a time that is ripe for
everything. A little extravagant,
Dad, I guess, judging by values.
Oh well, he'd say, and the whole
world might have been the address.
O P I U M A N D H I T L E R
Several faiths
bid him leapopium and Hitler
let him sleep.
A Negress with
an appetite
helped him think
he wasn't white.
Opium and Hitler
made him sure
the world was glass.
There was no cure
for matter
disarmed as this:
the state rose on
a festered kiss.
Once a dream
nailed on the sky
a summer sun
while it was high.
He wanted a
blindfold of skin,
he wanted the
afternoon to begin.
One law brokennothing held.
The world was wax,
his to mould.
Nol He fumbled
for his history dose.
The sun came loose,
his woman dose.
Lost in a darkness
their bodies would reach,
the Leader started
a racial speech.
I 133
F O R A N Y O N E D R E S S E D I N M A R B L E
The miracle we all are waiting for
is waiting till the Parthenon falls down
and House of Birthdays is a house no more
and fathers are unpoisoned by renown.
The medals and the records of abuse
can't help us on our pilgrimage to lust,
but like whips certain perverts never use,
compel our flesh in
