Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems Read online

  or our backs, any longer: baby,

  find another Eden, another apple tree,

  somewhere, if you can,

  and find some other natives, somewhere else,

  to listen to you bellow

  till you come, just like a man,

  but we don’t need you,

  are sick of being a fantasy to feed you,

  and of being the principal accomplice to your

  crime:

  for, it is your crime, now, the cross to which you

  cling,

  your Alpha and Omega for everything.

  Well (others have told you)

  your clown’s grown weary, the puppet master

  is bored speechless with this monotonous disaster,

  and is long gone, does not belong to you,

  any more than my woman, or my child,

  ever belonged to you.

  During this long travail

  our ancestors spoke to us, and we listened,

  and we tried to make you hear life in our song

  but now it matters not at all to me

  whether you know what I am talking about – or not:

  I know why we are not blinded

  by your brightness, are able to see you,

  who cannot see us. I know

  why we are still here.

  Godspeed.

  The niggers are calculating,

  from day to day, life everlasting,

  and wish you well:

  but decline to imitate the Son of the Morning,

  and rule in Hell.

  Song

  (for Skip)

  1

  I believe, my brother,

  that some are haunted by a song,

  all day, and all the midnight long:

  I’m going to tell

  God

  how you treated

  Me:

  one of these days.

  Now, if that song tormented me,

  I could have no choice but be

  winter than a bleaching bone

  of all the ways there are,

  this must be the most dreadful

  way to be alone.

  White rejects light

  while blackness drinks it in

  becoming many colours

  and stone holds heat

  while grass smothers

  and flowers die

  and the sleeping snake

  is hacked to pieces

  while digesting his

  (so to speak)

  three-martini lunch.

  Dread stalks our streets,

  and our faces.

  Many races

  gather, again,

  to despise and disperse

  and destroy us:

  nor can they any longer pretend

  to be looking for a friend.

  That dream was sold

  when we were,

  on the auction-block

  of Manifest Destiny.

  Time is not money.

  Time

  is

  time.

  And the time has come, again,

  to outwit and outlast

  survive and surmount

  the authors of the blasphemy

  of our chains.

  At least, we know a

  man, when we see one,

  a shackle, when we wear one,

  or a chain, when we bear one,

  a noose from a halter,

  or a pit from an altar.

  We, who have been blinded,

  are not blind

  and sense when not to

  trust the mind.

  Time is not money.

  Time is time.

  You made the money.

  We made the rhyme.

  Our children are.

  Our children are.

  Our children are:

  which means that we must be

  the pillar of cloud by day

  and of fire by night:

  the guiding star.

  2

  My beloved brother,

  I know your walk

  and love to hear you

  talk that talk

  while your furrowed brow

  grows young with wonder,

  like a small boy, staring at the thunder.

  I see you, somehow,

  about the age of ten,

  determined to enter the world of men,

  yet, not too far from your mother’s lap,

  wearing your stunning

  baseball cap.

  Perhaps, then, around eleven,

  wondering what to take as given,

  and, not much later, going through

  the agony bequeathed to you.

  Then, spun around, then going under,

  the small boy staring at the thunder.

  Then, take it all

  and use it well

  this manhood, calculating

  through this hell.

  3

  Who says better? Who knows more

  than those who enter at that door

  called back

  for Black,

  by Christians, who

  raped your mother

  and, then, lynched you,

  seed from their loins,

  flesh of their flesh,

  bone of their bone:

  what an interesting way

  to be alone!

  Time is not money:

  time is time.

  And a man is a man, my brother,

  and a crime remains

  a crime.

  The time our fathers bought for us

  resides in a place no man can reach

  except he be prepared

  to disintegrate himself into atoms,

  into smashed fragments of bleaching bone,

  which is, indeed, the great temptation

  beckoning this disastrous nation.

  It may, indeed, precisely, be

  all that they claim as History.

  Those who required, of us, a song,

  know that their hour is not long.

  Our children are

  the morning star.

  Munich, Winter 1973

  (for Y.S.)

  In a strange house,

  a strange bed

  in a strange town,

  a very strange me

  is waiting for you.

  Now

  it is very early in the morning.

  The silence is loud.

  The baby is walking about

  with his foaming bottle,

  making strange sounds

  and deciding, after all,

  to be my friend.

  You

  arrive tonight.

  How dull time is!

  How empty – and yet,

  since I am sitting here,

  lying here,

  walking up and down here,

  waiting,

  I see

  that time’s cruel ability

  to make one wait

  is time’s reality.

  I see your hair

  which I call red.

  I lie here in this bed.

  Someone teased me once,

  a friend of ours –

  saying that I saw your hair red

  because I was not thinking

  of the hair on your head.

  Someone also told me,

  a long time ago:

  my father said to me,

  It is a terrible thing,

  son,

  to fall into the hands of the living God.

  Now,

  I know what he was saying.

  I could not have seen red

  before finding myself

  in this strange, this waiting bed.

  Nor had my naked eye suggested

  that colour was created

  by the light falling, now,

  on me,

  in this strange bed,

  waiting

  where no one has ever rested
!

  The streets, I observe,

  are wintry.

  It feels like snow.

  Starlings circle in the sky,

  conspiring,

  together, and alone,

  unspeakable journeys

  into and out of the light.

  I know

  I will see you tonight.

  And snow

  may fall

  enough to freeze our tongues

  and scald our eyes.

  We may never be found again!

  Just as the birds above our heads

  circling

  are singing,

  knowing

  that, in what lies before them,

  the always unknown passage,

  wind, water, air,

  the failing light

  the falling night

  the blinding sun

  they must get the journey done.

  Listen.

  They have wings and voices

  are making choices

  are using what they have.

  They are aware

  that, on long journeys,

  each bears the other,

  whirring,

  stirring

  love occurring

  in the middle of the terrifying air.

  The giver

  (for Berdis)

  If the hope of giving

  is to love the living,

  the giver risks madness

  in the act of giving.

  Some such lesson I seemed to see

  in the faces that surrounded me.

  Needy and blind, unhopeful, unlifted,

  what gift would give them the gift to be gifted?

  The giver is no less adrift

  than those who are clamouring for the gift.

  If they cannot claim it, if it is not there,

  if their empty fingers beat the empty air

  and the giver goes down on his knees in prayer

  knows that all of his giving has been for naught

  and that nothing was ever what he thought

  and turns in his guilty bed to stare

  at the starving multitudes standing there

  and rises from bed to curse at heaven,

  he must yet understand that to whom much is given

  much will be taken, and justly so:

  I cannot tell how much I owe.

  3.00 a.m.

  (for David)

  Two black boots,

  on the floor,

  figuring out what the walking’s for.

  Two black boots,

  now, together,

  learning the price of the stormy weather.

  To say nothing of the wear and tear

  on

  the mother-fucking

  leather.

  The darkest hour

  The darkest hour

  is just before the dawn,

  and that, I see,

  which does not guarantee

  power to draw the next breath,

  nor abolish the suspicion

  that the brightest hour

  we will ever see

  occurs just before we cease

  to be.

  Imagination

  Imagination

  creates the situation,

  and, then, the situation

  creates imagination.

  It may, of course,

  be the other way around:

  Columbus was discovered

  by what he found.

  Confession

  Who knows more

  of Wanda, the wan,

  than I do?

  And who knows more

  of Terry, the torn,

  than I do?

  And who knows more

  than I do

  of Ziggy, the Zap,

  fleeing the rap,

  using his eyes and teeth

  to spring the trap,

  than I do!

  Or did.

  Good Lord, forbid

  that morning’s acre,

  held in the palm of the hand,

  one’s fingers helplessly returning

  dust to dust,

  the dust crying out,

  triumphantly,

  take her!

  Oh, Lord,

  can these bones live?

  I think, Yes,

  then I think, No:

  being witness to a blow

  delivered outside of time,

  witness to a crime

  which time

  is, in no way whatever,

  compelled to see,

  not being burdened with sight:

  like me.

  Oh, I watch Wanda,

  Wanda, the wan,

  making love with her pots,

  and her frying pan:

  feeding her cats,

  who, never, therefore,

  dream of catching the rats

  who bar

  her not yet barred

  and most unusual door.

  The cats make her wan,

  a cat

  (no matter how you cut him)

  not being a man,

  or a woman, either.

  And, yet,

  at that,

  better than nothing:

  But

  nothing is not better than nothing:

  nothing is nothing,

  just like

  everything is everything

  (and you better believe it).

  And,

  Terry, the torn,

  wishes he’d never been born

  because he was found sucking a cock

  in the shadow of a Central Park rock.

  The cock was black,

  like Terry,

  and the killing, healing,

  thrilling thing

  was in nothing resembling a hurry:

  came, just before the cops came,

  and was long gone,

  baby,

  out of that park,

  while the cops were writing down Terry’s name.

  Well.

  Birds do it.

  Bees endlessly do it.

  Cats leap jungles

  cages and ages

  to keep on doing it

  and even survive

  overheated apartments

  and canned cat-food

  doing it to each other

  all day long.

  It is one of the many forms of love,

  and, even in the cat kingdom,

  of survival:

  but Wanda never looked

  and Terry didn’t think he was a cat

  and he was right about that.

  Enter Ziggy, the Zap,

  having taken the rap

  for a friend,

  fearing he was facing the end,

  but very cool about it,

  he thought,

  selling

  what others bought

  (he thought).

  But Wanda had left the bazaar

  tricked by a tricky star.

  She knew nothing of distance,

  less of light,

  the star vanished

  and down came night.

  Wanda thought this progression natural.

  Refusing to moan,

  she began to drink

  far too alone

  to dare to think.

  I watch her open door.

  She thinks that she wishes

  to be a whore.

  But whoredom is hard work,

  stinks far too much of the real,

  is as ruthless as a turning wheel,

  and who knows more

  of this

  than I do?

  Oh,

  and Ziggy, the Zap,

  who took the rap,

  raps on

  to his fellow prisoners

  in the cell he never left

  and will never leave.

  You’d best believe

  it’s cold outside.

  Nobody

&nb
sp; wants to go where

  nothing is everything

  and everything adds up

  to nothing.

  Better to slide

  into the night

  cling to the memory

  of the shameful rock

  which watched as the shameful act occurred

  yet spoke no warning

  said not a word.

  And who knows more

  of shame, and rocks,

  than I do?

  Oh,

  and Wanda, the wan,

  will never forgive her sky.

  That’s why the old folks say

  (and who knows better than I?)

  we will understand it

  better

  by and by.

  My Lord.

  I understand it,

  now:

  the why is not the how.

  My Lord,

  Author of the whirlwind,

  and the rainbow,

  Co-author of death,

  giver and taker of breath

  (Yes, every knee must bow),

  I understand it

  now:

  the why is not the how.

  Le sporting-club de Monte Carlo

  (for Lena Horne)

  The lady is a tramp

  a camp

  a lamp

  The lady is a sight

  a might

  a light

  the lady devastated

  an alley or two

  reverberated through the valley

  which leads to me, and you

  the lady is the apple

  of God’s eye:

  He’s cool enough about it

  but He tends to strut a little

  when she passes by

  the lady is a wonder

  daughter of the thunder

  smashing cages

  legislating rages

  with the voice of ages

  singing us through.

  Some days

  (for Paula)

  1

  Some days worry

  some days glad

  some days

  more than make you

  mad.

  Some days,

  some days, more than

  shine:

  when you see what’s coming

  on down the line!

  2