POEMS
Empty the parochial schools tonight, and mate
The clean girls with the vigorous boys.
Let the pale librarian lost in the index
Tum on her doorstep and call her unhappy departing lover
And give him that which he pleads for.
The drunken boy shrieks in the fist of life.
The woman turns on the carbolic bed.
Her legs snap open like a pocket knife.
A roaring company of drunks and fools
Stand in the air,
And their teeth fixed with golden caps
And their fingers ringed with cheap jewels,
Take the boy into their violent ideas of fun.
He plunges with them into the abyss
And rides with them the diseased horses of the sun.
There in that world the freak is an athlete
And the dwarf a giant in his own desire.
He endures with them the stevedore's short ecstasy
And his hair stands upright and his toenails seem on fire.
The woman moves and his legs are wet.
Across the room an inexplicable shadow passes.
He smells the odors of flesh and soaps and sweat.
Down down down down down
As though the flight of stairs had no end.
She calls down the bannister, good night, honey,
Come again. And bring a friend.
Turns back to tuck away her money.
What fond father turns uneasily in bed
And awakens thinking of his absent son?
Is there a civic bureau spends a restless night?
Again the bull-lunged foghorn blows.
The drunken boy whimpers in a world of men,
Then stumbles homewards,
His body vomiting tears inside his clothes.
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