Angst
a moment, Delmore. We drank and eyed
The chicken-hearted shadows of the world.
Underseas fellows, nobly mad,
we talked away our friends. "Let Joyce and Freud,
the Masters of Joy,
be
our guests here," you said. The room was filled
with cigarette smoke circling the paranoid,
inert gaze of Coleridge, back
from Malta-his eyes lost in flesh, lips baked and black.
Your tiger kitten,
Oranges,
cartwheeled for joy in a ball of snarls.
You said:
"We poets in our youth begin in sadness;
thereof in the end come despondency and madness;
Stalin has had two cerebral hemorrhages!"
The Charles
River was turning silver. In the ebb–
light of morning, we stuck
the duck
-s' web-
foot, like a candle, in a quart of gin we'd killed.
"TO SPEAK OF THE WOE THAT IS IN MARRIAGE"
"It is the future generation that presses into
being by means of these exuberant feelings and
supersensible soap bubbles of ours."
--Schopenhauer
The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.
My hopped-up husband drops
his
home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor's edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
