Fucking, poetry, Don Yorty, Janis Joplin, John Keats, Life Cafe

Fucking V: I’ve smoked a thousand cigarettes and watched you sleep

Fucking

for Janis

V

I’ve smoked a thousand cigarettes and watched you sleep.
Your Raphael angel curls Your bee stung lips
Dare I touch you where the sun hasn’t? Dare I say wake?
There is the smell of pepper in your armpits but not rank.
About your thighs and tendrils is the smell of moss in late August
when everything is close and green and out of my pocket
I take a harmonica to serenade the nothingness
to lean against a tree. I play an ancient tragedy
a blues best heard sung by black women or Janis Joplin
who once lived told that she was ugly and repulsed men.
In the needing to forget that, in the drinking and the fucking
that away Janis is gone one day but for her voice that sings
on records as they spin the clearest and most precious pain
it always brings me joy:

Love comes to me, not me to Love.
That’s how it is, it can’t be helped
Love is my master because Love is all I’m after.
Last night Love treat me right but came home tonight
drunk, blackened my eye, knocked out two of my teeth
now’s gone to be with somebody else instead of me
while I weep till I’m weak for a week
but when Love comes back oh Lord Love’s sweet
Love’s paradise, I’ve never had it so nice
laying with Love in bed with Love and it’s night
Love strikes a match and Love’s light
when Love’s face comes out of the dark
puffing on a cigarette Love hands to me
so I puff on it and glows the red tip.

When there’s light, I look, when it’s dark, I touch
and all about’s tobacco smoke, tobacco smoke.
Sometimes I get so drunk, I throw up or I shoot up
nod out. No, nobody wants much, they just want to fuck
so fuck them I say and I fuck them. Anyway
if I’m Love’s slave when Love comes knocking
wanting in, it’s me lifts the latch and lets Love in.
I choose to sing the blues.
The booze I choose. I pick what shit I shoot.
Love comes and Love goes so let Love control.
Those who control never can roam
but must stay at home, don’t do what they want
just hold down the fort with their rifles out
on the lookout for feathers on the horizon
that grow into the heads of Indians
with faces painted and war whooping
growing larger coming at them
with those feathers in their braids got
when they chopped up the hen they caught pleading
covering her eggs in her nest with her wings.
You don’t fly if you’re not high and you’re not high
if you hold the kite by the string and it’s you who’s turning the thing
but you’re not the thing turning up through the windy distances
almost unseeable and out of your reach
though I spin through the air at the flick of your wrist
Love, holder of my reins, you must stay holding them.
Where you are right now this hour there you’ll be tomorrow
so soon you’re just a bore. I want it different than before.
Here are some chains. Go hang me on the wall.
And here’s all kinds of nails, a whip. Can you do it?

Janis, despite it all: earthquakes and what comes after
quick slit in earth like opening legs split into chasm
I envy your multiple orgasm
and think of it when sliding a needle into my vein
where after booting I nod off in waves
to the beautiful landscape of impossible dreams.
I really seem to cream a flock of cherubim that flutter
rub me all over with oils, sweet warm butter, tongue licks
and lightly fingertips: I’m coming over the ocean up in the blue sky
into the sunlight that white light so bright light of worlds and skies
all seas of feeling where every creature in me living knows it.
Nothing’s concealed, all is revealed
like I’ve imagined it to be at a successful orgy
though orgies I’ve attended never got anywhere:
a room full of fucking still boils down to pairs.
You can take it as far as a ménage à trois
but after that forget it, Jack:
four people in bed are two couples instead.
The secret’s in three; three can touch three
and that’s endless energy, the power is mighty
but when you’ve more than three
someone’s not touching somebody
and if you get involved with too many
you have to know geography, mathematics and choreography.
To be comfortably fucked while you’re fucking is a goal worth having.
To shoot and be what you’re shooting that would be something.
I’ve had a fight with Amphetamines.
When Speed comes knocking I’m not around;
Speed lifts me up to put me down
but I’ve got a thing for Heroin;
only by going down I rise again
as sure as through Joy I’m sure to descend
as sure as through Sadness I always ascend.
If the sun rises it had to set.
Hardon hardoff hardon again.
In dark of night I’m most aware of it, a circle,
that tail of the snake in the mouth of the same,
69, you are mine,
the thought and the deed one thing complete,
your mind, the tide,
wedding rings slipped on two fingers,
the sphincter relaxed gently giving way to a round entry
or 24 hours as they’re making a circle
round your head like a crown of thorns
pressed in by fingertips placed carefully
between those points of scorn
that intrude into you more than you’d like them to
so you bleed. Once again it’s morning.
You get up naked out of bed leaving Love
to put on some clothes, go to the bathroom,
pass water, brush your teeth with Arm & Hammer,
smell your armpits, maybe shower,
look in the mirror to take off your face
relaxed as death and all gentleness
the one you wear in unwatched darkness
to put on the face for the eyes of your office
the one that pulls into a tightness
and makes you breathe in little breaths
that fill you up with gas
so you often get up to go fart in the closet
smelling your own stink stinking the darkness
among the hung coats of liberal bureaucrats
and the secretary’s lunch you just stepped in
without a touch of embarrassment;
then there are the seasons:
winter’s phony celibate, summer’s false fullness
with Love’s favorites soonest over, metamorphic Spring, Autumn;
in mouths; the rise and fall of empires and conversations;
the unfolding of a fragrant blossom as it opens,
then there is the pollen, a still point in space gets startled
happens, this circle we call “moment”
where from now on all spreads out through the infinite
like LSD you’ve licked off of your fingertip
that takes you everywhere which isn’t anywhere
but where you are right now which isn’t very far
although the journey’s hard till you’re the journey
and there you are like a diver dives in the ocean
just like a diver dives in the ocean
the bottom so distant no diver can reach it
pushing aside ocean into more ocean within ocean
getting nearer deeply closer all the time
to that thin dividing line that’s the pupil of your eye
telling inside what’s outside.

And Janis, you’re a circle
spreading beneath me throughout the galaxies.
You fall away from me with my saliva on your lips.
I am a dry stone flung upon dry land
and pleasure is a tear I shed.
Why do you think I kissed your breast?
For you, some altruistic reason?

You’re everywhere as I’m piercing your thighs,
water not pierced by my oils, I’m
just one little point in time.
At least it seems this way to me subjectively.
I think your vagina is eastern
like the lotus of Buddha and the third of Krishna
where all consciousness is shining
where we’re walking where sacred cows are mooing
down streets of too many unlooked at and starving
but you say, “It’s okay;
there are rich people too and they’re eating,
in each other’s arms two lovers are nibbling.
Understand, my man, there’s yang and yin
but you must transcend them to everything
is everything for out of that I, woman, spread
and would if I could take you in
like a white corpuscle surrounding what’s alien.
I’m appetite and you’re what’s for dinner tonight.
Like a string of spaghetti I’m sucking you in
and if you were an eternal plate of it
a million years from now I’d still be sucking it
through my vertical lips thin as a pin and hungering.”

Janis, I do not move from a slimed hole like you
to emanate, surround and take truth in
but like a stream down a mountain
splashing in gravity to sea
a straight line I’m on, I’m very Protestant,
I know in Aesop’s race the turtle won,
that there was a spider that tried and tried
until it did spin a web in Scotland,
from here to there, me to you
the shortest way’s a straight line
and I’m on mine even pushing you aside
inside your slippery insides
where inside the head of my prick’s a hive
where a million zillion bees are buzzing
honey pouches empty
and all worried they won’t get any
pushing and shoving buzzing and buzzing
with their stingers out and it’s all very ouch
but kind of nice, such a rush
because there is just one little hole
for us all to go through and when I do
I make a beeline for the bower
like I’m in a car going ninety miles an hour
when up comes this flower like a brick wall.
Smashed smithereens of honey gore
is as intense as you can get
but then that’s that, over.

I’m Western Man: my lust rises like a hollow fang
full then empty then full again.
I preach togetherness
but practice the separateness
and it was awful when I approached it
the black bird took wing, the rabbit ran
the snake glided all all away from me.
And I was like a dog tied to its house
going no further than my chain allowed
tearing at the grass
making the earth bare with my chain’s scraping.
O Love, forever come,
don’t fly up to some branch I can’t reach
but take the chain off of my neck
to fling it in that sea
where there is a shark
a slish slash on the wrist
when the razor’s nearer to me than my flesh
and oh this gnawing that’s the smell of roses
that comes after pruning all that’s dead
before the peeping little leaves
can unfurl quietly like flames
to whisper in the wind, “I am,”
with all the buds unfolding
bloomed red then truly dying is the rose
as on your face when looking
my flesh pretended stone;
now as the detumescent petals float
out of the bower
bald birds peck hatching gaping
eyeless gaping mouths
in the soft drift of approach of dark
of the twilight hour
within the thorny limbs young hunger peeps,
“we need, we need.”

Of course we need.
The trouble is a mouth can’t say this wordless thing
that’s understood and said so easily between eyes.
Even in the eyes of children throwing a ball at play
or in the eyes of your grandmother who is dying
full of cancer more vast than the Roman Empire
inside her as you bend down to kiss her
she’s too weak to hug you, yet you know she still knows you:
right there in her eyes she is
shining among all that withering
Grandma who groans then her eyes close
and I’m kissing a stone I’ve picked out of a stream
pressing my lips tasting incredibly clear water
smack dab against the unenterable hard cold shock of it:
what knew me doesn’t, what I know isn’t,
now all is useless emptiness, pointless in grief I weep
when out of Grandma’s cunt a hand comes
without flesh, no rottenness, just bone
like an ice cube that smokes so cold
I would have stayed stuck to it but
when it took my hand to shake and gripped
Grandma’s womb warm dripped
squeezed out between our palms
and intertwined fingers a separation yet
kept from each other midst a slippery salvation
I slipped out of drips slick as drooled spit
on the lips of a tiger shaking a gazelle by the neck
while out of its paws unzipping its claws to rip:
“Hello,” Death said, “I’m glad we’ve finally met.
I am the truth. Come closer and I’ll whisper it.”

Now I gnawed always by a secret
was scared but I listened hearing nothing:
Death wasn’t there, only silence and my tears,
though I know Death will one day appear to me
as quickly as an accident or something I forget
and I admit it, I am curious, I wait for death
like factory workers wait for their trains
that took them to work to bring them home again.
Sitting with them on a subway bench
among lunch buckets, newspapers and cigarettes
thinking how this world of ours, its bombs and locks
without stop goes passing by on a conveyor belt
and I thought we are what we’re touching
and I didn’t think very much of them
the no good factory fodder, raked leaves for the fire:
it wasn’t good-bye but their smoke made me cry
soldiers for sons and very loose daughters
who get knocked up, quick grow old, but keep the thing going.

Up against the wall the working class stood
leaning back or standing in flocks
staring down at the tracks that now begin to tremble
like you’re just about ready to stick in the needle
when down in the tunnel I hear the train’s coming
for them here now standing waiting doing nothing
which is what I think of them nothing
gazing dispassionate from face to face
on sleepy looks emotionless; not one I think’s awake
until I see around one eye a line of red
and knew that eye had cried laughing so hard
the tears had to come or crying over a sentiment
that meant something to that eye alone
or crying perhaps because it’s a fact
this world holds more sadness than you can shake a stick at.
We humans get to shed more tears than oceans can put back.

Then I looked until that eye saw me
and I saw that eye trembled because it was seen.
What’s seen you know, what you know you can hold
what you hold you can destroy as quickly as a thin tea cup
or any delicate joy like the wing of a butterfly
like this eye that was a soul
a thing that felt, a thing that knows
one thing that’s understood and there it was.

Then I looked from that eye to the many
and saw inside each was as vast as me
aliens from distant universes
mixed together in the same sea of we.
And what if we should meet?
The things we would show
for the things we would see
I trembled to think ready to faint
stood up before them and loudly said
in the noise of the train that was growing:

“Where have we met?
Almost, almost I can remember it.
Why are you as dear to me as my own breath?
Why is there a hurt in it? Strangers, I want to kiss.
Strangers are not strangers when they kiss
and what is love but this: a kiss is not isn’t
and to you I’d gladly give it
but worse than Narcissus Narcissus kissed
are you if you abhor yourself yet wait
wanting to be adored
or cling to me as ivy does a wall.
Look to yourselves for love
to me for something else, the touch.
There is no love but love of self
it is the core all else spreads from.
Look to your own souls, be it
conjure your visions and let me see them
but don’t lift your eyes for my comment.
Whatever you must do go do it
it’s you who must enjoy it
you’re not in my employment
I can’t give you a raise
and praise is sought only by self contempt
who is barren and unable to make a go of it
needing more and more flattery til o.d.ing on it.
Woe to the famous who don’t know how they got there.
Looking down through bottomless air
they see a winding steep undescendable stair
while all about come vultures and other tailfin groupie horrors
out of total darkness to tear at them as they wonder
What do they want from me? Why do they care?
But those who are known who know all is unknown
and it’s out of that comes what you take to make
what you are and what you own are alone where you see them
scrape and howl at the wall of the impossible
but what you don’t see underneath there it’s calm
and it’s like Aretha, Miss Port in the Storm.

Your voice I can’t give you nor should I have to
and if you cling so that I feel I can’t get loose
I’ll get bored but you’ll say cruel.”

Meanwhile as I talked the train had come
when I was finished the train had gone
left me standing all alone
on a platform underground
in the City of Brotherly Love.

Janis, wake up. In my closet hangs a belt.
Get it for me. It’s of leather, one I no longer wear
since becoming vegetarian and believing it’s better
to alleviate all pain even to the bellowing
stripped off the backs of cattle hung off hooks in Chicago
where Delta bluesmen used to work
when no one would pay to hear them play
and they sat to contemplate the killing floor
as the sun sank from the door
in the growing lightbulb’s glow
about which flies buzzed full of gore
as they strummed and strummed their weeping chords
to salve and soothe their savage souls
in the abbatoir of night with their eyes shut tight.

A belt
my favorite
iron buckle like a claw
easy to put on or take off
if you’re just about ready to make love
or you’re standing in Indiana by some road
with your thumb out also snapping it
and your foot you’re tapping it to the beat of eternity
which is the rock and roll of Bo Didley
when a car stops full of grown men
one of them sticks his head out the window
surprising you to see he’s the same age you are
when he says: “The West was won with a gun,
that’s how it’s done
and that’s how we’ll do it in Vietnam.
Leave it if you don’t love it
you longhaired commie faggot
while I give you a haircut
my buddies are gonna hold you down
one by one choke their cocks in your mouth
then to while away the afternoon
we’re going to beat you black and blue,”
which is when it gets very simple:
I just swing off my belt so the buckle
hits him on the temple.

I wore it years ago when I was of the street
full of revolution one of many children
who hitchhiked on the highways
slept under the stars
marched into the Capitol to protest war
and anything we had we’d give it to you free:
our genitals our clothes our LSD
till what was in us moving was also moving you
through the streets a great crowd of Love
walking all around. Above us flew a dove
flying in the sun way up and out of reach
but descending on its own a black dot yet
in all that light of illuminating possibility
so sure to be because we’d seen it
when we knocked at the door of the president
and shouted, “Let us in!” he came and he stood
but he wouldn’t, only said, “What do you want?”

We said, “War to end.”

“No,” said the president, “I have to control.
If there’s no war the world won’t go our way,
no way, no, and by the way go fight it
go fight for me my war.”

“Hell no!” we said: “We won’t go!”

“Trust me,” said the president.
“I know how the world must go.”

“How do you know how the world must go
if you hold onto it and won’t let it go?
Let the world go and watch where it goes
then you can follow it and then you will know.
Relax, sit back,
smoke dope for an hour, look at the flowers.”

“Where in that,” said the president, “is the power?
You need power in this world of ours
or they’ll shoot you for sure and put you under the flowers.”

We shouted, “You haven’t the power!”

“But I do,” he said, “I gathered it
in the wee dark hours when you were all sleeping
and no one was looking. I made a chain of it
and locked it on you.” He held up in his hand
the green face of George Washington:
“A dollar is power; it bought me this gun.”
As he showed us putting the bullet in
the dove from above was descending.

“Here comes peace,” we said, “can’t you see it.”

“It’s just a bird,” said the president and he shot it.

“It’s just a bird,” said the congress and they cooked it.

“It’s just a bird,” said the generals and they ate it.

“It’s just our sons,” said the people and they buried it
wept bitterly, cried out, “How come?”
and the land was dark as a tomb
while the president walked up and down in his room
talking to portraits hung on the wall
that were the faces of presidents gone before.
To cracked silence that’s paint the president talked politics
talked world affairs with who wasn’t there.
His officials trembled, hid on the stair.
“This is bad,” they said, “but what can you do?
He’s got the power, not us, not you.”

“Then take the power!” I said throwing a brick
screamed “Chaos! Fire! Some never learn
so let them burn!”

Then all about the crowd of Love stooped down
to pick up a stone, what was picked up one thing
each throwing alone
not through the president’s window
but through the windows of themselves
the flames shot out tore the place down
til visions of Shiva danced in our heads
smashing to ash what we finally sat in
to ponder why we didn’t win.

One old woman wept and no one looked;
one young one did and men turned their heads.
“The only way to have a revolution,” I said
“is not to have one,” and I was just sad
got drunk, sat in my ash and tried to forget
when I saw it what I thought had been dead
the dove that was Peace I thought I had seen
shot down in the street still was breathing
Peace a phoenix breathing quick breathings
where I blew and I blew on the coals of my soul
that were dying almost dead till the flames shot up again
not like the flames of Shiva, but instead
like candlelight where all the land is dark
but you can walk if you hold it out
a flame that soon took wing to cover everything
disappearing saying, “Persevere and you are near.”

Revolution was a fad;
most finished college, turned into their dads
but behind every fad if you look is the truth
I cling to as those climbers of mountains to ropes
pull themselves up into beautiful views
where if they let go that’s all they will do.

It’s true: I’m afraid to let go.
I have to control even you.
“Flip a penny,” I say, “we’ll see who beats who.”

You don’t want me to go so you do
then to be a little funny
and to see how it will make us feel
while I close the curtains
bringing the bedroom back into a fake-dusk gloom
and on my hands and knees crawl here and there
looking for matches you put on accessories:
a silver ring with an Apache’s tear,
strings over strings of Mardi Gras beads
that hang down and around and outline your breasts
that push as unstemmed pears beneath your flesh,
oxblood and tierd your nipples;
a copper bracelet, a leather band;
a wide silver bracelet with flying geese
delicate feathers etched in their wings, tiniest of pupils;
and brass camel bells that come from Morocco
jingle softly jingle about your ankle
each time you move your foot to strike me
with the belt that’s almost like a kiss
the way it takes away my breath
each stroke expected but never certain
until it’s there along me faster and faster
as you’re taken up in this fantasy
not giggling now and joking nervously
but striking with assurity.

“Ouch!” I say. It’s strange
how that one word comes out of us so easily.
From what common center does ouch come
contract the muscles of the mouth into an O
with tongue come forward flicking upward at the teeth?

“Ouch! Ouch!” I say
between your strokes like flames
that have burned all I own
til I am nothing but anticipation
preceding clean and fresh and new as when
the sticky caul was first lifted
like an adhesive from my still closed eyes
in that sudden whoosh of cold surprise
when I was pulled out of the all into the now
to hear and feel the first slap on my ass and cried
plunking my sound into this world
like a thrown stone or bubbles rise
from drowning mouths to break the surface
and grow wide in circles that haven’t ceased
23 years later but now reach
the corner of a galaxy a billion miles away
touching planets of creatures I will never see
dead and gone, new and rising out of strange seas,
other creatures out of ooze, out of ammonias,
out of twos, out of chemicals not yet devised
I am still the center even later after death
my sound without me will still spread
through evermore and never end.

“Ouch! Ouch!” I say and lift my hand to have the belt
encircle my forearm like a tendril or the tail
of a constricting snake pulling you to my parting mouth
to make you wet between your legs I see you are
already wet from the belt of my fantasy, not dry
as you are often dry with me the plain reality
I can’t come in where the truth burns and chafes
but first must do you with my pretty viper’s teeth
for which, alas, you always seem to have the antidote.

janis joplin

Some thoughts about Janis and this poem:

I am putting part V of Fucking on my blog today because it is Janis Joplin’s birthday and I wrote it for her. She would be 70. Her death affected me a lot; although she could shout and scream, she was also a flower that was born to blush unseen; she really wasn’t finished yet, but like Keats (a poet I was reading at the time), Fate had something else to say about that. Sad sad sad the death of Joplin, sad sad sad the death of Keats.

I met Linda Waldron, the woman who strung the beads that Janis is wearing in the photo above, in 1980. Linda had been a friend and I think also a lover. She was making a living as a psychic when I met her through my room-mate Patti. When Linda walked into my room and saw the photo that I had cut out of Rolling Stone, framed and hung on my wall, she burst out crying and sobbed. I was skeptical about psychics, but the fact that one had walked into my room and started crying was worrisome. As it turned out, Linda was remembering the photo shoot and Janis.

I gave Linda a copy of Fucking. Sometimes when she got drunk (she liked whiskey), she would call me on the phone and channel Janis, then Janis and I would talk. Linda had her raspy chuckle down so well, sometimes I felt it was Janis I was talking to. Well, what can I tell you, Janis loved the poem. Later, Linda gave me some lace that had belonged to Janis. I gave a piece of it to my niece and Patti used part of it for a magic wand that she made and gave to me.

I began to work on Fucking when I was 23 and about to travel to South America. When I returned, I continued to work on the poem that grew longer and longer until it was finally finished in early July 1976 in the South Mountain in Pennsylvania where I was camping, revising and committing it to memory until I could say the hour long poem from one end to the other. I was camped out for a week on a mountainside where a stream came splashing down in little waterfalls. I took acid, smoked pot, ate oranges, built a fire at night and read Keats. Strangely one day three people came walking through the woods. One of them was barefooted, bare-chested, in shorts and looked like Tarzan; he went running over rocks and fallen branches and yet remained unscathed; another was the brother of someone I went to high school with (he would later die of AIDS), and the last was a man currently, who was going to have a sex change at John Hopkins in a couple of weeks wearing lipstick and sprouting breasts. What were these three people doing coming up to me while I’m writing a poem in the middle of the woods? It seemed like some kind of sign, an omen.

In part V of Fucking the poem is confused sexually. There is nothing I can do about that now; it is closeted; let it be what it is: a young man grappling with who is. I performed Fucking often in Philadelphia and New York in the late 70s and early 80s. I did it several times at Life Cafe and part of it at Saint Mark’s Church. Bill Pullman the actor liked it. Bob Holman and Jackie Curtis thought I did a fine performance. “Don,” said Jackie, “I’ve been around the world and nobody does a poem like you.” Lots of people liked it. I sent it to Ferlinghetti to see if he would publish it, but he didn’t and that was that: I am not one to send things off to get published. I am more interested in the writing. In the late 80s I got involved in local New York politics and began, with others, to save a park, La Plaza Cultural, which took up all my time. Fucking was laid aside.

It is what a 23 year old started and a 26 year old finished. A later version of part V formed, more pared down as I performed it. Although I am happy with parts I, II, III, and IV of Fucking, part V leaves me feeling unfinished; it isn’t quite able to articulate itself, and I cringe, but still it is a conversation that gets from one end to the other, a whole; if some parts aren’t so good, well others are, I hope, worth the struggle to read it through.

Janis