Clerks and You

Something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you

We have everything and we have nothing
And some men do it in churches
And some men do it by tearing butterflies in half
and some men do it in Palm Springs
Laying it into butter-blondes with Cadillac souls
Cadillacs and butterflies
Nothing and everything
The face melting down to the last puff in a cellar in Corpus Christi
There's something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you . . .
Something at eight a.m., something in the library, something in the river
Everything and nothing
In the slaughterhouse it comes running along the ceiling on a hook, can you swing it?
One, two, three
And then you've got it
Two hundred dollars worth of dead meat, it's bones against your bones
Something and nothing
It's always early enough to die and it's always too late
And the drill of blood in the basin white it tells you nothing at all
And the gravediggers playing poker over 5 a.m. coffee
Waiting for the grass to dismiss the frost
They tell you nothing at all

We have everything and we have nothing
Days with glass edges and the impossible stink of river moss worse than shit
Checkerboard days of moves and countermoves
Fagged interest, with as much sense in defeat as in victory
Slow days like mules
Humping and slagged and sullen and sun-glazed
Up a road where a madman sits waiting among bluejays and wrens
Netted in and sucked a flaky grey
Good days too of wine and shouting
Fights in alleys, fat legs of women striving around your bowels, buried in moans
The signs in bullrings like diamonds hollering Mother Capri
Violets coming out of the ground telling you to forget the dead armies and the loves that robbed you
Days when children say funny and brilliant things
Like savages trying to send you a message through their bodies, while their bodies are still alive enough to transmit and feel and run up and down
Without locks and paychecks and ideals and possessions and beetle-like opinions
Days when you can cry all day long in a green room with the door locked
Days when you can laugh at the bread man because his legs are too long
Days of looking at hedges

And nothing, and nothing
The days of the bosses, yellow men with bad breath and big feet
Men who look like frogs, hyenas
Men who walk as if melody had never been invented
Men who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and profit
Men with expensive wives they possess like 60 acres of ground to be drilled or shown-off or to be walled away from the incompetent
Men who'd kill you because they're crazy and justify it because
it's the law
Men who stand in front of windows 30 feet wide and see nothing
Men with luxury yachts who can sail around the world and yet never get out of their vest pockets
Men like snails, men like eels, men like slugs, and not as good
And nothing
Getting your last paycheck at a harbor, at a factory, at a hospital, at an aircraft plant, at a penny arcade, at a barbershop, at a job you didn't want anyway
Income tax, sickness, servility, broken arms, broken heads — all the stuffing come out like an old pillow

We have everything and we have nothing
Some do it well enough for a while and then give way
Fame gets them or disgust or age or lack of proper diet or ink across the eyes or children in college
Or new cars or broken backs while skiing in Switzerland
Or new politics or new wives
Or just natural change and decay —
The man you knew yesterday hooking for ten rounds or drinking for three days and three nights by the Sawtooth mountains now
just something under a sheet or a cross, or a stone, or under an easy delusion
Or packing a bible or a golf bag or a briefcase
How they go, how they go!
All the ones you thought would never go

Days like this, like your day today
Maybe the rain on the window trying to get through to you
What do you see today?
What is it? where are you?
The best days are sometimes the first, sometimes the middle, and even sometimes the last.
The vacant lots are not bad
Churches in Europe on postcards are not bad?
People in wax museums frozen into their best sterility are not bad?
Horrible, but not bad?
The cannons, think of the cannon
And toast for breakfast and coffee hot enough to know your tongue is still there
Three geraniums outside a window, trying to be red and trying to be pink and trying to be geraniums
No wonder sometimes the women cry
No wonder the mules don't wanna go up the hill.
Are you in a hotel room in Detroit looking for a cigarette?
One more good day, a little bit of it
And as he nurses come out of the building after their shift
Having had enough
Eight nurses with different names and different places to go Walking across the lawn
Some of them want cocoa and a paper
Some of them want a hot bath, some of them want a man, some
of them are hardly thinking at all
Enough and not enough
Arcs and pilgrims, oranges, gutters, ferns, antibodies, boxes of
tissue paper

In the most decent sometimes sun
There is the softsmoke feeling from urns
And the canned sound of old battleplanes
And if you go inside and run your finger along the window ledge you'll find dirt, maybe even earth
And if you look out the window there will be the day
And as you get older you'll keep looking, keep looking
Sucking your tongue in a little
Ah, ah, no, no, maybe

Some do it naturally
Some obscenely
Everywhere