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 butterblondes

       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 8 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, and you swing it—

       one

       two

       three

       and then you’ve got it, $200 worth of dead

       meat, its 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 it slagged and sullen and sun-glazed

       up a road where a madman sits waiting among

       blue jays and wrens netted in and sucked a flakey

       gray.

       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 breadman

       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