All Alone In Furnished Room With Pee Stains On My Underwear

by Ronald Zack

Lies! Lies! Lies! I lie, you lie, we all lie!
It came; hundreds came! all afire!
Guns rusting in their arthritic hands.
And if Western Civilization comes to an end
Fields will kneel proud beneath the halleluyahs of the wind.

I lived a life of canned heat and raw hands
And my hands are afire.
I rose from the carcass of my torment.
I called to the angels of my generation,
Because I want to know the meaning of everything.

No sign of Spring!  No sign!
The sun like a blazing lollipop can be sucked
My window-shaped head is bowed with sad draperies
They’ve just finished having a high mass for it
They want to make buttons out of my bones.

The embalmer, still smiling, came back to me
The fat merchant offers me opium, kief, hashish
I cut through the cowbrain and saw Christmas
My flesh is caught on the Inevitable Hook!
Dogs howled! Cats fled!  All windows closed!

O life abandoned! Half embalmed, I beat the soil!
I stand in the dark light in the dark street
Upon the ashes and remaining bits of fur
A pocket full of payote
O Time be merciful!

Note:  In order from the following poems of Gregory Corso:  "Marriage," "1959," "Dream of a Baseball Star," "The Last Gangster," “American Politica Historia, in Spontaneity," “Bomb," "To a Downfallen Rose," "My Hands Are A City," Transformation & Escape," "Writ on the Eve of My 32nd Birthday," "Writ on the Steps of Puerto Rican Harlem," "Botticelli's 'Spring'," "Sun," "I Miss My Dear Cats," "Italian Extravaganza," "The Mad Yak," "In The Morgue," "Zizi's Lament," "This Was My Meal," "Hello," "But I Do Not Need Kindness," "Amnesia In Memphis," "Birthplace Revisited," "The Sniper's Lament," "This is America," "You Whose Mother's Lover Was Grass."

Ronald Zack is an attorney currently in Tucson, Arizona.  He was raised in Detroit, formally educated in Michigan, California, and Arizona, and is currently working on an MFA in Creative Writing at Mississippi University for Woman.