poor Al - are we not all so?

I don't know how he does it
but every woman he meets is
crazy.
he will get rid of one
crazy woman
but he never gets any
relief-
another crazy woman moves right in
with him.


it's only after they move in
and begin acting
more than strange
that they admit to him
that they've done madhouse
time
or that their families have
a long history of mental
illness.


his last one
he sent to a shrink
once a week:
$75 for 45 minutes.
after 7 months
she walked out on the
shrink
and said to Al,
"that god damned fag doesn't know
anything."


I don't know how they all find
Al.


he says you can't tell at the first
meeting
they have their guard up
but after 2 or 3 months the
guard comes down
and there's Al with
another one.

It got so bad that Al thought
maybe it was
him
so he went to a shrink
and asked
and the shrink said,
"you're one of the sanest men
I've ever met."

poor Al.

that made him feel
worse
than ever.
.
.
.

23 Nisan hesabına...

A plausible finish

there ought to be a place to go
when you can’t sleep
or you’re tired of getting drunk
and the glass doesn’t work anymore,
and I don’t mean to go
to hash or cocaine,
i mean a place to go to besides
the death that’s waiting
or to a love that doesn’t work
anymore.

there ought to be a place to go
when you can’t sleep
besides to a tv set or to a movie
or to buy a newspaper
or to read a novel.

it’s not having that place to go to
that creates the people now in madhouses
and the suicides.

i suppose what most people do
when there isn’t any place to go
is to go to some place or to something
that hardly satisfies them,
and this ritual tends to sandpaper them
down to where they can somehow continue even
without hope.

those faces you see everyday on the streets
were not created
entirely without
hope: be kind to them:
like you
they have not
escaped.