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CONFIDENTIAL

  

A peeping Tom, I’ve shot four petting couples,

done my Sal, and now aim at the Presidency.

My apartment is walled with hilly pin-ups 

which grin with pain, for haven’t they already

been stapled through the soft places?

So I’m a pukey loner,—though at school

I had high grades.  If no one read about them

there was a way to make them see my mind.

A gun that jerks with well-oiled motion into

my hand holding.   My own piece, curling smoke.

Not a stump, right?  Not exactly.  I

could have been the New Man.  Never hurt none.

Always the sky was grey, like hung-down hair,

my brain balloon-size, like a muscle, heavy.

They had to know about me.  Sal was

the only girl which I ever told my name to.

She had a fall of grease-yaller, hide-in-me hair

and our kicks measured the size of Texas

as we gunned my hot rod from Smithville to Austin.

‘Show who we are,’ she cooed, and my tyres

spat tar out as the hot wind popped our ears.

Shee-ut, if the punks at the store which called me

‘the quiet one’ could’ve seen me as we clovered

around the industrial lots like two spacemen

around a slag star, and on out into unasking distance.

We took the Camino Real through Hell and Heaven

which failed not of posting my dreams and horrors

on hazy billboards.  Garrotted landladies dripped

their hoarded dimes from deliquescent nails.

Maverick swingers which knew not the name of God

were splattered on drive-in screens, flayed by the wires

of their own sick guitars.  Racked on embers

of live-it-up motels, the undone joints

of Commie senators blackened the air with smell.

On Sunset Strip we saw mayhem and harlem.

But we roared beyond, ol’ Sal and me.  I saw

my mother at her last man’s feet, bathing

my hand with her tears.  I saw my sister

whoring in downtown streets, her thin face

believing in me wholly.  I saw God.  I

saw and I entered God in his residence

of hail and arson.  God the great Burner

in his lone-star wilderness.  God and the voice of God

which’ll cry, ‘Capital!’ when he fries his victims,

those useless wetbacks, gone ape on the stand.

And I heard her, needling, the raw voice

of all these women lipping and licking my brain

into fierce ire with, ‘That is your manhood, Charlie?’

slurry as a whip that flicks and idles.

So I killed her, and him, and her. Till a calm reigned.

Now they’ll have to recognise me, I

which have spied so many in the act, I

which have at last burned my way to conviction.

  

Alan Marshfield

  

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