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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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