Borrachos
I used to do my James Jones look-alike imitation
on the drill field but I never fooled anybody.
I read Kaylie Jones’s Lies My Mother Never Told Me.
Her mother, Gloria, was a writer-fucker monster.
All those old guys were drunks. Jones, Mailer, William Styron,
Willie Morris. Faulkner and Hemingway. O’Neill.
Truman Capote and Mary McCarthy. Imagine marrying
Edmund Wilson. The Partisan Review crowd were horrible.
Stalinists versus Trotskyites. If you could get up and go
to work in the morning—that is, write—you weren’t
an alcoholic. Denial
is a river in
I remember the Ling Master telling me
to break my own arm so I could kiss my elbow
and restore magic to the world.
I tried, but while I was leaned over
Nixon ran his tongue up my ass and I had
a fit of tickling Republican mischievousness.