I’d visited the sailors’

quarters of

the Orizaba, past Cuba.

I’d read The Tempest

 

in Venice, a few eccentrics

and gulls

to talk Melville to;

an incoherence.

 

It hasn’t been easy.

A cold shoulder

in Pasadena,

Chaplin’s “Carcassonne.”

 

At the same industry

party urinal,

Ramón Novarro

came, swallowing me . . .

 

The first attempt

by iodine,

a few drops, and a bottle

of mercurochrome,

 

leaving my inheritance

to a sailor

one Sunday brunch,

having razored

 

my own face (by Siquieros!)

raving, incoherent,

already drunk. Without

an income—

 

Sailors. Plenty

in fact, like Honeyboy,

the stoker

from battleship

 

Wyoming with
coal-stained hands. And

Alfredo, the Maximo

Gomez docked

 

in Havana harbor.

A hurricane—what luck!

I never could stand

so much

 

falsetto, this badinage

about “flying” being better

than “sailing,” since

I’d been fisted by

 

a pilot in Los Angeles,

that “great pink

vacuum of marvelous

blvds. and pink

 

sunsets” and rum,

splashed

with garden lime,

stolen from

 

mother’s Sunset

bungalow;

birds-of-paradise!

Uncensored,

 

raw, she’d burn

my letters, the good ones.

“That terrible virus

of criticism,”

 

my affliction.

My white Spitz,

Paloma.

A pet

 

parrot, Attaboy.

Herman Melville;

Poe. I did not

love Wise,

 

that frail Millionaire

gobbling caviar

with port, and later

in Mexico

 

the scandal of jailtime;

an Indian

servant boy. . .

A Guggenheim. Oh Emil,

 

sailed to Los Angeles

on SS California!

A Bacardi quart,

five “complete” men

 

attacked us leaving him

sprawled across

the docks, unconscious.

Our reunion,

 

a hate crime—

Hollywood.

Fierce young

faeries reciting

 

Rimbaud,

a shadow.

Nocturnal

beatings,

 

binging, arrests;

gravity.

A mystical poverty

before I folded

 

my coat, over

the railing.

Tropic of Cancer.

My quarrelling

 

life, enthralled—

You know, you already know,

I’d vaulted

into the byzantine

 

glittering metaphor…

We mostly wed the irony
we hardly touched, in Napoli.

---

Miguel Murphy is the author recently of Detainee, a collection of poems. He lives in Southern California where he teaches at Santa Monica College.