That year he lived
as a vagabond holed up
in that fourth floor
attic on South Rose street
with the rollaway bed
and toaster oven and hot plate
drinking Schlitz
tall boys and smoking Old Golds.
He worked in the
lumberyard from dawn to dusk
unloading boxcars
and drank Mogen David with
Cactus Jack in
the railyard weeds. At night, sweating
in the attic,
he read philosophy he didn't
understand, that
and Rod McKuen's bad poetry,
ate TV dinners
from the toaster oven and
listened to
Patsy Cline and Dylan on his
hifi but it
was afterwards, every night, after
reading the words
he did not understand, or
understood all
too well, as he lay naked in
the darkness of
the attic, the day's heat
enshrouding him
in sweat, his brain a bit boozy
from the hours of
lifting lumber,
it was then that he listened to
the world's loneliness,
the woman below visited nightly by
the 2 AM drunkard
who banged her against the headboard
and then departed,
the tick-ticking of someone' s
oscillating fan,
insects clicking
against the streetlight's glass,
distant cars
climbing the graveyard hill where junkies
and stoned lovers
smashed empty pints against headstones,
he could hear the
anguished cries of those Dutch emigres,
his people, family, the generations
of men seeking
asylum from their madness and finding only
fear haunting
their minds behind the stone walls and
the caged windows
and the single electric cords hanging
from the ceilings.
