The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

was not, their tusks in corkscrews and their eyes

as red as the whips of sorrow;

wrapped around their wrinkled legs were jungle vines.

One come – yes! – with a flower stuck

in a fold of his chest hide like a boutonniere!

Revois screamed and put his hand over his eyes.

Manning said ‘I don’t see that.’ (He sounded

like a man explaining to a fucking traffic cop.)

I pulled em aside and we three stumbled

into a stony cunt near the edge. From there

we watched em roll: a tide in the face of reality

that made you wish for blindness and glad for sight.

They went past us, never slowing,

the ones behind driving the ones before,

and over they went, trumpeting their way to suicide,

crashing into the bones of their oblivion a dusty mile below.

Hours it went on, that endless convention of tumbling death;

trumpets all the way down, a brass orchestra,

diminishing. The dust and the smell of their shit

near choked us, and in the end Revois ran mad.

Stood up, whether to pelt away or to join em

I don’t never knew which, but join em he did,

headfirst and down with his bootheels in the sky and

all the nailheads winking.

One arm waved. The other … one of those giant flat feet

tore it off his body and the arm followed after, fingers

waving: ‘Bye-bye!’ and ‘Bye-bye!’ and ‘So long, boys!’

Har!

I leaned out to see him go and it was a sight to remember,

how he sprayed in pinwheels that hung in the air

after he was gone, then turned pink and floated away

on a breeze that smelled of rotten carnations.

His bones are with the others now, and where’s my drink?

But – hear this, you idiot! – the only new bones were his.

Do you mark what I say? Then listen again, damn you:

His, but no others.

Nothing down there after the last of the giants had passed us

but for the bone church, which was as it was,

with one blot of red, and that was Revois.

For that was a stampede of ghosts or memories,

and who’s to say they’re not the same? Manning got up

trembling, said our fortunes were made (as if he

didn’t already have one).

‘And what about what you just saw?’ I asked.

‘Would you bring others to see such a holy place?

Why, next thing you know the pope himself will be

pissing his holy water over the side!’ But Manning

only shook his head, and grinned, and held up hands

without a speck of dust on them – although not a minute

past we’d been choking on it by the bale,

and coated with it from top to toe.

He said it was hallucination

we’d seen, brought on by fever and stinkwater.

Said again that our fortunes were made, and laughed.

The bastard, that laugh was his undoing.

I saw that he was mad – or I was – and one of us

would have to die. You know which one it was,

since here I sit before you, drunk with hair that once

was black hanging in my eyes.

He said, ‘Don’t you see, you fool—’

And said no more, for the rest was just a scream.

Balls to him!

And balls to your grinning face!

I don’t remember how I got back; it’s a

dream of green with brown faces in it,

then a dream of blue with white faces in it,

and now I wake at night in this city

where not one man in ten dreams of what

lies beyond his life – for the eyes they

use to dream with are shut, as Manning’s

were, until the end, when not all the bank accounts in hell

or Switzerland (they may be the same) could save him.

I wake with my liver bellowing, and in the dark

I hear the lumbering thunder of those great ghosts rising

out of the greenroof like a storm set loose to harrow the earth,

and I smell the dust and the shit, and when the horde

breaks free into the sky of their undoing, I see

the ancient fans of their ears and the hooks of their

tusks; I see their eyes and their eyes and their eyes.

There’s more to life than this; there are maps inside your maps.

It’s still there, the bone church, and I’d like to

go back and find it again, so I could throw myself

over and be done this wretched comedy. Now turn away

your sheep’s face before I turn it away for you.

Arr, reality’s a dirty place with no religion in it.

So buy me a drink, goddam you!

We’ll toast elephants that never were.

For Jimmy Smith

Morality is a slippery subject. If I didn’t know that as a boy, I found out when I went to college. I attended the University of Maine on a slapped-together financial scaffolding of small scholarships, government loans, and summer jobs. During the school year, I worked the dish line in West Commons. The money never stretched far enough. My single mother, who was working as head housekeeper in a mental institution called Pineland Training Center, sent me $12 a week, which helped a little. After Mom died, I found out from one of her sisters that she had managed it by giving up her monthly beauty parlor visit and economizing on groceries. She also skipped lunch every Tuesday and Thursday.

Once I moved off-campus and away from West Commons, I sometimes supplemented my own diet by shoplifting steaks or packages of hamburger from the local supermarket. You had to do it on Fridays, when the store was really busy. I once tried for a chicken, but it was too fucking big to go under my coat.