Hotel Wentley Poems

Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia,
John Wieners, David Meltzer
San Francisco 1958

Hotel Wentley Poems
—for John Wieners
__________________

A poem for hustlers

“I shall be placed
on probation”
—John Wieners,
“A poem for vipers,”
Hotel Wentley Poems

Old age—
Bereft of any
Nobility

Behind the—
State Capitol
I cruise youth

Mean hustlers—
Hang out and
Beat me up

What’s an—
Old queen like
Me to do?

Wilde beestes—
No place for a
Lady like me

Spluged by—
Ugly smegma
Scented boyz

The sun—
Never rises now
Where I go

Blood-shot—
Eyes, young vipers
Who know

My face—
Has gone stale
Already dead

Looking away—
More than
Cruising anymore

What would—
The Kingfish say
About me now?

The Senate Apartments II

The Senate Apartments II
—for Coleman Dowell
__________________

Male memory—Undid me, did me in Did me down and dirty Assuredly it led me—To the edge of poetic Profluent precipices

Violet gent quills—Foreskin fountain fondue Making up for lost-time The first time I met you—A sudden warmth a thaw Unrestrained deformity love Like murder held back—By an upstream blocked The sin submerges itself

A prolonged stillness—Approximating death even then Before the car crash What are the chances—That words just fall outta Thin air into our laps? Why are some of us—Receptive to full-blown Seen and syntax? What are the chances—That language is just a Perpetual-motion mobile?

A string of words—Smoothing out the motions That seem to make things move? I’m temped to Say—That I make the Selections Of work on a page But it’s more like—Pretending to know what’s On the other side of the moon The smell of your clothes—your tough lean jerky body Sleeping late in bed

Your svelte carnality—Streamline moderne male beauty At the Senate Apartments Your intuitive recognition—And instinctive rejection Of my queer art deco eye Your later car crash—Thus making you a young sailor Home from the Land of the Dead The Senate as a Sinking Ship—A harbor of ferries Coming home

Freighters unloading themselves The only enemy being—Winter and rough weather Icy streets and highways A patch work of quilts—Around us palms, pyramids Art deco Egypto zigzags Watery Beginnings—Surrounded by Nile deserts Heat mirages of Sphinxes

A warm reeky kitchen—Steeped in pork, coffee, yeast smells For a hungry night prowler like me The care with which the architects—In the lathe and plaster and glass blocks Joining genders, jewelry, style Morphing the morbid past—Streamlining the moon’s high tide Amatory to Aphrodite again

A mysterious effeminizing—The night squeezing the Wisteria Billy the Kid into young King Tut A dread troubling ambuscading—A fear of losing it within the walls A gentle moth’s sewing room Only youths and soft heartaches—Give tenacity to the illusion that That power of the poem could become Visible at will

The Senate sometimes a Ship—Cartouche with storm, other times Hanging suspended like a wax carving A secret door to Pharaoh’s tomb—Sometimes feeling Magician’s stillness Pulse of young students in bed The Senate lays suspended—Within the glassy globe of time Fused eternity of land and sea

Floating like a life raft—Off the coast of Wherever In the Great Sea of Tranquility À trois with bulky buboes—The size of lovers groins and axilla Enjoying Saturday night nuances Was it your distillate darkness—Strength of night’s untapped source That corrupted me so much with love?

Gone my Beatrice boyfriend?—All these years without you A long drawn out no-return trip to Elba I search for you in the past again—The corridors of language thru the spectrum Of worms and words and maimed tattoos I’ve struggled with your tongue—Halfway down my throat all the way Down to my curled toes

I saved you and yet you did me in—Your words, your smile, delivered in The heat of the moment by moonlight I became witness to reborn love—The simple days after your car crash Nursing your ass back to consciousness The specter of the oldest murder—Hanging in the air around me much
More than just literary hearsay

It was more like “hidden bait”—The love of Cain for his brother Abel East of Eden tasting the Forbidden Fruit The Biblicist past restoring distrust once again—Devoting myself to bringing you back to life Only to indulge in forbidden Love once again? Our bodies knit together with the same—

Sperm and slime tainted all over again My lips gemmed with pearls of your cum The only anecdote to—The irreversibility of history—The faculty of forgiveness this time around This time around Coughenour’s tragic Abel—To my simpering cloying Cain envy and East of Eden serpentine sexual jealousy Hardly pearls of wisdom even before swine—Spouting these pretentious and demeaning Snotty tidbits of Slimy Supposed Scholarship—sitting here alone in the Senate penthouse tonight

The Senate Apartments

The Senate Apartments

The Senate Apartments
—for Coleman Dowell
__________________

The Senate Apartments—Was an art deco dump Built in the early Forties At the end of the Thirties—When WPA architects Still needed a job

A swanky old wreck—Like the Civic Auditorium Streamline Moderne I bought the joint—Its curved glass block Corners appealed to me I had it remodeled—Back to its stylish pristine Nostalgic beauty I rented it out—To young college students Writers and artists

All around the neighborhood—A student ghetto of old Mansions turned rooming-houses The Senate Apartments—Art deco still had some class Compared to today I always wondered—What a cute epileptic Would be like to live with After the accident—He was the perfect spaz A cute invalid

He was lucky to survive—His car crash smashed His sports car to nothing He’d been a pretty boy—In my fraternity but now He was in love with death I had to coax him back—Beneath the sheets in bed My Lazarus boyfriend The luxury of imagining—Myself with a spastic lover My reward for nursing him

Like a homecoming—To boyhood with all its Smells and decay of youth Still goodlooking—Blasphemously callous He let me do him Paralyzed angel—Except for one minor thing Down between his legs I worshipped him—Assiduously like I wanted To do before the crash

In the penthouse above—I made up for lost time Calluses on my lips A beautiful spastic kid—Who wanted to die after His tragic accident I was obsequious—Finally he accepted my Generosity, murmuring okay I began to siphon off—His lifeblood with liquor Pills, dope, slowly, slowly

To think he was all mine—This guy who was engaged to Be married and breed Was it wrong of me—To take advantage of his Helpless spasticity? Hardly, my dear—I wanted what I—Couldn’t have back when We were freshman Who knows how long—He’d last with the brain-dead Party time frat boyz

Before self-hatred—Set in, watching him get Corrupted just like me His family, his girlfriend—All of them were for pulling The plug on my lover boy But I pulled him back—Back again into life and Didn’t tell them how I pulled and pulled—Until young Jonah popped Outta the Whale again

And it wasn’t artificial—Respiration either that Brought the love-child back Humiliation wasn’t mine—Down there between his legs Bringing him back to life And later on after—I got care-person custody He “came back” more & more I wasn’t bashful or shy—

His throes of epilepsy were Scandalous if they only knew I slowed him down—Restraining his almost constant Rerun of the car accident Halfway mourning to be dead—The other half of him becoming Imperceptibly alive again It lasted a year for him—His recovery with the help of My equally spastic lips

He’d been abandoned—But I wouldn’t let him as Long as he had a heart-throb Pretty soon he could sit up—In bed and eat Thai take-out And watch movies again I never did believe much—In tear-jerking unrequited love I’d always been into the real thing We drove, walked, ate—Looked at television, pretended It was Night of Living Dead

Dead emanations—Of stars, other lives circling His and mine around us Still-winged, wind borne—Sympathetic juices and organs In our daily living Death Such prolonged Thanatos—A prolonged stillness of Perpetual obituary silence

When monsoon weather—Set in with scudding clouds Overhead like a Sargasso Sea We looked at each other—Nodding that we’d already been There and done that Somehow we’d survived it—Thinking about his carnal Crawling internment The stink of youngmen—High-tided sperm smell Smell of teen brown sugar

Death’s postponed victory—Draining our life-juices and Sucking salt from the clay His eyes were portholes—He’d gone down with the Titanic And lived to talk about it Clifton Webb was a screamer—Even as the band played on Down to Davy’s Locker

Chthonic collaborations—Nature’s worming minutest Millimeter—Hasty scrutiny Clangorous earthiness—Milking the Tellurian Peepshow pathology

The Birthmark

Mechthild Op Gen Oorth

The Birthmark
—for Coleman Dowell
__________________

I had this kind of—Special birthmark that I was ashamed of I was working as this bellhop—In this hotel and I got Lots of queer attention

My boyfriend was—Somewhat enamored With it too, ogling it My birthmark grew & grew—Like I grew and hints of Obscene pleasure crept in—Adolescence brought it—To everybody’s attention & Became a sought after thing

I got the sense that—I was being made the gay Target of thrill-seekers My dinge birthmark—Brought-out homosexuals Like butterflies from a chrysalis I felt like I was an imposter—When the men spoke soothingly About my dark imperfection

A “Venus de Milo” torso they’d say—A “Winged Victory” body they’d whisper in my ear—Matched with my black penis Such attention helped me—Overcome any trauma that Resulted from my birthmark My face and body awaking—In others a hustler’s mood My black beauty birthmark

I thought of myself as going—Where the meat was since The meat was where I was Hustling such a tedious job—Slow, necessarily slow, stretching It in & out and letting it go Subliminally it appealed to—Middle-aged closeted businessmen With their loneliness, money and despair

There was something dangerous—Ultimately erotic about a kid like me, a White kid, skinny with a black dick The game was to play innocent—Distraught, helpless, befuddled Playing the birth mark all the way A dealer in dreams—The dreams deferred being the Permanent dreams gone for trade

I acted like a dreamer—Permanently deferring my whiteness Others paying for my hesitation

JABEZ: A PORTRAIT

Carl Van Vechten Scrapbook Photo (Yale)

JABEZ: A PORTRAIT
for Coleman Dowell
__________________

There were lots—Of stories about Jabez But I ignored them After I grew up—Went to Old Miss for college I forgot about it But I couldn’t quite—Leave them alone for some strange Reason or other I was 20 years old—When my parents died making Me heir to the estate

Real estate agents—Wanted to subdivide it Into apartment tracks It was then that I—Was confronted once again With the Jabez story There was a certain—Brutality about it I’d always ignored it A perversity—That made a direct gazing Unendurable

Daily existence—Without thinking about him Jabez my kid brother And so I preferred—The racial vagaries of Whitey obliqueness This obliqueness was—Like having a Third Eye Opening up things An eyepiece showing—Peripheral narration of Negro mysteries

Town gossip tidbits—Dark encounters with my past Upbringing secrets Words of self-loathing—Ignorant Southern stories Miscegenal hate I wasn’t perfect—I’d been corrupted by the South’s vice viscerally I didn’t believe—It was demoralizing Distasteful of me Jabez’s presence—How denigrating was it A young dinge brother?

There were plenty of—Skeletons in my closet I know that for sure I’d discovered at—Ole Miss that I was indeed Homosexual I had my own thoughts—And fears about being gay Returning back home Sewing dragon teeth—An army of worries sprung From the land of Thebes

Jabez was waiting—In the old mansion for me Naked in the bedroom How could he have known—Sixteen years old half-brother I was a size queen? He was so handsome—Abnormally, obscenely Endowed like a horse More like a pony—Standing nervously nude His skin all twitchy

Like a thoroughbred—At the starting gate of some Kentucky Blue Grass racetrack How could he have known—How much Jabez was too much Flesh for me back then? He was asserting—His well-hung birthright to me His dinge virility The house and the land—Has spawned us both as brothers Now what should we do?

I wrenched a muscle—I painfully sprained my neck Going down on him Jabez had coffee-skin—Smooth mulatto manhood legs Wrapped around my neck His palms were pinkish—His black water-moccasin Uncut head pink too He had licorice loins—Sticky and cheesy penis Fondue of the godz

I was his fag brother—Down there on my nelly knees He was my Master My time to be Slave—No more unrequited love Jabez my new lover All my past affairs—At Ole Miss, the Big Easy Long gone, forgotten Thanks to the good Lord—Salvation had come my way Jabez my jizzy joy!!!

His merciless eyes—His sleek, svelte black silhouette My streamlined Mandingo I no longer felt—Stunted and useless but Instead born-again, baby Jabez was intense—Androgynous Black Angel Endowed by Africa “Jeez, are you alright?”—I’d whisper to him as he Sank six feet under

Sinking his thick root—Our gnarly Family Tree Deep down in the Earth Black and blue veiny—Wiggling down my throat His genealogy groaning Contemptuously—He said, “Of course, I’m Okay, take it sucker.” He was the real man—Not me his older brother The inheritance was his

The deed and the will—I switched it all over to him My mulatto kid brother His teenage young face—Hardly hermaphroditic Creaming his brains out He was Mandingo man—Twice the man I’d ever be Three times what I’d ever get “S’what you came for?”—Jabez said, looking away Was he sick of me?

Jabez was hopelessly—Hetero and Str8t with his Cute girlfriend, Yolanda I realized then that—Too much flesh & Jabez Had come my way home “Too much flesh,” I said—Looking at Jabez in bed I couldn’t help thinking “Throw out the lifeline!”—Surely that’s all I could hear Jabez just smiled at me

I heard the Church bells—Ringing in my ears & bats Up there in my belfry I felt so downright dirty—So faggoty and shamefully Knowing what I knew Coming back home again—Was my wedding night with My dinge bridegroom brother But he was already married— Yolanda was already pregnant
I was already an Exile

The men folk in town—Nodded knowingly at me “Miss High and Mighty” Knowing that Jabez—Was just too much flesh for me Me and my college boy ways Mississippi had its own way—For Tallahatchie boyz like Jabez It was time for me to go

Coleman Dowell

by Carl Van Vechten Library of Congress

Coleman Dowell (1925-1985)
__________________

The look on his face—
When he suddenly realized
I was “Yolanda”

He got angry—
Then he got sullen, pouty
Then he spread his legs

I was “Yolanda”—
His slutty whorish girlfriend
His prison pen-pal
______________________

We wrote long letters—
A pair of yearning lovers
Lonely for some love

I could smell him and—
Almost taste him whenever
I got a letter

I was his rich chick—
Waiting for his nice body
And his needy dick
____________________

He beat me up bad—
Called me a goddamn faggot
Blackmailed me for dough

He like threatened to—
Stick me with his sharp switchblade
Me down on my knees

He took my money—
Then I “dropped a dime” on him
He was on parole
___________________

I tipped off the cops—
My ex-lover was holding
And they nailed him good

That was my revenge—
For his infidelity
Some more prison time

I picked up this kid—
A young Hispanic from down
There in Central Park
____________________

My black lover’s friend—
Threw me off the balcony
They called it Suicide

Too Much Flesh and Jabez

Too Much Flesh and Jabez
__________________

“No drama queens, please.”
—Edmund White, “City Boy”

I suppose I should—
Admit that I wanted him
My cute kid-brother

I wanted something—
Tres exquisitely prolonged
Like Epilepsy

His perfect body—
Was an end in itself but
I wanted more

A long drawn-out spaz—
A hare-lipped gimpy lover
A dumb kid-brother

“The New York Times
Book Review had asked
Me to review his “Island People”
—Edmund White, “City Boy”

Drama queen writer—
Opaque Faulknerian style
A charmless loser

Dodgy modernist—
Elaborately POMO
Southern Gothic spleen

I’d fallen from Grace—
Much too much pot and cocaine
Maligned by cruel fate

The shallows of life—
Sad deep South malignancy
Queerly vulnerable

A dreadful lover—
Picking up his chicken leg
Worms on my fingers

__________________________

“So uneven it could
be called a corduroy
road to perdition”
—Edmund White, “City Boy”

I couldn’t help it—
That’s the way I wrote novels
Aghast at the world

Atlanta was burning—
Rhett Butler abandoned me
The Deep Door South was doomed

Butterfly McQueen—
Didn’t know a fuckin thing
About baby boys

Oh Lordly, Lordly—
What’s a Dixie Girl to do?
Be a novelist?

___________________

“She was ennuyante of stature.”
—Edmund White, “City Boy”

Like Miss Andre Gide—
I relived Counterfeiters
Such duplicity

Total exposure—
Of myself with the technique
Of concealing things

Mise-en-abyme queen—
Using many points of view
To conceal myself

Writing a novel—
Exploring possibilities
And insincerities

Divining how to—
Use insincerity
To cover-up things