You’re not likely to find this published or online. A treat. Such a treat, O god. These two poems are excellent, particularly the latter but they flow into each other so well.

Walking Home at Night

Reaching my own block
I saw the port Authority
Building hovering over
the old ghetto side
of the street I tenement
in company with obscure
Bartlebys and Judes,
cadaverous men,
shrouded men, soft white
fleshed failures creeping
in and out of rooms like
myself. Remembering
my attic, I reached
my hands to my head and hissed
“Oh, God how horrible!”

345 W. 15th St.

I came home from the movies with nothing on my mind,
Trudging up 8th Avenue to 15th almost blind,
Waiting for a passenger ship to go to sea.
I live in a roominghouse attic near the Port Authority,

An enormous City warehouse slowly turning brown
Across from which old brownstones’ fire escapes hang down
On a street which should be Russia outside the Golden gates
Or back in the middle ages not in United States.

I thought of my home in the suburbs, my father who wanted me home,
My aunts in the asylum myself in Nome or Rome.
I opened the door downstairs & Creaked up the first flight
A Puerto Rican in the front room was laughing in the night.

I saw from the second stairway the homosexual pair
That lived in different cubicles playing solitaire,
And I stopped on the third landing and said hello to Ned,
A crooked old man like Father Time who drank all night in bed.

I made it up to the attic room I paid $4.50 for.
There was a solitary cockroach on my door.
It passed me by. I entered. Nothing of much worth
Was hung up under the skylight. I saw what I had on earth.

Bare elements of Solitude: table, chair & clock;
Two books on top of the bedspread, Jack Woodford and Paul de Kock.
I sat down at the table & read a holy book
About a super City whereon I cannot look.

What misery to be guided to an eternal clime
When I yearn for sixty minutes of actual time.
I turned on the Radio voices strong and clear
described the high fidelity of a set without a peer.

Then I heard great musicians playing the Mahogany Hall
Up to the last high chorus. My neighbor beat on the wall.
I looked up at the Calendar it had a picture there
Showing two pairs of lovers and all had golden hair.

I looked into the mirror to check my worst fears.
My face is dark but handsome It has not loved for years.
I lay down with the paper to see what Time had wrought:
Peace was beyond vision, war too much for thought.

Only the suffering shadow of DREAM DRIVEN BOY, 16
Looked in my eyes from the Centerfold after murdering High School
Queen.
I stripped, my head on the pillow eyes on the cracked blue wall.
The same cockroach or another continued its upward crawl.

From what faint words, what whispers did I lie alone apart?
What wanted consummation? What sweetening of the heart?
I wished that I were married to a sensual thoughtful girl.
I would have made a wedded workmanlike tender churl.

I wished that I were working for $ 10,000 a year,
I looked all right in business suits but my heart was weak with fear.
I wished I owned an apartment uptown on the East Side,
So that my gentle breeding nurtured, had not died.

I wished I had an Aesthetic worth its weight in gold.
The myth is still unwritten. I am getting old.
I closed my eyes and drifted back in helpless shame
To jobs & loves wasted Disillusion itself was lame.

I closed my eyes and drifted the shortening years ahead,
Walk home from the movies lone long nights in bed,
Books, plays, music, spring afternoons in bars,
The smell of old Countries, the smoke of dark cigars.