Paranoid: A Chant

I can't go out no more.

There's a man by the door

in a raincoat

smoking a cigarette.

But

I've put him in my diary.

and the mailers are all lined up

on the bed, bloody in the glow

of the bar sign next door.

He knows that if I die

(or even drop out of sight)

the diary goes and everyone knows

the CIA's in Virginia.

500 mailers bought from

500 drug counters each one different

and 500 notebooks

with 500 pages in every one.

I am prepared.

I can see him from up here.

His cigarette winks from just

above his trenchcoat collar

and somewhere there's a man on a subway

sitting under a Black Velvet ad thinking my name.

Men have discussed me in back rooms.

If the phone rings there's only dead breath.

In the bar across the street a snubnose

revolver has changed hands in the men's room.

Each bullet has my name on it.

My name is written in back files

and looked up in newspaper morgues.

My mother's been investigated;

thank God she's dead.

They have writing samples

and examine the back loops of pees

and the crosses of tees.

My brother's with them, did I tell you?

His wife is Russian and he

keeps asking me to fill out forms.

I have it in my diary.

Listen--

listen

do listen:

you must listen.

In the rain, at the bus stop,

black crows with black umbrellas

pretend to look at their watches, but

it's not raining. Their eyes are silver dollars.

Some are scholars in the pay of the FBI

most are the foreigners who pour through

our streets. I fooled them

got off the bus at 25th and Lex

where a cabby watched me over his newspaper.

In the room above me an old woman

has put an electric suction cup on her floor.

It sends out rays through my light fixture

and now I write in the dark

by the bar sign's glow.

I tell you I know.

They sent me a dog with brown spots

and a radio cobweb in its nose.

I drowned it in the sink and wrote it up

in folder GAMMA.

I don't look in the mailbox anymore.

The greeting cards are letter-bombs.

(Step away! Goddam you!

Step away, I know tall people!

I tell you I know very tall people!)

The luncheonette is laid with talking floors

and the waitress says it was salt but I know arsenic

when it's put before me. And the yellow taste of mustard

to mask the bitter odor of almonds.

I have seen strange lights in the sky.

Last night a dark man with no face crawled through nine miles

of sewer to surface in my toilet, listening

for phone calls through the cheap wood with

chrome ears.

I tell you, man, I hear.

I saw his muddy handprints

on the porcelain.

I don't answer the phone now,

have I told you that?

They are planning to flood the earth with sludge.

They are planning break-ins.

They have got physicians

advocating weird sex positions.

They are making addictive laxatives

and suppositories that burn.

They know how to put out the sun

with blowguns.

I pack myself in ice--have I told you that?

It obviates their infrascopes.

I know chants and I wear charms.

You may think you have me but I could destroy you

any second now.

Any second now.

Any second now.

Would you like some coffee, my love?

Did I tell you I can't go out no more?

There's a man by the door

in a raincoat.