richard brautigan poems i like

I (it's time to train yourself)

It's time to train yourself
to sleep alone again
and it's so fucking hard.

II (appearing in your own face)

There are days when that is the last place
in the world where you want to be but you
have to be there, like a movie, because it
features you.

III (we are in a kitchen)

We are in a kitchen
in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Some bacon is frying.
It smells like a character
that you like in a good movie.
A beautiful girl is watching
the bacon.

IV (memoirs of jesse james)

I remember all those thousands of hours
that I spent in grade school watching the clock,
waiting for recess or lunch or to go home.
Waiting: for anything but school.
My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James
for all the time they stole from me.

V (the sister cities of los alamos, new mexico, and hiroshima, japan)

It was snowing hard when we drove
into Los Alamos. There was a clinical feeling
to the town as if every man, woman and child
were a doctor. We shopped at the Safeway
and got a bag of groceries. A toddler
looked like a brain surgeon. He carefully
watched us shop at the exact place where he would
make his first incision.

VI (feasting and drinking went on far into the night)

Feasting and drinking went on far into the night
but in the end we went home alone to console ourselves
which seems to be what so many things are all about
like the branches of a tree just after the wind
stops blowing.

VII (restuarant)

Fragile, fading 37,
she wears her wedding ring like a trance
and stares straight down at an empty coffee cup
as if she were looking into the mouth of a dead bird.
Dinner is over. Her husband has gone to the toilet.
He will be back soon and then it will be her turn
to go to the toilet.

VIII (as the bruises fade, the lightning aches)

As the bruises fade, the lightning aches.
Last week, making love, you bit me.
Now the blue and dark have gone
and yellow bruises grow toward pale daffodils,
then paler to become until my body
is all my own and what that ever got me.