Billy the Kid

by Jack Spicer

Illustrations by Jess

Genres: Poetry

16 pages

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 - August 17, 1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.

Spicer was born in Los Angeles, where he later graduated from Fairfax High School in 1942, and attended the University of Redlands from 1943-45. He spent most of his writing-life in San Francisco and spent the years 1945 to 1950 and 1952 to 1955 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began writing, doing work as a research-linguist, and publishing some poetry (though he disdained publishing). During this time he searched out fellow poets, but it was through his alliance with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser that Spicer forged a new kind of poetry, and together they referred to their common work as the Berkeley Renaissance. The three, who were all gay, also educated younger poets in their circle about their "queer genealogy", Rimbaud, Lorca, and other gay writers.[1] Spicer's poetry of this period is collected in One Night Stand and Other Poems (1980). His Imaginary Elegies, later collected in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry 1945-1960 anthology, were written around this time.

In 1954, he co-founded the Six Gallery in San Francisco, which soon became famous as the scene of the October 1955 Six Gallery reading that launched the West Coast Beat movement.

Reviews

[Holly Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel cheap giving everything Jack Spicer wrote five stars. Is that ok? Do you understand? Let's all try to be on the same page here about Jack Spicer being really great.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

That old equalizer
Called time by some
Love by others
Cock by a few
Will come to meet you at the door
When you go
(Knowing that death is as near to you as water)
Go to duck and say goodbye to your Mexican whore.
They will be waiting in the same room for you:
Time with his big jeans
Love with his embarrassed laugh
Cock with his throat cut wearing a bandana.
They can equalize anybody
January, February, March,
April, May, June, July, August, September,
October,
November,
December,
I love you, I love you,
Scream when you come.
There is not another room to go into
But hell, Billy,
It was hell when they shot you.
- Jack Spicer, "For Billy" (Admonitions)

BILLY THE KID

I
 The radio that told me about the death of Billy the Kid
 (And the day, a hot summer day, with birds in the sky)
 Let us fake out a frontier - a poem somebody could hide in with a sheriff's posse after him - a thousand miles of it if it is necessary for him to go a thousand miles - a poem with no hard corners, no houses to get lost in, no underwebbing of customary magic, no New York Jew salesman of amethyst pajamas, only a place where Billy The Kid can hide when he shoots people.
 Torture gardens and scenic railways. The radio
 That told me about the death of Billy The Kid
 The day a hot summer day. The roads dusty in the summer. The roads going somewhere. You can almost see where they are going beyond the dark purple of the horizon. Not even the birds know where they are going.
 The poem. In all that distance who could recognize his face.



II
A sprinkling of gold leaf looking like hell flowers
A flat piece of wrapping paper, already wrinkled, but wrinkled again by hand, smoothed into shape by an electric iron
A painting
Which told me about the death of Billy The Kid.
Collage a binding together
Of the real
Which flat colours
Tell us what heroes 
 really come by.
No, it is not a collage. Hell flowers
Fall from the hands of heroes
 fall from all of our hands
 flat
As if we were not ever able quite to include them.
His gun
 does not shoot real bullets
 his death
Being done is unimportant.
Being done
In those flat colours
Not a collage
A binding together, a
Memory.



III
There was nothing at the edge of the river
But dry grass and cotton candy.
"Alias," I said to him. "Alias,
Somebody there makes us want to drink the river
Somebody wants to thirst us."
"Kid," he said. "No river
Wants to trap men. There ain't no malice in it. Try
To understand."
We stood there by that little river and Alias took off his shirt and I took off my shirt
I was never real. Alias was never real.
Or that big cotton tree or the ground.
Or the little river.



IV
What I mean is
I
Will tell you about the pain
It was a long pain
About as wife as a curtain
But long
As the great outdoors.
Stig-
 mata
Three bullet holes in the groin
One in the head
 dancing
Right below the left eyebrow
What I mean is I
Will tell you about his
Pain.



V
Billy The Kid in a field of poplars with just one touch of moonlight
His shadow is carefully
 distinguished form all of their shadows
Delicate
 as perception is
No one will get his gun or obliterate
Their shadows



VI
The gun
A false clue
 Nothing can kill
Anybody.
Not a poem or a fat penis. Bang,
Bang, bang. A false
Clue.
Nor immortality either (though why immortality should occur to me with somebody who was as mortal as Billy The Kid or his gun which is now rusted in some rubbish heap or shined up properly in some New York museum) A
False clue
Nothing
Can kill anybody. Your gun, Billy,
And your fresh
Face.



VII
Grasshoppers swarm through the desert.
Within the desert
There are only grasshoppers.
Lady
Of Guadalupe
Make my sight clear
Make my breath pure
Make my strong arm stronger and my fingers tight.
Lady of Guadalupe, lover
Of many make
Me avenge
Them



VIII
Back where poetry is Our Lady
Watches each motion when the players take the cards
From the deck.
The Ten of Diamonds. The Jack of Spades. The Queen
Of Clubs. The King of Hearts. The Ace
God gave us when he put us alive writing poetry for unsuspecting people or shooting them with his guns.
Our Lady
Stands as a kind of dancing partner for the memory.
Will you dance, Our Lady,
Dead and unexpected?
Billy wants you to dance
Billy
Will shoot the heels off your shoes if you don't dance
Billy 
Being dead also wants
Fun.



IX
So the heart breaks
Into small shadows
Almost so random
They are meaningless
Like a diamond
Has at the centre of it a diamond
Or a rock
Rock.
Being afraid
Love asks its bare question -
I can no more remember 
What brought me here
Than bone answers bone in the arm
Or shadow sees shadow -
Deathward we ride in the boat
Like someone canoeing
In a small lake
Where at either end
There are nothing but pine-branches -
Deathward we ride in the boat
Broken-hearted or broken-bodied
The choice is real. The diamond. I
Ask it.



X
Billy The Kid
I love you
Billy The Kid
I back anything you say
And there was the desert
And the mouth of the river
Billy The Kid
(In spite of your death notice)
There is honey in the groin
Billy

[Victor H · Rating 3 out of 5]

li e traduzi

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

YES