There is a whore in my apartment building:
her room smells like dirty sex
There’s a man next door who reads the Times:
his idea of a hero is a handjob and a beer
There’s a dog in that man’s room:
his name is Asshole and he smells like piss
There is also a woman in that man’s room:
she cleans and gets fucked
Across the courtyard a couple lives:
He’s an actor, she’s an actress.
They can’t find work so they steal from the market.
They are breaking the law.
I smoked a reefer with them—
they don’t know shit about fuck—
I like them.
I used to be like that.
The streets outside my window are wet;
A filthy steam rises from every pore in the pavement.
I hate it here,
but I don’t think I could ever leave…
A manuscript lies on a naked mattress that lies in the corner of my two-room apartment
and there’s a coffee stain on it:
the publishers and editors have fucked it all to hell
A six-string guitar rests against a chair in my room:
It has only three strings.
I’m strung out on dope.
Next door to me, a young man is writing pamphlets:
they are anti-Semitic.
But for Christ’s sake, that man is a Jew.
A [guy] lies on a flat surface smoking a cigarette:
I lie dead in my bathtub.
“The Apartment Building,” a poem by Michael Showalter