After the Fall: Poems Old and New

The Winners and the Losers

The Winners and the Losers I stood before them and told them of my life, the sorrows and the losses— in short, the human condition. I could see them all, so young, hair shiny, with their lives before them— they were looking on me as a loser and had no pity, so determined were they to make it big, to be winners. Even the clerk in the social security office looked at me with wonder and asked, Have you always earned so little? I had never thought of it that way— to her too I was a loser, with bad luck written all over my tax records. What happened to the beautiful losers of my youth who let the world destroy them but stayed true to their dream, scoffed at materialism, conventions, a small, beleaguered band who kept their integrity against the world and devoted their lives to Art, Sex, and Revolution? Youth once believed in them, the madmen who burned themselves out with drugs and drink, 151 disappeared into the desert, or battered society with their shaggy heads. There was one period even when everybody was rushing off in search of the Underground Man. But now that winners are in fashion, disappearing are the last of the bohemians, left over from the old days of the Village, and I am of another era, like the grizzled poet who slept in Village doorways and showed up at the Poetry Society with his life work in a shopping bag and read his poem “Crows”: Caw, caw, he cried, as he jumped off a table, flapping his arms. 152 ...