Collected Poems 1947-1997 Page 10

  with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

  ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—

  and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

  who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

  to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

  the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

  and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

  with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

  II

  What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

  Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

  Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

  Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jail-house and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

  Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

  Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

  Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

  Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

  Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

  Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

  They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

  Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

  Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

  Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

  Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

  III

  Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland where you’re madder than I am

  I’m with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange

  I’m with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother

  I’m with you in Rockland where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries

  I’m with you in Rockland where you laugh at this invisible humor

  I’m with you in Rockland where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

  I’m with you in Rockland where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

  I’m with you in Rockland where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

  I’m with you in Rockland where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

  I’m with you in Rockland where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

  I’m with you in Rockland where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss

  I’m with you in Rockland where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

  I’m with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

  I’m with you in Rockland where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

  I’m with you in Rockland where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

  I’m with you in Rockland where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

  I’m with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep

  I’m with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free

  I’m with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

  San Francisco, 1955–1956

  Footnote to Howl

  Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

  The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!

  Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

  The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!

  The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!

  Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels!

  Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas!

  Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes & drums!

  Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!

  Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!

  Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul!

  Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel i
n Moloch!

  Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss!

  Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!

  Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

  Berkeley, 1955

  A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley

  All afternoon cutting bramble blackberries off a tottering brown fence

  under a low branch with its rotten old apricots miscellaneous under the leaves,

  fixing the drip in the intricate gut machinery of a new toilet;

  found a good coffeepot in the vines by the porch, rolled a big tire out of the scarlet bushes, hid my marijuana;

  wet the flowers, playing the sunlit water each to each, returning for godly extra drops for the stringbeans and daisies;

  three times walked round the grass and sighed absently:

  my reward, when the garden fed me its plums from the form of a small tree in the corner,

  an angel thoughtful of my stomach, and my dry and lovelorn tongue.

  1955

  Block print by Robert LaVigne

  A Supermarket in California

  What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

  In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

  What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! —and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

  I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

  I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

  I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

  We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

  Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?

  (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)

  Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.

  Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

  Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

  Berkeley, 1955

  Four Haiku

  Looking over my shoulder

  my behind was covered

  with cherry blossoms.

  Lying on my side

  in the void:

  the breath in my nose.

  I didn’t know the names

  of the flowers—now

  my garden is gone.

  On the porch

  in my shorts—

  auto lights in the rain.

  Berkeley, Fall 1955

  Sunflower Sutra

  I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.

  Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.

  The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the river-bank, tired and wily.

  Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust—

  —I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem

  and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past—

  and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye—

  corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,

  leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,

  Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!

  The grime was no man’s grime but death and human locomotives,

  all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—modern—all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown—

  and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these

  entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!

  A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!

  How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul?

  Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

  You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!

  And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!

  So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter,

  and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul too, and anyone who’ll listen,

  —We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.

  Berkeley, 1955

  Transcription of Organ Music

  The flower in the glass peanut bottle formerly in the kitchen crooked to take a place in the light,

  the closet door opened, because I used it before, it kindly stayed open waiting for me, its owner.

  I began to feel my misery in pallet on floor, listening to music, my misery, that’s why I want to sing.

  The room closed down on me, I expected the presence of the Creator, I saw my gray painted walls and ceiling, they contained my room, they contained me

  as the sky contained my garden,

  I opened my door

  The rambler vine climbed up the cottage post, the leaves in the night still where the day had placed them, the animal heads of the flowers where t
hey had arisen

  to think at the sun

  Can I bring back the words? Will thought of transcription haze my mental open eye?

  The kindly search for growth, the gracious desire to exist of the flowers, my near ecstasy at existing among them

  The privilege to witness my existence—you too must seek the sun …

  My books piled up before me for my use

  waiting in space where I placed them, they haven’t disappeared, time’s left its remnants and qualities for me to use—my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.

  I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.

  Saw the red blossoms in the night light, sun’s gone, they had all grown, in a moment, and were waiting stopped in time for the day sun to come and give them …

  Flowers which as in a dream at sunset I watered faithfully not knowing how much I loved them.

  I am so lonely in my glory—except they too out there—I looked up —those red bush blossoms beckoning and peering in the window waiting in blind love, their leaves too have hope and are upturned top flat to the sky to receive—all creation open to receive—the flat earth itself.

  The music descends, as does the tall bending stalk of the heavy blossom, because it has to, to stay alive, to continue to the last drop of joy.

  The world knows the love that’s in its breast as in the flower, the suffering lonely world.

  The Father is merciful.

  The light socket is crudely attached to the ceiling, after the house was built, to receive a plug which sticks in it allright, and serves my phonograph now…

  The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.

  The kitchen has no door, the hole there will admit me should I wish to enter the kitchen.