Collected Poems 1947-1997 Read online

  I remember when I first got laid, H.P. graciously took my cherry, I sat on the docks of Provincetown, age 23, joyful, elevated in hope with the Father, the door to the womb was open to admit me if I wished to enter.

  There are unused electricity plugs all over my house if I ever need them.

  The kitchen window is open, to admit air …

  The telephone—sad to relate—sits on the floor—I haven’t the money to get it connected—

  I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the Creator.

  And the Creator gave me a shot of his presence to gratify my wish, so as not to cheat me of my yearning for him.

  Berkeley, September 8, 1955

  Sather Gate Illumination

  Why do I deny manna to another?

  Because I deny it to myself.

  Why have I denied myself?

  What other has rejected me?

  Now I believe you are lovely, my soul, soul of Allen, Allen—

  and you so beloved, so sweetened, so recalled to your true loveliness,

  your original nude breathing Allen

  will you ever deny another again?

  Dear Walter, thanks for the message

  I forbid you not to touch me, man to man, True American.

  The bombers jet through the sky in unison of twelve,

  the pilots are sweating and nervous at the controls in the hot cabins.

  Over what souls will they loose their loveless bombs?

  The Campanile pokes its white granite (?) innocent head into the clouds for me to look at.

  A cripple lady explains French grammar with a loud sweet voice: Regarder is to look—

  the whole French language looks on the trees on the campus.

  The girls’ haunted voices make quiet dates for 2 o’clock—yet one of them waves farewell and smiles at last—her red skirt swinging shows how she loves herself.

  Another encased in flashy Scotch clothes clomps up the concrete in a hurry—into the door—poor dear!—who will receive you in love’s offices?

  How many beautiful boys have I seen on this spot?

  The trees seem on the verge of moving—ah! they do move in the breeze.

  Roar again of airplanes in the sky—everyone looks up.

  And do you know that all these rubbings of the eyes & painful gestures to the brow

  of suited scholars entering Dwinelle (Hall) are Holy Signs?—anxiety and fear?

  How many years have I got to float on this sweetened scene of trees & humans clomping above ground—

  O I must be mad to sit here lonely in the void & glee & build up thoughts of love!

  But what do I have to doubt but my own shiny eyes, what to lose but life which is a vision today this afternoon.

  My stomach is light, I relax, new sentences spring forth out of the scene to describe spontaneous forms of Time—trees, sleeping dogs, airplanes wandering thru the air, negroes with their lunch books of anxiety, apples and sandwiches, lunchtime, icecream, Timeless—

  And even the ugliest will seek beauty—‘What are you doing Friday night?’ asks the sailor in white school training cap & gilt buttons & blue coat,

  and the little ape in a green jacket and baggy pants and overloaded school-book satchel says ‘Quartets.’

  Every Friday nite, beautiful quartets to celebrate and please my soul with all its hair—Music!

  and then strides off, snapping pieces chocolate off a bar wrapped in Hershey brown paper and tinfoil,

  eating chocolate rose.

  & how can those other boys be them happy selves in their brown army study uniforms?

  Now cripple girl swings down walk with loping fuck gestures of her hips askew—

  let her roll her eyes in abandon & camp angelic through the campus bouncing her body about in joy—

  someone will dig that pelvic energy for sure.

  Those white stripes down your chocolate cupcake, Lady (held in front of your nose finishing sentence preparatory to chomp),

  they were painted there to delight you by some spanish industrial artistic hand in bakery factory faraway,

  expert hand in simple-minded messages of white stripes on millions of message cupcakes.

  I have a message for you all—I will denote one particularity of each!

  And there goes Professor Hart striding enlightened by the years through the doorway and arcade he built (in his mind) and knows—he too saw the ruins of Yucatán once—

  followed by a lonely janitor in dovegray italian fruitpeddler Chico Marx hat pushing his rolypoly belly thru the trees.

  N sees all girls

  as visions of

  their inner cunts,

  yes, it’s true!

  and all men walking

  along thinking

  of their spirit cocks.

  So look at that poor dread boy

  with two-day black hair

  all over his dirty face,

  how he must hate his cock

  —Chinamen stop shuddering

  and now to bring this to an end with a rise and an ellipse—

  The boys are now all talking to the girls ‘If I was a girl I’d love all boys’ & girls giggling the opposite, all pretty everywhichway

  and even I have my secret beds and lovers under another moonlight, be you sure

  & any minute I expect to see a baby carriage pushed on to the scene

  and everyone turn in attention like the airplanes and laughter, like a Greek Campus

  and the big brown shaggy silent dog lazing openeyed in the shade

  lift up his head & sniff & lower his head on his golden paws & let his belly rumble away unconcerned.

  … the lion’s ruddy eyes

  Shall flow with tears of gold.

  Now the silence is broken, students pour onto the square, the doors are crowded, the dog gets up and walks away,

  the cripple swings out of Dwinelle, a nun even, I wonder about her, an old lady distinguished by a cane,

  we all look up, silence moves, huge changes upon the ground, and in the air thoughts fly all over, filling space.

  My grief at Peter’s not loving me was grief at not loving myself.

  Huge Karmas of broken minds in beautiful bodies unable to receive love because not knowing the self as lovely—

  Fathers and Teachers!

  Seeing in people the visible evidence of inner self thought by their treatment of me: who loves himself loves me who love myself.

  Berkeley, September 1955

  America

  America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

  America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.

  I can’t stand my own mind.

  America when will we end the human war?

  Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

  I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

  I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

  America when will you be angelic?

  When will you take off your clothes?

  When will you look at yourself through the grave?

  When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

  America why are your libraries full of tears?

  America when will you send your eggs to India?

  I’m sick of your insane demands.

  When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

  America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

  Your machinery is too much for me.

  You made me want to be a saint.

  There must be some other way to settle this argument.

  Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.

  Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?

  I’m trying to come to the point.

  I refuse to give up my obsession.

  America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.

  America the plum b
lossoms are falling.

  I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.

  America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.

  America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.

  I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

  I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.

  When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.

  My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.

  You should have seen me reading Marx.

  My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.

  I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.

  I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.

  America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.

  I’m addressing you.

  Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?

  I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.

  I read it every week.

  Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.

  I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.

  It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious.

  Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.

  It occurs to me that I am America.

  I am talking to myself again.

  Asia is rising against me.

  I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.

  I’d better consider my national resources.

  My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.

  I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.

  I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.

  My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.

  America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

  I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.

  America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe

  America free Tom Mooney

  America save the Spanish Loyalists

  America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die

  America I am the Scottsboro boys.

  America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.

  America you don’t really want to go to war.

  America it’s them bad Russians.

  Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.

  The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.

  Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.

  That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.

  America this is quite serious.

  America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.

  America is this correct?

  I’d better get right down to the job.

  It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.

  America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

  Berkeley, January 17, 1956

  Fragment 1956

  Now to the come of the poem, let me be worthy

  & sing holily the natural pathos of the human soul,

  naked original skin beneath our dreams

  & robes of thought, the perfect self identity

  radiant with lusts and intellectual faces

  Who carries the lines, the painful browed

  contortions of the upper eyes, the whole body

  breathing and sentient among flowers and buildings

  open-eyed, self knowing, trembling with love—

  Soul that I have, that Jack has, Huncke has

  Bill has, Joan had, and has in me memory yet,

  bum has in rags, madman underneath black clothes.

  Soul identical each to each, as standing on

  the streetcorner ten years ago I looked at Jack

  and told him we were the same person—look

  in my eyes and speak to yourself, that makes me

  everybody’s lover, Hal mine against his will,

  I had his soul in my own body already, while

  he frowned—by the streetlamp 8th Avenue & 27th

  Street 1947—I had just come back from Africa

  with a gleam of the illumination actually

  to come to me in time as come to all—Jack

  the worst murderer, Allen the most cowardly

  with a streak of yellow love running through

  my poems, a fag in the city, Joe Army screaming

  in anguish in Dannemora 1945 jailhouse,

  breaking his own white knuckle against the bars

  his dumb sad cellmate beaten by the guards

  an iron floor below, Gregory weeping in Tombs,

  Joan eyes narrow-lidded under benzedrine

  harkening to the paranoia in the wall,

  Huncke from Chicago dreaming in Arcades

  of hellish Pokerino blue skinned Times Square light,

  Bill King yelling pale faced in the subway window

  final minute gape-death struggling to return,

  Morphy himself, archsuicide, expiring in blood

  on the Passaic, tragic & bewildered in

  last tears, attaining death that moment

  human, intellectual, bearded, who else

  was he then but himself?

  Berkeley, 1956

  Afternoon Seattle

  Busride along waterfront down Yessler under street bridge to the old red Wobbly Hall—

  One Big Union, posters of the Great Mandala of Labor, bleareyed dusty cardplayers dreaming behind the counter … ‘but these young fellers can’t see ahead and we nothing to offer’—

  After Snyder his little red beard and bristling Buddha mind I weeping crossed Skid Road to 10¢ beer.

  Labyrinth wood stairways and Greek movies under Farmers Market secondhand city, Indian smoked salmon old overcoats and dry red shoes,

  Green Parrot Theater, Maytime, and down to the harborside the ships, walked on Alaska silent together—ferryboat coming faraway in mist from Bremerton Island dreamlike small on the waters of Holland to me

  —and entered my head the seagull, a shriek, sentinels standing over rusty harbor iron dockwork, rocks dripping under rotten wharves slime on the walls—

  the seagull’s small cry—inhuman not of the city, lone sentinels of God, animal birds among us indifferent, their bleak lone cries representing our souls.

  A rowboat docked and chained floating in the tide by a wharf. Basho’s frog. Someone left it there, it drifts.

  Sailor’s curio shop hung with shells and skulls a whalebone mask, Indian seas. The cities rot from oldest parts. Little red mummy from Idaho

  Frank H. Little your big hat high cheekbones crosseyes and song.

  The cities rot from the center, the suburbs fall apart a slow apocalypse of rot the spectral trolleys fade

  the cities rot the fire escapes hang and rust the brick turns black dust falls uncollected garbage heaps the wall

  the birds invade with their cries the skid row all
ey creeps downtown the ancient jailhouse groans bums snore under the pavement a dark Turkish bath the cornice gapes at midnight

  Seattle!—department stores full of fur coats and camping equipment, mad noontime businessmen in gabardine coats talking on streetcorners to keep up the structure, I float past, birds cry,

  Salvation Army offers soup on rotting block, six thousand beggars groan at a meal of hopeful beans.

  February 2, 1956

  Tears

  I’m crying all the time now.

  I cried all over the street when I left the Seattle Wobbly Hall.

  I cried listening to Bach.

  I cried looking at the happy flowers in my backyard, I cried at the sadness of the middle-aged trees.

  Happiness exists I feel it.

  I cried for my soul, I cried for the world’s soul.

  The world has a beautiful soul.

  God appearing to be seen and cried over. Overflowing heart of Paterson.

  Seattle, February 2, 1956

  Scribble

  Rexroth’s face reflecting human

  tired bliss

  White haired, wing browed

  gas mustache,

  flowers jet out of

  his sad head,

  listening to Edith Piaf street song

  as she walks the universe

  with all life gone

  and cities disappeared

  only the God of Love

  left smiling.

  Berkeley, March 1956

  In the Baggage Room at Greyhound

  I

  In the depths of the Greyhound Terminal

  sitting dumbly on a baggage truck looking at the sky waiting for the Los Angeles Express to depart

  worrying about eternity over the Post Office roof in the night-time red downtown heaven,

  staring through my eyeglasses I realized shuddering these thoughts were not eternity, nor the poverty of our lives, irritable baggage clerks,

  nor the millions of weeping relatives surrounding the buses waving goodbye,

  nor other millions of the poor rushing around from city to city to see their loved ones,

  nor an indian dead with fright talking to a huge cop by the Coke machine,

  nor this trembling old lady with a cane taking the last trip of her life,