Collected Poems 1947-1997 Page 19

  Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord

  Paris, December 1957-New York, 1959

  Mescaline

  Rotting Ginsberg, I stared in the mirror naked today

  I noticed the old skull, I’m getting balder

  my pate gleams in the kitchen light under thin hair

  like the skull of some monk in old catacombs lighted by

  a guard with flashlight

  followed by a mob of tourists

  so there is death

  my kitten mews, and looks into the closet

  Boito sings on the phonograph tonight his ancient song of angels

  Antinoüs bust in brown photograph still gazing down from my wall

  a light burst from God’s delicate hand sends down a wooden dove to the calm virgin

  Beato Angelico’s universe

  the cat’s gone mad and scraowls around the floor

  What happens when the death gong hits rotting ginsberg on the head

  what universe do I enter

  death death death death death the cat’s at rest

  are we ever free of—rotting ginsberg

  Then let it decay, thank God I know

  thank who

  thank who

  Thank you, O lord, beyond my eye

  the path must lead somewhere

  the path

  the path

  thru the rotting shit dump, thru the Angelico orgies

  Beep, emit a burst of babe and begone

  perhaps that’s the answer, wouldn’t know till you had a kid

  I dunno, never had a kid never will at the rate I’m going

  Yes, I should be good, I should get married

  find out what it’s all about

  but I can’t stand these women all over me

  smell of Naomi

  erk, I’m stuck with this familiar rotting ginsberg

  can’t stand boys even anymore

  can’t stand

  can’t stand

  and who wants to get fucked up the ass, really?

  Immense seas passing over

  the flow of time

  and who wants to be famous and sign autographs like a movie star

  I want to know

  I want I want ridiculous to know to know WHAT rotting ginsberg

  I want to know what happens after I rot

  because I’m already rotting

  my hair’s falling out I’ve got a belly I’m sick of sex

  my ass drags in the universe I know too much

  and not enough

  I want to know what happens after I die

  well I’ll find out soon enough

  do I really need to know now?

  is that any use at all use use use

  death death death death death

  god god god god god god god the Lone Ranger

  the rhythm of the typewriter

  What can I do to Heaven by pounding on Typewriter

  I’m stuck change the record Gregory ah excellent he’s doing just that

  and I am too conscious of a million ears

  at present creepy ears, making commerce

  too many pictures in the newspapers

  faded yellowed press clippings

  I’m going away from the poem to be a drak contemplative

  trash of the mind

  trash of the world

  man is half trash

  all trash in the grave

  What can Williams be thinking in Paterson, death so much on him

  so soon so soon

  Williams, what is death?

  Do you face the great question now each moment

  or do you forget at breakfast looking at your old ugly love in the face

  are you prepared to be reborn

  to give release to this world to enter a heaven

  or give release, give release

  and all be done—and see a lifetime—all eternity—gone over

  into naught, a trick question proposed by the moon to the answerless earth

  No Glory for man! No Glory for man! No glory for me! No me!

  No point writing when the spirit doth not lead

  New York, 1959

  Lysergic Acid

  It is a multiple million eyed monster

  it is hidden in all its elephants and selves

  it hummeth in the electric typewriter

  it is electricity connected to itself, if it hath wires

  it is a vast Spiderweb

  and I am on the last millionth infinite tentacle of the spiderweb, a worrier

  lost, separated, a worm, a thought, a self

  one of the millions of skeletons of China

  one of the particular mistakes

  I allen Ginsberg a separate consciousness

  I who want to be God

  I who want to hear the infinite minutest vibration of eternal harmony

  I who wait trembling my destruction by that aethereal music in the fire

  I who hate God and give him a name

  I who make mistakes on the eternal typewriter

  I who am Doomed

  But at the far end of the universe the million eyed Spyder that hath no name

  spinneth of itself endlessly

  the monster that is no monster approaches with apples, perfume, railroads, television, skulls

  a universe that eats and drinks itself

  blood from my skull

  Tibetan creature with hairy breast and Zodiac on my stomach

  this sacrificial victim unable to have a good time

  My face in the mirror, thin hair, blood congested in streaks down beneath my eyes, cocksucker, a decay, a talking lust

  a snaeap, a snarl, a tic of consciousness in infinity

  a creep in the eyes of all Universes

  trying to escape my Being, unable to pass on to the Eye

  I vomit, I am in a trance, my body is seized in convulsion, my stomach crawls, water from my mouth, I am here in Inferno

  dry bones of myriad lifeless mummies naked on the web, the Ghosts, I am a Ghost

  I cry out where I am in the music, to the room, to whomever near, you, Are you God?

  No, do you want me to be God?

  Is there no Answer?

  Must there always be an Answer? you reply,

  and were it up to me to say Yes or No—

  Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!

  But that I long for a Yes of Harmony to penetrate

  to every corner of the universe, under every condition whatsoever

  a Yes there Is … a Yes I Am … a Yes You Are … a We

  A We

  and that must be an It, and a They, and a Thing with No Answer

  It creepeth, it waiteth, it is still, it is begun, it is the Horns of Battle it is Multiple Sclerosis

  it is not my hope

  it is not my death at Eternity

  it is not my word, not poetry

  beware my Word

  It is a Ghost Trap, woven by priest in Sikkim or Tibet

  a crossframe on which a thousand threads of differing color

  are strung, a spiritual tennis racket

  in which when I look I see aethereal lightwaves radiate

  bright energy passing round on the threads as for billions of years

  the thread-bands magically changing hues one transformed to another as if the

  Ghost Trap

  were an image of the Universe in miniature

  conscious sentient part of the interrelated machine

  making waves outward in Time to the Beholder

  displaying its own image in miniature once for all

  repeated minutely downward with endless variations throughout all of itself

  it being all the same in every part

  This image or energy which reproduces itself at the depths of space from the very Beginning

  in what might be an O or an Aum

  and trailing variations made of the same Word circles round itself in the
same pattern as its original Appearance

  creating a larger Image of itself throughout depths of Time

  outward circling thru bands of faroff Nebulae & vast Astrologies

  contained, to be true to itself, in a Mandala painted on an Elephant’s hide,

  or in a photograph of a painting on the side of an imaginary Elephant which smiles, tho how the Elephant looks is an irrelevant joke—

  it might be a Sign held by a Flaming Demon, or Ogre of Transience,

  or in a photograph of my own belly in the void

  or in my eye

  or in the eye of the monk who made the Sign

  or in its own Eye that stares on Itself at last and dies

  and tho an eye can die

  and tho my eye can die

  the billion-eyed monster, the Nameless, the Answerless, the Hidden-from-me, the endless Being

  one creature that gives birth to itself

  thrills in its minutest particular, sees out of all eyes differently at once

  One and not One moves on its own ways

  I cannot follow

  And I have made an image of the monster here

  and I will make another

  it feels like Cryptozoids

  it creeps and undulates beneath the sea

  it is coming to take over the city

  it invades beneath every Consciousness

  it is delicate as the Universe

  it makes me vomit

  because I am afraid I will miss its appearance

  it appears anyway

  it appears anyway in the mirror

  it washes out of the mirror like the sea

  it is myriad undulations

  it washes out of the mirror and drowns the beholder

  it drowns the world when it drowns the world

  it drowns in itself

  it floats outward like a corpse filled with music

  the noise of war in its head

  a babe laugh in its belly

  a scream of agony in the dark sea

  a smile on the lips of a blind statue

  it was there

  it was not mine

  I wanted to use it for myself

  to be heroic

  but it is not for sale to this consciousness

  it goes its own way forever

  it will complete all creatures

  it will be the radio of the future

  it will hear itself in time

  it wants a rest

  it is tired of hearing and seeing itself

  it wants another form another victim

  it wants me

  it gives me good reason

  it gives me reason to exist

  it gives me endless answers

  a consciousness to be separate and a consciousness to see

  I am beckoned to be One or the other, to say I am both and be neither

  it can take care of itself without me

  it is Both Answerless (it answers not to that name)

  it hummeth on the electric typewriter

  it types a fragmentary word which is

  a fragmentary word,

  MANDALA

  Gods dance on their own bodies

  New flowers open forgetting Death

  Celestial eyes beyond the heartbreak of illusion

  I see the gay Creator

  Bands rise up in anthem to the worlds

  Flags and banners waving in transcendence

  One image in the end remains myriad-eyed in Eternity

  This is the Work! This is the Knowledge! This is the End of man!

  Palo Alto, June 2, 1959

  I Beg You Come Back & Be Cheerful

  Tonite I got hi in the window of my apartment

  chair at 3 A.M.

  gazing at Blue incandescent torches

  bright-lit street below

  clotted shadows looming on a new laid pave

  —as last week Medieval rabbiz

  plodded thru the brown raw

  dirt turned over—sticks

  & cans

  and tired ladies sitting on spanish

  garbage pails—in the deadly heat

  —one month ago

  the fire hydrants were awash—

  the sun at 3 P.M. today in a haze—

  now all dark outside, a cat crosses

  the street silently—I meow

  and she looks up, and passes a

  pile of rubble on the way

  to a golden shining garbage pail

  (phosphor in the night

  & alley stink)

  (or door-can mash)

  —Thinking America is a chaos

  Police clog the streets with their anxiety,

  Prowl cars creak & halt:

  Today a woman, 20, slapped her brother

  playing with his infant bricks—

  toying with a huge rock—

  ‘Don’t do that now! the cops! the cops!’

  And there was no cop there—

  I looked around shoulder—

  a pile of crap in the opposite direction.

  Tear gas! Dynamite! Mustaches!

  I’ll grow a beard and carry lovely

  bombs,

  I will destroy the world, slip in between

  the cracks of death

  And change the Universe—Ha!

  I have the secret, I carry

  Subversive salami in

  my ragged briefcase

  “Garlic, Poverty, a will to Heaven,”

  a strange dream in my meat:

  Radiant clouds, I have heard God’s voice in

  my sleep, or Blake’s awake, or my own or

  the dream of a delicatessen of snorting cows

  and bellowing pigs—

  The chop of a knife

  a finger severed in my brain—

  a few deaths I know—

  O brothers of the Laurel

  Is the world real?

  Is the Laurel

  a joke or a crown of thorns?—

  Fast, pass

  up the ass

  Down I go

  Cometh Woe

  —the street outside,

  me spying on New York.

  The dark truck passes snarling &

  vibrating deep—

  Leaving us flying like birds into Time

  —eyes and car headlights—

  The shrinkage of emptiness

  in the Nebulae

  These Galaxies cross like pinwheels & they pass

  like gas—

  What forests are born.

  September 15, 1959

  Psalm IV

  Now I’ll record my secret vision, impossible sight of the face of God:

  It was no dream, I lay broad waking on a fabulous couch in Harlem

  having masturbated for no love, and read half naked an open book of Blake on my lap

  Lo & behold! I was thoughtless and turned a page and gazed on the living Sun-flower

  and heard a voice, it was Blake’s, reciting in earthen measure:

  the voice rose out of the page to my secret ear never heard before—

  I lifted my eyes to the window, red walls of buildings flashed outside, endless sky sad in Eternity

  sunlight gazing on the world, apartments of Harlem standing in the universe—

  each brick and cornice stained with intelligence like a vast living face—

  the great brain unfolding and brooding in wilderness!—Now speaking aloud with Blake’s voice—

  Love! thou patient presence & bone of the body! Father! thy careful watching and waiting over my soul!

  My son! My son! the endless ages have remembered me! My son! My son! Time howled in anguish in my ear!

  My son! My son! my father wept and held me in his dead arms.

  1960

  To an Old Poet in Peru

  Because we met at dusk

  Under the shadow of the railroad station

  clock

  While my shade was visiting Lima

&
nbsp; And your ghost was dying in Lima

  old face needing a shave

  And my young beard sprouted

  magnificent as the dead hair

  in the sands of Chancay

  Because I mistakenly thought you were

  melancholy

  Saluting your 60 year old feet

  which smell of the death

  of spiders on the pavement

  And you saluted my eyes

  with your anisetto voice

  Mistakenly thinking I was genial

  for a youth

  (my rock and roll is the motion of an

  angel flying in a modern city)

  (your obscure shuffle is the motion

  of a seraphim that has lost

  its wings)

  I kiss you on your fat cheek (once more tomorrow

  Under the stupendous Desamparados clock)

  Before I go to my death in an airplane crash

  in North America (long ago)

  And you go to your heart-attack on an indifferent

  street in South America

  (Both surrounded by screaming

  communists with flowers

  in their ass)

  —you much sooner than I—

  or a long night alone in a room

  in the old hotel of the world

  watching a black door

  … surrounded by scraps of paper

  DIE GREATLY IN THY SOLITUDE

  Old Man,

  I prophesy Reward

  Vaster than the sands of Pachacamac

  Brighter than a mask of hammered gold

  Sweeter than the joy of armies naked

  fucking on the battlefield

  Swifter than a time passed between

  old Nasca night and new Lima

  in the dusk

  Stranger than our meeting by the Presidential

  Palace in an old café

  ghosts of an old illusion, ghosts

  of indifferent love—

  THE DAZZLING INTELLIGENCE

  Migrates from Death

  To make a sign of Life again to you

  Fierce and beautiful as a car crash

  in the Plaza de Armas

  I swear that I have seen that Light

  I will not fail to kiss your hideous cheek

  when your coffin’s closed

  And the human mourners go back

  to their old tired

  Dream.

  And you wake in the Eye of the

  Dictator of the Universe.

  Another stupid miracle! I’m