Little Boy

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  AND so the other day I am reading another handwrit letter from this old girlfriend of mine talking to me like we never split and so she says: HA! I found the “old poem” I wrote years ago - it predicted the present…………and funnier than I remembered. I can’t wait for the biography - and the movie. Life is ironic - if you can keep your sense of humor and lose your ego (not yours - mine) or rather, and I like this better, life is absurd - especially how it turns around. Duchamp, where are you? I should have kept writing poetry - or become a psychic. If I didn’t think you would collapse laughing I would send you the poem but I am afraid to. I will wait until you are feeling better - which will be soon. Remember Kahlil’s friend Dante (love the names) fell off the couch laughing at Legman’s Rationale of the Dirty Joke and hurt himself. I don’t want that to happen to you. Keep your chins up - everything will be fine. It is the waiting that is the worst. Get out of the hospital as quickly as possible so you don’t get an infraction. Let people take care of you. Be pampered…….and do not do too much. Don’t push yourself. I am thinking of you - I gave hundreds of heart milagros to the priests to pray over - if you believe in that sort of thing - can’t hurt and supports big business (the Catholic Choich). At least you didn’t start your email “……..unfortunately for your vacation plans, etc etc” so the blow was softened. It is amazing how calluses grow - what would have laid me low a few years ago is just regular now. I guess that is what life is also - the inside gets harder and the outside gets softer (that is an important insight - and a frightening one). None of this has anything to do with you - this is all about me so don’t take anything personally or get upset. It’s late and I am rambling - and it is not meant that way, and you told me once to take everything with a touch of salt and I am not telling you with a pound of sugar, for I’ve had so much sugar I am practically diabetic and I told you I see the world as a bestiary now - wish that had happened years ago but if wishes were knishes I’d open a deli - or something like that. (I’d love a hot pastrami right now - maybe I am becoming bipolar - see how my mind works - or doesn’t.) I think I am living Edna St. Vincent Millay’s life - or else I’ve just read her too much. You are the only one I know who appreciated her poetry. Everyone else thought she was too sappy. She had a sonnet for everything - and survived. She needed what she needed. I see her as a fox with the heart of a rabbit. I am glad I am a romantic and not a realist - that would be boring and no fun - just the little bit of realism I let in is a drag. I avoid it at all costs. A quote I like is (not from Edna) “never give up and never, under any circumstances, face the facts.” That’s me……………and, if I can’t talk to you - my oldest dearest longest love, who can I talk to? We didn’t talk enough - about important things - us, for instance. I was always too scared (see above). I’ll see you again - in my dreams until then. And so how is E. doing? Let me know. He admires you very much - and loves you - but we don’t talk about you. We talk about books, ideas, and movies. It is difficult for me to tell - his voice sounds the same. I send him warm clothes and sardines. Chris was here - can’t get HIS voice out of my head. The hurricane/storm is frightening - maybe that is what has brought on this mood. I found out who my real father was - took l5 minutes on the computer and cost less than $10……….a little bit of realism almost crept in but I held it at bay. The 1940s census was recently released with all the info - it is a relief of a sort but doesn’t really make any difference I am thinking of you….“If in the years to come you should remember…” etc…and today I remembered a trip to Gloucester with you and that ain’t all but just go ahead and fill in the missing parts and you’ll see what you shoulda done with your/our life, honeybun…..

  AND what am I to do with the rest of my life or your life as the days rave on, the nights too the long nights as the daze goes on and where are we anyway on the face of existence in the race for existence and which way are we facing with our bullyboy consciousness But is not laughter the sublime expression of consciousness which can go from extreme depression to ecstasy and the final ecstasy nothing but pure silent laughter Oh the sublimity of it and if I weren’t laughing I’d be dying I’d be crying with Samuel Beckett and Jimmy Joyce the master laugher behind the sublime babble of Finnegan yeah yeah I have read it all heard it all heard the falcon in its dying fall Oh white nights and mouths of desire and the cry of the mourning dove at dawn and the laughter of the universe behind closed shutters late at night when all the world goes sleeping and sleep the suicide of consciousness and I am entering my silent stage and no more regurgitation of everything seen or heard or said over the past century no more of that thank ye and this no Portrait of the Autist as an Old Man although this might be my hundredth year to heaven when summer passed me by and every season became the same season in my high flat and no one noticed the leaves coming and going and falling to the cry of flutes and the dog slept by the TV unaware of spring at the door leaves in her hair flowered with petals and an ancient voice in the air singing Primavera! Primavera! And the wind sprang up at four o’clock that day as it had every day for a long time a steady wind a great wind sweeping the universe never ceasing during the late afternoons and it stirred the leaves of the great laurel tree outside my window ceaselessly lashing them and it was like the mistral in southern France except this wind came from the far far north and still it blows and blows and blows every day lashing the leaves And the only sound a high laughter the laughter of the marvelous the laughter of the invisible the laughter of the absurd Oh i had not known life had undone so many so many of my friends on earth all gone and myself shrunk to an i left with Samuel Beckett the Unnamable almost underground but still thinking and what does the spinning spindrift pluriverse care even if it is a kind of verse for are we all blank verse to the blind cosmos with its overwhelming indifference to our fate and our little universe not lyric and good and harmonious but rather made of total chaos hostility and murder as Werner Herzog said observing the Grizzly Man being eaten alive by his favorite grizzly and it’s eat or be eaten all the way down Oh man turn me over i’m done on this side but nevertheless on the other hand (and how many hands do we have) perhaps in nature after all there is a secret innocence hidden beyond the last savanna deep in some sacred wood wherein I read the carbon-copy history of creepy man and his far-out destiny forever shrouded And the real tall-tale story of your life/my life yet to be told unwinding like a thread through a labyrinth a labyrêve or an onion peeled down to its core of Nothingness aha don’t you believe it for there must be more than nothing especially if you listen to the latest quantum activists telling you that the cosmos has its own consciousness beyond the collective consciousness of individuals animal vegetable or mineral (and this a quantum leap of aha! insight, sayeth Dr. Goswami) oh man but suppose on the other hand on the nether hand this cosmos is nothing but one huge computer in which we are all micro pixels and everyone knows a computer has no consciousness of its own but is made up of nothing but “other” consciousnesses and yet and yet even if all that is true there might still be a real prophet a bullyboy or dame a fair-haired one a dark seer or some other form of conscious talking protoplasm or ecoplasm to light our way to the final ha-ha! the final aha! the final ah! which is the final rebellion, and every act of rebellion expressing a nostalgia for innocence

  OH ain’t that going a bit too far with all your misty mysticism and your ah ah ahs Egad am I supposed to swallow all that bullshit while I’m trying to drink my espresso, yeah man as if all this time I was doing nothing but trying to reach the highest level of consciousness by emptying my mind of everything Om Om and the Empty Mind being the end of everything Nirvana itself so lie back and enjoy ah men and I was born the same year as Pete Seeger along with Jackie Robinson Nat King Cole Eva Peron J. D. Salinger Sir Edmund Hillary who scaled the heights if not the depths where some so-called heavy thinkers might have decided that there are Known Knowns and there are Unknown Knowns and there are also Unknown Unknowns which are the things we don’t know we don’t know since they are beyond our
imagination to imagine And the Unknown Unknowns are where “god” is or what “god” is “behind the brain” and “behind the eyes” where all is darkness where all all is light and does all this mean that I am about to “die” Well that’s a distant possibility although I doubt it since I of course am an American and Americans don’t die and so I am not about to croak oh no baby not me not not

  SO why does the world, why does the cosmos exist at all while all the advanced cosmologists have no answer nor anything but guesses as to which came first, the Void or the Universe which is like asking which came first the chick or the egg while we know all the time it was the cock came first, and so which came first, Being or Nothingness, and the existentialists posited that Being (or Existence) came first, Essentia before Esse, but no matter which we are definitely here spinning around on our own little globe of Earth, and it’s Wow! all over again every time we open our eyes every morning, the sun the sun, great god sun rising every morn to strike the towers with a shaft of light even as we sit in cafés endlessly wasting the time we have to waste time while we hear manuscripts murmuring like Marcel Proust’s endless sentences simulating endless time in his “involuntary memory” wherein he found happiness yes the memory involuntarily thrust upon him by the sound of a distant bell recalling a bell struck in his childhood in a moment of happiness or the taste of that famous madeleine dipped in tea evoking a fleeting moment with his dear mother yes not the moment when she refused him the cherished Good-Night Kiss yes and then there was Tony Judt the intellectual’s intellectual who when he was old and dying and had lost power of speech he kept thinking back and back to his childhood and to his Memory Chalet the place in his early childhood a little inn a pensione in French speaking Switzerland where his family went on vacation a small cozy inn still there in his old-age memory where people loved and were loved or felt fraternity Ah the fate of fraternity in an age of egoism in which Auguste Comte would brave despair with his belief that we have an ingrained desire to further the well-being of others oh what an absurd assumption And President Obama saying we are all responsible for each other Ha-ha-ha good luck with your good intentions in this world where evil really does exist and functions daily a veritable horned devil with a pitchfork Evil Evil Evil peeking through the daredevil fetching smile of a shy instructor or a pleasant lady with a dog ready to eat you alive And until I was ninety years old, I never had time to stop and think of where I was in life while now I look back and see it all too clearly. I think of Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” and of Yeats and the woods of Arcady being dead, of old the world on dreaming fed, now Grey Truth her painted toy! Life is still a freakin’ mystery but all that’s left now is bare reality the animals in their field configured grazing on their reality dreamers all to the end of time

  AT the corner of Francisco and Powell the soundless cars creep by An average Chinese gent wheels his wobbly bike across the intersection He’s wearing a Mao jacket and leans forward into the steady north wind as two tourists with tiny backpacks stride by looking exactly the same dressed the same which is the man which is the woman There may be only unisex people left in the world But here are two ladies at the next table refilling their wineglasses and laughing and each has a hilarious story to tell they’re whooping it up and one lady says “And what’s the opposite of ‘booby’?” and the other says “Two boobies!” and they both haw-haw and almost fall off their chairs here on the edge of the world and of existence While a girl in a dirndl skirt lilts by licking an ice-cream cone While a couple holding hands crosses in front of a delivery truck which swerves to miss them The two ladies are still dying laughing as one shouts “Get outa here, I’m Jewish!” As the Middle Eastern owner of the café comes by and graces me with a beer While a postman with empty bag limps across to the PO. The too-hot sun beats down and the wind continues its flapping of awnings as four young guys with backpacks stride by each on his cell phone talking to someone else somewhere else and instead of Be Here Now it’s Be Somewhere Else Now and I am witnessing Thank God It’s Friday on earth As a Japanese woman in a long skirt comes out of the Hokkaido studio down the block As a young husband pushing a stroller sits down at the café table as the baby bawls and the wife shows up as the baby continues bawling and the two ladies have quit laughing and gathered themselves together and got up saying between laughs “Hope we didn’t bother you! We don’t get out much!” And the sun falls down out of sight on the far horizon

  SO watching animals in clothes on downtown streets and where is everyone going? It’s a short story and a long story of greed in the face of Gandhi Yes well that’s pushing it but why is everybody rushing around like bandits looking for a deal Why is this guy on a street corner begging for a buck Why this aged lady on another corner hawking flowers to save herself And this funny fellow with buttons all over him proclaiming the end of the world and nobody acting like they notice as they rush by And it’s a script for a Pixar animated film in which every character is totally motivated by what he wants And it’s I want I want but they don’t say it Why say it when it’s so obvious Yeah all over America everybody is running around intent on their own instant gratification and why not? What else is there to live for I gotta get mine I wanna I wanna I wanna Make a million overnight Git rich quick & git out and have a mistress never mind the global warming fuck all that I got to get to Fat City and I mean soon Don’t tell me Jim reaching for the moon Just git out my way and fuck the nation of poor assholes on the street I am an American I deserve everything Me-Me-Me Nevermind what the scientists are saying the human race might not make it to the end of this here century but life goes on and on like a roller coaster in an amusement park ZOOM ZOOM and we’re up and over and over

  MEMORY all gone into reveries the cherry time over and what remains? oh I remain with Beckett and Proust in the Amen Corner and will aureate dawn ever come again? Will I survive will you survive even as drones the size of hummingbirds can kill you or your brother ten thousand miles away I shudder to think…said the dame from South Side Boston but stopped short without finishing her sentence as the light dimmed in the Caffé Paradiso after they’d thrown out Jack Powers black Irish and the last great poetry spouter on the Near North Side Lord save us we all cry together as if we all believed together that there was such a thing as a God that metes out justice like executing Whitey Bulger or whoever ran the mob and there’s no turning back when you do enough dumb things to screw up the country and everybody knowing what should be done but they don’t do it and everybody knows what shouldn’t be done but they do it anyway and bang goes the ball game and there ain’t no joy in Mudville even though there indeed are many enlightened people on earth and I am tempted to say that so-and-so living almost exclusively with animals made her a truly enlightened being “Oh I must turn and live with animals” said a famous poet and he did he did oh are there not so many ways to live so many ways to die and how many lives do each of us live in one lifetime so many lives subsumed in one voice like a flight of birds with a single consciousness and the consciousness expressed in one cry in animals and in one voice in man or woman as I myself lived more than one life growing up yes and I’ll get back to that if I live long enough but for now I’m too busy living in here and now in the vast marvel of being alive as part of creation as part of the earth and sea and my blood is part of the sea And then there are the two fish swimming in tandem in one consciousness like the body and the mind vibrating together and unable to live without the other, the two fish of our body with one fate which is what that hatha yoga feller told me one day at the Tassajara Zen Center in Big Sur mountains Yeah he said Fix your mind and fix your body with my repair kit heal one and heal the other Yeah and if you believe that you’ll believe anything without a computer Google or Wikipedia to tell you right or wrong and No you can’t bring your iPhone into the yoga room You’re on your own with only yourself and the hell with that house of cards the electronic universe which in an instant will collapse and disappear whenever the electricity g
oes off with a zizzle and a pop and you are left with nothing but yourself and no one to Twitter with Baby baby you’ve come a long way only to fall on your face with your Facebook and if you believe that you’ll believe anything but you gotta believe in something Baby you gotta believe And ain’t that the crisis of modern ape and especially the American North American variety with no myths of our own to believe in We landed here with the old European the old Greek myths the old myths like Christianity in our baggage and if we believe if we still believe all those fairy tales we’ll believe anything which leaves us exactly where we are naked under the apple tree with each other Oh so you think this is all pop religion since I’m no enlightened being and who am I to destroy your gods or whatever you live by? Well, I won’t argue with that, I’ve got other fires to start with other fish to fry as for instance can anyone imagine what the world would be like if life on earth reaches a condition in which there would be no further need for the left to continually dissent, when there would be no further need to dissent And one swallow does not make a spring but two swallows winging together with one consciousness make a full summer so that if enough people could wing together with one consciousness—and that consciousness being truly enlightened—would we not then bring peace and social justice to all the world? indeed indeed And is all that a crock of merde? indeed indeed Shall we just persist in our cynical stance our genial cynicism as heard up and down the alleys of Silicon Valley or Wall Street yeah yeah business as usual Don’t give me all that Man oh man and “When you’re up to your neck in merde there’s nothing to do but sing” quoth Samuel Beckett in one of his more optimistic moods and and “Let us spray” said the skunks in church Oh man shall I go on and what else can I do but go on Is there no end to it the voiceless wailing while members of the Pussy Riot go on wailing in jail in Mother Russia and are denied parole by the paternalistic court in Saransk on the grounds that they had not sufficiently repented their obscene acts in the Mother Church What next are we to be denied sacrament in Sacramento since we did not do right with our do-do And what am I to think if I don’t toe the line and my toe-jam gets me in trouble for offending the noses of the High-Ups and they may not approve of the too-strong smell of the rot of civilization and its discontents oh yes and the dark knight rises also yes it’s upon us the final darkest night brandishing a carbon sword and shall the world as we know it just simply come to an end but what do we know what our end really is or could be Well it’s just like our government to keep common ignorant people from getting their just desserts or even just main courses in the food-stamp dining halls of the greatest nation on earth where everybody eats plenty and all the cars look new what with the auto industry pumping out a million new cars a year and where are they to go except to your nearest stoplight or parking lot or ten-lane freeway or autobahn like in the goody Godard movie where the traffic jam is so bad the people in the cars start erecting tents and camping out along the highway waiting for the end of the jam and it all grows into a vast encampment which eventually turns into another city and where do we go from here sitting here on the thruway waiting for liberation from pathogenic industrial civilization until it becomes time to actually dismantle this civilization but somehow without throwing out the baby with the bathwater ha-ha Aye there’s the rub-a-dub as I circumnavigate the world looking for an angry truth or falsehood Oh I should turn and live with animals like Rima in Green Mansions in a dream of green oh no none of that turning my back on the world as it exists in turbulent cities groaning with machines yes I have seen the expatriates in places like Oaxaca or Katmandu or Fiji fiddling with their mustaches and kicking back like natives but the slow rot of being disconnected from their own culture invisibly sinks them into insomnia and boredom their brains rotted away like overage cheese with the mold that grows in lotuslands and their eyes get a faraway look and that ain’t for me I have to stay connected with the whole hairy mess and the glory of it or the vainglory of life as she is lived in our America god bless our hairy souls the sun is at the meridian and anything can happen while the government is going into mushroom cultivation growing mushrooms in the traditional manner you know the way it is done You keep the mushrooms in the dark and you feed them merde yessir that is how it is done Just keep the people in the dark and you can do anything and everything and you don’t even need the Supreme Court to help you like letting Big Money rule in a new corporate fascism Oh boy and what’s next just set ’em up in the other alley where the bowling pins are all lined up and all you have to do is knock ’em down and you’re king of the mountain and not even a nail of thought in the plank of stupidity can stop you And ain’t that the sum of it And so why am I watching baseball to escape the pain or ecstasy of existence and the Reds are beating the Yankees and should I be happy It’s all relative and life depends on the simplest things to yield a crop of happiness as if it were something you could harvest like corn or clover Oh roll me over in the clover Do it again Do I feel pain when a thousand innocents die in an air raid but you know who at the same moment I am having an orgasm as big as any imagined by Henry Miller that is Henry Miller from Brooklyn all or most all of his writing is inspired by the raised phallus or the raising phallus and then when he gets to be so old that he cannot get it up anymore and then what does that do to his writing which may or may not be out of juice if you know what I mean like as if it isn’t the same problem with for instance D. H. Lawrence who died at forty-five or hereabouts and thus never had to experience the fading of the phallus and who would ever know if his phallus-based writing would ever suffer the same wilted fate as Henry from Brooklyn Yeah Yeah and so why not believe in a meaty interpretation of literature or lit as they dub it in the universities since what is all our writing about male or female if it is not based on that life force rooted in the heart of desire or in that nest of flesh from which all life springs Oh endless the splendid life of the world Endless its lovely living and breathing its lovely sentient beings seeing and hearing feeling and thinking laughing and dancing sighing and crying through endless afternoons endless nights drinking and doping talking and singing with endless lively conversations over endless cups of coffee in literary cafés on rainy mornings Endless street movies passing in cars and trams of desire on the endless tracks of light And endless longhair dancing to airless punk rock and airhead disco through Milky Way midnights to the Paradisos of dawn talking and smoking and thinking of everything endless at night in the white of night the light of night Ah yes oh yes the endless living and loving hating and loving kissing and killing Endless the ticking breathing breeding meat-wheel of life turning on and on through time Endless life and endless death Endless air and endless breath Endless worlds without end of days in autumn capitals their avenues of leaves ablaze Endless dreams and sleep unraveling the knitted sleeves of care the labyrinths of thought the labyrêves of love the coils of desire and longing myriad endgames of the unnamable Endless the heavens on fire Endless universe spun out World upon a mushroom pyre Endless the fire that breathes in us tattooed fire-eaters dancing in plazas swallowing flaming gasoline air Brave the beating heart of flaming life its beating and pulsings and flameouts Endless the open fields of the senses the smell of lust and love the calling and calling of cats in heat their scent of must of musk No end to the sound of the making of love to the sound of bedsprings creaking to the moan of lovers making it heard through the wall at night No end to their groans of ecstasy moans of the last lost climax the sound of jukebox jumping the flow of jass and gyzm jived in Paradiso And then the endless attempts to escape the nausée of Sartre the bald hills of burned-out sensation joie de vivre in despair boatloads of enlightenment ships of merde afloat by Charon’s moat, greeds hysterias paranoias pollutions and perversions Endless l’homme revolté in the anonymous face of death in the tracks of the monster state Endless his anarchist visions Endless his alienation Endless his alienated poetry Gadfly of the state Bearer of Eros Endless the sound of the life of man on earth his endless radio broadcasts and TV transmissions newspapers r
olling off endless rolls on rotary presses the flow of his words and images on endless typewriter ribbons and tapes automatic writings and scrawlings endless poèmes dictés by the unknown Endless the calling on or dangling dick and then telephones to ends of earth the waiting of lovers on station platforms the crying of birds on hills and rooftops the cawing and cawing of crows in the sky the myriad churning of crickets the running seas the crying waters rising and falling on far shingles the lapping of tides in the ides of autumn salt kiss of creation No end to the sea bells tolling beyond the dams and dykes of life and the calling and calling of bells in empty churches and towers of time No end to the calamitous enunciation of hairy holy man Endless the ever-unwinding watch spring heart of the world shimmering in time shining through space Endless the tourist-boats through it bateaux mouches in endless canals millions of windows aflame in sunset the city burns with leftover light and red-light districts rock and glow with endless porn and neon cocks and vibrators vibrating endlessly in lonely topfloor rooms of leaning houses Endless the munching on the meat-sandwiches of lust the juicy steaks of love endless dreams and orgasms fertility rites and rites of passage and flights of fertile birds over rooftops and the dropping of eggs in nests and wombs the tempts and attempts of the flesh in furnished rooms of love where sings the stricken dove No end to the birthing of babies where love or lust has lain No end to the sweet birth of consciousness No end to the bitter deaths of it in vain No end no end to the withering of fur and fruit and flesh so passing fair and the neon mermaids singing each to each somewhere Endless the slight variations of the utterly familiar the fires of youth the embers of age the rage of the poet born again No end no end to any and all creation in the mute dance of molecules All is transmuted All is muted and all cries out again again Endless the waiting for God and Godot the absurd actions absurd plans and plays dilemmas and delays Absurd the waiting without action for the withering away of war and the withering away of the state Insane the waiting without action for the insane ending! Endless the wars of good and evil the flips of fate the trips of hate endless nukes and faults all failing-safe in endless chain reactions of the final flash while the White Bicycles of protest still circle round it For there will be an end to the dogfaced gods in wingtip shoes in Gucci slippers in Texas boots and tin hats in bunkers pressing buttons For there is no end to the hopeful choices still to be chosen the dark minds lighted the green giants of chance the fishhooks of hope in the sloughs of despond the hills in the distance the birds in the bush hidden streams of light and unheard melodies sessions of sweet silent thought stately pleasure domes decreed and the happy deaths of the heart every day the cocks of clay the feet in running shoes upon the quay And there is no end to the doors of perception still to be opened and the jet streams of light in the upper air of the spirit of man in the outer space inside us Endless rubaiyats and endless beatitudes endless shangri-las endless nirvanas sutras and mantras satoris and sensaras Bodhiramas and Boddhisatvas karmas and karmapas! Endless singing Shivas dancing on the smoking wombs of ecstasy! Shining! Transcendent! into the crystal night of time in the endless silence of the soul in the long loud tale of man in his endless sound and fury signifying everything with his endless hallucinations adorations annihilations illuminations erections and exhibitions fascismo and machismo circuses of the soul astray merrygorounds of the imagination coney island of the mindless endless poem dictated by the uncollected voice of the collective unconscious blear upon the tracks of time! The dancing continues There is a sound of revelry by night