Collected Poems 1947-1997

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Collected Poems 1947-1997 Page 6

by Allen Ginsberg


  toward what wild city

  jumping with jazz

  on the Pacific Ocean!

  Spring 1951

  Marijuana Notation

  How sick I am!

  that thought

  always comes to me

  with horror.

  Is it this strange

  for everybody?

  But such fugitive feelings

  have always been

  my métier.

  Baudelaire—yet he had

  great joyful moments

  staring into space,

  looking into the

  middle distance,

  contemplating his image

  in Eternity.

  They were his moments

  of identity.

  It is solitude that

  produces these thoughts.

  It is December

  almost, they are singing

  Christmas carols

  in front of the department

  stores down the block on

  Fourteenth Street.

  New York, November 1951

  Gregory Corso’s Story

  The first time I went

  to the country to New Hampshire

  when I was about eight

  there was a girl

  I always used to paddle with a plywood stick.

  We were in love,

  so the last night there

  we undressed in the moonlight

  and showed each other our bodies,

  then we ran singing back to the house.

  December 10, 1951

  I Have Increased Power

  over knowledge of death.

  (See also Hemingway’s

  preoccupation.) My

  dreamworld and realworld

  become more and more

  distinct and apart.

  I see now that what

  I sought in X seven years

  ago was mastery or

  victimage played out

  naked in the bed.

  Renewal of nostalgia

  for lost flair of those days,

  lost passions …

  Trouble with

  me now, no active life

  in realworld. And Time,

  as realworld, appearing vile,

  as Shakespeare says:

  ruinous, vile, dirty Time.

  As to knowledge of death:

  and life itself as without

  consummation foreseeable

  in ideal joy or passion

  (have I exaggerated the

  terror of catastrophe?

  reality can be joy or terror—

  and have I exaggerated the joy?):

  life as vile, as painful,

  as wretched (this pessimism

  which was X’s jewel),

  as grim, not merely bleak:

  the grimness of chance. Or as

  Carl wrote, after bughouse,

  “How often have I

  had occasion to see

  existence display

  the affectations

  of a bloodthirsty

  negro homosexual.”

  December 1951

  Walking home at night,

  reaching my own block

  I saw the Port Authority

  Building hovering over

  the old ghetto side

  of the street I tenement

  in company with obscure

  Bartlebys and Judes,

  cadaverous men,

  shrouded men, soft white

  fleshed failures creeping

  in and out of rooms like

  myself. Remembering

  my attic, I reached

  my hands to my head and hissed,

  “Oh, God how horrible!”

  New York, December 1951

  I learned a world from each

  one whom I loved;

  so many worlds without

  a Zodiac.

  New York, December 1951

  I made love to myself

  in the mirror, kissing my own lips,

  saying, “I love myself,

  I love you more than anybody.”

  New York, December 30, 1951

  A Ghost May Come

  Elements on my table—

  the clock.

  All life reduced to this—

  its tick.

  Dusty’s modern lamp,

  all shape, space and curve.

  Last attempts at speech.

  And the carved

  serpentine knife of Mexico,

  with the childish

  eagle head on the handle.

  New York, December 30, 1951

  I feel as if I am at a dead

  end and so I am finished.

  All spiritual facts I realize

  are true but I never escape

  the feeling of being closed in

  and the sordidness of self,

  the futility of all that I

  have seen and done and said.

  Maybe if I continued things

  would please me more but now

  I have no hope and I am tired.

  New York, Early 1952

  An Atypical Affair

  —Long enough to remember the girl

  who proposed love to me in the neon

  light of the Park Avenue Drugstore

  (while her girl friends walked

  giggling in the night) who had

  such eerie mental insight into my

  coldness, coupled with what seemed

  to me an untrustworthy character,

  and who died a few months later,

  perhaps a month after I ceased

  thinking of her, of an unforeseen

  brain malignancy. By hindsight,

  I should have known that only such

  a state of deathliness could bare

  in a local girl such a luminous

  candor. I wish I had been kinder.

  This hindsight is the opposite,

  after all, of believing that even

  in the face of death man can be

  no more than ordinary man.

  New York, January 1952

  345 W. 15th St.

  I came home from the movies with nothing on my mind,

  Trudging up 8th Avenue to 15th almost blind,

  Waiting for a passenger ship to go to sea.

  I live in a roominghouse attic near the Port Authority,

  An enormous City warehouse slowly turning brown

  Across from which old brownstones’ fire escapes hang down

  On a street which should be Russia outside the Golden gates

  Or back in the middle ages not in United States.

  I thought of my home in the suburbs, my father who wanted me home,

  My aunts in the asylum myself in Nome or Rome.

  I opened the door downstairs & Creaked up the first flight.

  A Puerto Rican in the front room was laughing in the night.

  I saw from the second stairway the homosexual pair

  That lived in different cubicles playing solitaire,

  And I stopped on the third landing and said hello to Ned,

  A crooked old man like Father Time who drank all night in bed.

  I made it up to the attic room I paid $4.50 for.

  There was a solitary cockroach on my door.

  It passed me by. I entered. Nothing of much worth

  Was hung up under the skylight. I saw what I had on earth.

  Bare elements of Solitude: table, chair & clock;

  Two books on top of the bedspread, Jack Woodford and Paul de Kock.

  I sat down at the table & read a holy book

  About a super City whereon I cannot look.

  What misery to be guided to an eternal clime

  When I yearn for sixty minutes of actual time.

  I turned on the Radio voices strong and clear

  described the high fidelity of a set without a peer.

  Then I heard great musicians
playing the Mahogany Hall

  Up to the last high chorus. My neighbor beat on the wall.

  I looked up at the Calendar it had a picture there

  Showing two pairs of lovers and all had golden hair.

  I looked into the mirror to check my worst fears.

  My face is dark but handsome It has not loved for years.

  I lay down with the paper to see what Time had wrought:

  Peace was beyond vision, war too much for thought.

  Only the suffering shadow of Dream Driven Boy, 16

  Looked in my eyes from the Centerfold after murdering High School Queen.

  I stripped, my head on the pillow eyes on the cracked blue wall.

  The same cockroach or another continued its upward crawl.

  From what faint words, what whispers did I lie alone apart?

  What wanted consummation? What sweetening of the heart?

  I wished that I were married to a sensual thoughtful girl.

  I would have made a wedded workmanlike tender churl.

  I wished that I were working for $10,000 a year.

  I looked all right in business suits but my heart was weak with fear.

  I wished I owned an apartment uptown on the East Side,

  So that my gentle breeding nurtured, had not died.

  I wished I had an Aesthetic worth its weight in gold.

  The myth is still unwritten. I am getting old.

  I closed my eyes and drifted back in helpless shame

  To jobs & loves wasted Disillusion itself was lame.

  I closed my eyes and drifted the shortening years ahead,

  Walk home from the movies lone long nights in bed,

  Books, plays, music, spring afternoons in bars,

  The smell of old Countries, the smoke of dark cigars.

  February 1952

  [According to biographer Bill Morgan, the actual address where this poem was written was 346 West 15th Street.—The Allen Ginsberg Trust, May 2006]

  A Crazy Spiritual

  A faithful youth

  with artificial legs

  drove his jalopy

  through the towns of Texas.

  He got sent out

  of the Free Hospital

  of Galveston, madtown

  on the Gulf of Mexico

  after he recovered.

  They gave him a car

  and a black mongrel;

  name was Weakness.

  He was a thin kid

  with golden hair

  and a frail body

  on wire thighs,

  who never traveled

  and drove northward

  timid on the highway

  going about twenty.

  I hitched a hike

  and showed him the road.

  I got off at Small Town

  and stole his dog.

  He tried to drive away,

  but lost control,

  rode on the pavement

  near a garage,

  and smashed his doors

  and fenders on trees

  and parked cars,

  and came to a halt.

  The Marshal came,

  stopping everything

  pulled him out

  of the wreck cursing.

  I watched it all

  from the lunch cart,

  holding the dog

  with a frayed rope.

  “I’m on my own

  from the crazyhouse.

  Has anybody

  seen my Weakness?”

  What are they saying?

  “Call up the FBI.

  Crazy, ha? What

  is he a fairy?

  He must do funny

  things with women,

  we bet he * * *

  them in the * * *.”

  Poor child meanwhile

  collapsed on the ground

  with innocent expression

  is trying to get up.

  Along came a Justice

  of the Supreme Court,

  barreling through town

  in a blue limousine.

  He stopped by the crowd

  to find out the story,

  got out on his pegleg

  with an angry smile.

  “Don’t you see

  he has no legs?

  That’s you fools

  what crazy means.”

  He picked the boy

  up off the ground.

  The dog ran to them

  from the lunch cart.

  He put them both in

  the back seat of his car

  and stood in the square

  hymning at the crowd:

  “Rock rock rock

  for the tension

  of the people

  of this country

  rock rock rock

  for the craziness

  of the people

  of America

  tension is a rock

  and god will

  rock our rock

  craziness is a rock

  and god will

  rock our rock

  Lord we shall all

  be sweet again.”

  He showed his wooden leg

  to the boy, saying:

  “I promise to drive you

  home through America.”

  Paterson, April 1952

  Wild Orphan

  Blandly mother

  takes him strolling

  by railroad and by river

  —he’s the son of the absconded

  hot rod angel—

  and he imagines cars

  and rides them in his dreams,

  so lonely growing up among

  the imaginary automobiles

  and dead souls of Tarrytown

  to create

  out of his own imagination

  the beauty of his wild

  forebears—a mythology

  he cannot inherit.

  Will he later hallucinate

  his gods? Waking

  among mysteries with

  an insane gleam

  of recollection?

  The recognition—

  something so rare

  in his soul,

  met only in dreams

  —nostalgias

  of another life.

  A question of the soul.

  And the injured

  losing their injury

  in their innocence

  —a cock, a cross,

  an excellence of love.

  And the father grieves

  in flophouse

  complexities of memory

  a thousand miles

  away, unknowing

  of the unexpected

  youthful stranger

  bumming toward his door.

  New York, April 13, 1952

  II

  THE GREEN

  AUTOMOBILE

  (1953–1954)

  The Green Automobile

  If I had a Green Automobile

  I’d go find my old companion

  in his house on the Western ocean.

  Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

  I’d honk my horn at his manly gate,

  inside his wife and three

  children sprawl naked

  on the living room floor.

  He’d come running out

  to my car full of heroic beer

  and jump screaming at the wheel

  for he is the greater driver.

  We’d pilgrimage to the highest mount

  of our earlier Rocky Mountain visions

  laughing in each other’s arms,

  delight surpassing the highest Rockies,

  and after old agony, drunk with new years,

  bounding toward the snowy horizon

  blasting the dashboard with original bop

  hot rod on the mountain

  we’d batter up the cloudy highway

  where angels of anxiety

  careen through the trees

  and scream out of the e
ngine.

  We’d burn all night on the jackpine peak

  seen from Denver in the summer dark,

  forestlike unnatural radiance

  illuminating the mountaintop:

  childhood youthtime age & eternity

  would open like sweet trees

  in the nights of another spring

  and dumbfound us with love,

  for we can see together

  the beauty of souls

  hidden like diamonds

  in the clock of the world,

  like Chinese magicians can

  confound the immortals

  with our intellectuality

  hidden in the mist,

  in the Green Automobile

  which I have invented

  imagined and visioned

  on the roads of the world

  more real than the engine

  on a track in the desert

  purer than Greyhound and

  swifter than physical jetplane.

  Denver! Denver! we’ll return

  roaring across the City & County Building lawn

  which catches the pure emerald flame

  streaming in the wake of our auto.

  This time we’ll buy up the city!

  I cashed a great check in my skull bank

  to found a miraculous college of the body

  up on the bus terminal roof.

  But first we’ll drive the stations of downtown,

  poolhall flophouse jazzjoint jail

  whorehouse down Folsom

  to the darkest alleys of Larimer

  paying respects to Denver’s father

  lost on the railroad tracks,

  stupor of wine and silence

  hallowing the slum of his decades,

  salute him and his saintly suitcase

  of dark muscatel, drink

  and smash the sweet bottles

  on Diesels in allegiance.

  Then we go driving drunk on boulevards

  where armies march and still parade

  staggering under the invisible

  banner of Reality—

  hurtling through the street

  in the auto of our fate

  we share an archangelic cigarette

  and tell each other’s fortunes:

  fames of supernatural illumination,

  bleak rainy gaps of time,

  great art learned in desolation

 

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