Collected Poems 1947-1997

by Allen Ginsberg

  on the frosty broad road

  uphill between highway embankments

  I search for the language

  that is also yours—

  almost all our language has been taxed by war.

  Radio antennae high tension

  wires ranging from Junction City across the plains—

  highway cloverleaf sunk in a vast meadow

  lanes curving past Abilene

  to Denver filled with old

  heroes of love—

  to Wichita where McClure’s mind

  burst into animal beauty

  drunk, getting laid in a car

  in a neon misted street

  15 years ago—

  to Independence where the old man’s still alive

  who loosed the bomb that’s slaved all human consciousness

  and made the body universe a place of fear—

  Now, speeding along the empty plain,

  no giant demon machine

  visible on the horizon

  but tiny human trees and wooden houses at the sky’s edge

  I claim my birthright!

  reborn forever as long as Man

  in Kansas or other universe—Joy

  reborn after the vast sadness of War Gods!

  A lone man talking to myself, no house in the brown vastness to hear,

  imaging the throng of Selves

  that make this nation one body of Prophecy

  languaged by Declaration as Pursuit of

  Happiness!

  I call all Powers of imagination

  to my side in this auto to make Prophecy,

  all Lords

  of human kingdoms to come

  Shambu Bharti Baba naked covered with ash

  Khaki Baba fat-bellied mad with the dogs

  Dehorahava Baba who moans Oh how wounded, How wounded

  Sitaram Onkar Das Thakur who commands

  give up your desire

  Satyananda who raises two thumbs in tranquillity

  Kali Pada Guha Roy whose yoga drops before the void

  Shivananda who touches the breast and says OM

  Srimata Krishnaji of Brindaban who says take for your guru

  William Blake the invisible father of English visions

  Sri Ramakrishna master of ecstasy eyes

  half closed who only cries for his mother

  Chaitanya arms upraised singing & dancing his own praise

  merciful Chango judging our bodies

  Durga-Ma covered with blood

  destroyer of battlefield illusions

  million-faced Tathagata gone past suffering

  Preserver Harekrishna returning in the age of pain

  Sacred Heart my Christ acceptable

  Allah the Compassionate One

  Jaweh Righteous One

  all Knowledge-Princes of Earth-man, all

  ancient Seraphim of heavenly Desire, Devas, yogis

  & holymen I chant to—

  Come to my lone presence

  into this Vortex named Kansas,

  I lift my voice aloud,

  make Mantra of American language now,

  I here declare the end of the War!

  Ancient days’ Illusion!—

  and pronounce words beginning my own millennium.

  Let the States tremble,

  let the Nation weep,

  let Congress legislate its own delight

  let the President execute his own desire—

  this Act done by my own voice,

  nameless Mystery—

  published to my own senses,

  blissfully received by my own form

  approved with pleasure by my sensations

  manifestation of my very thought

  accomplished in my own imagination

  all realms within my consciousness fulfilled

  60 miles from Wichita

  near El Dorado,

  The Golden One,

  in chill earthly mist

  houseless brown farmland plains rolling heavenward

  in every direction

  one midwinter afternoon Sunday called the day of the Lord—

  Pure Spring Water gathered in one tower

  where Florence is

  set on a hill,

  stop for tea & gas

  Cars passing their messages along country crossroads

  to populaces cement-networked on flatness,

  giant white mist on earth

  and a Wichita Eagle-Beacon headlines

  “Kennedy Urges Cong Get Chair in Negotiations”

  The War is gone,

  Language emerging on the motel news stand,

  the right magic

  Formula, the language known

  in the back of the mind before, now in black print

  daily consciousness

  Eagle News Services Saigon—

  Headline Surrounded Vietcong Charge Into Fire Fight

  the suffering not yet ended

  for others

  The last spasms of the dragon of pain

  shoot thru the muscles

  a crackling around the eyeballs

  of a sensitive yellow boy by a muddy wall

  Continued from page one area

  after the Marines killed 256 Vietcong captured 31

  ten day operation Harvest Moon last December

  Language language

  U.S. Military Spokesmen

  Language language

  Cong death toll

  has soared to 100 in First Air Cavalry

  Division’s Sector of

  Language language

  Operation White Wing near Bong Son

  Some of the

  Language language

  Communist

  Language language soldiers

  charged so desperately

  they were struck with six or seven bullets before they fell

  Language Language M 60 Machine Guns

  Language language in La Drang Valley

  the terrain is rougher infested with leeches and scorpions

  The war was over several hours ago!

  Oh at last again the radio opens

  blue Invitations!

  Angelic Dylan singing across the nation

  “When all your children start to resent you

  Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?”

  His youthful voice making glad

  the brown endless meadows

  His tenderness penetrating aether,

  soft prayer on the airwaves,

  Language language, and sweet music too

  even unto thee,

  hairy flatness!

  even unto thee

  despairing Burns!

  Future speeding on swift wheels

  straight to the heart of Wichita!

  Now radio voices cry population hunger world

  of unhappy people

  waiting for Man to be born

  O man in America!

  you certainly smell good

  the radio says

  passing mysterious families of winking towers

  grouped round a quonset-hut on a hillock—

  feed storage or military fear factory here?

  Sensitive City, Ooh! Hamburger & Skelley’s Gas

  lights feed man and machine,

  Kansas Electric Substation aluminum robot

  signals thru thin antennae towers

  above the empty football field

  at Sunday dusk

  to a solitary derrick that pumps oil from the unconscious

  working night & day

  & factory gas-flares edge a huge golf course

  where tired businessmen can come and play—

  Cloverleaf, Merging Traffic East Wichita turnoff

  McConnell Airforce Base

  nourishing the city—

  Lights rising in the suburbs

  Supermarket Texaco brilliance starred

  over streetlamp vertebrae on Kellogg,

  green jeweled traffic li
ghts

  confronting the windshield,

  Centertown ganglion entered!

  Crowds of autos moving with their lightshine,

  signbulbs winking in the driver’s eyeball—

  The human nest collected, neon lit,

  and sunburst signed

  for business as usual, except on the Lord’s Day—

  Redeemer Lutheran’s three crosses lit on the lawn

  reminder of our sins

  and Titsworth offers insurance on Hydraulic

  by De Voors Guard’s Mortuary for outmoded bodies

  of the human vehicle

  which no Titsworth of insurance will customize for resale—

  So home, traveler, past the newspaper language factory

  under Union Station railroad bridge on Douglas

  to the center of the Vortex, calmly returned

  to Hotel Eaton—

  Carry Nation began the war on Vietnam here

  with an angry smashing ax

  attacking Wine—

  Here fifty years ago, by her violence

  began a vortex of hatred that defoliated the Mekong Delta—

  Proud Wichita! vain Wichita

  cast the first stone!—

  That murdered my mother

  who died of the communist anticommunist psychosis

  in the madhouse one decade long ago

  complaining about wires of masscommunication in her head

  and phantom political voices in the air

  besmirching her girlish character.

  Many another has suffered death and madness

  in the Vortex from Hydraulic

  to the end of 17th—enough!

  The war is over now—

  Except for the souls

  held prisoner in Niggertown

  still pining for love of your tender white bodies O children of Wichita!

  February 14, 1966

  Auto Poesy: On the Lam from Bloomington

  Setting out East on rain bright highways

  Indianapolis, police cars speeding past

  gas station—Stopped for matches

  PLOWL of Silence,

  Street bulbs flash cosmic blue—darkness!

  POW, lights flash on again!

  pavement-gleam

  Mobil station pumps lit in rain

  ZAP, darkness, highway power failure

  rain hiss

  traffic lights dead black—

  Ho! Dimethyl Triptamine flashing circle vibrations

  center Spiked—

  Einsteinian Mandala,

  Spectrum translucent,

  … Television eyeball dots in treehouse Ken Kesey’s

  Power failure inside the head,

  neural apparatus crackling—

  So drift months later past

  Eli Lilly pharmaceuticals’ tower walls

  asleep in early morning dark outside Indianapolis

  Street lamps lit humped along downtown Greenfield

  News from Dallas, Dirksen declareth

  “Vietnam Protesters have forgotten the lessons of History”

  Across Ohio River, noon

  old wire bridge, auto graveyards,

  Washington town covered with rust—hm—

  February 1966

  Kansas City to Saint Louis

  Leaving K.C. Mo. past Independence past Liberty

  Charlie Plymell’s memories of K.C. renewed

  The Jewel-box Review,

  white-wigged fat camps yakking abt

  Georgie Washington and Harry T.

  filthier than any poetry reading I ever gave

  applauded

  by the police negro wives Mafia subsidized

  To East St. Louis on the broad road

  Highway 70 crammed with trucks

  Last night almost broke my heart dancing to

  Cant Get No Satisfaction

  lotsa beer & slept naked in the guest room—

  Now

  Sunlit wooded hills overhang the highway

  rolling toward the Sex Factories of Indiana—

  Automobile graveyard, red cars dumped

  bleeding under empty skies—

  Burchfield’s paintings, Walker Evans’ photos,

  a white Victorian house on a hill—

  Trumble & Bung of chamber music

  pianoesque on radio—midwest culture

  before rock and roll

  If I knew twenty years ago what I know now

  I coulda led a symphony orchestra in Minneapolis

  & worn a tuxedo

  Heart to heart, the Kansas voice of Ella Mae

  “are you afraid of growing old,

  afraid you’ll no longer be attractive to your husband?”

  “… I dont see any reason” says the radio

  “for those agitators— Why dont they move in with the negroes? We’ve been separated all along, why change things now? But I’ll hang up, some other Martian might want to call in, who has another thought.”

  The Voice of Leavenworth

  echoing thru space to the car dashboard

  “… causes and agitations, then, then they’re doing the work of the communists as J. Edgar Hoover says, and many of these people are people with uh respectable, bility, of a cloak of respectability that shows uh uh teachers professors and students …”

  hollow voice, a minister

  breathing thru the telephone

  “God created all the races … and it is only men who tried to mix em up, and when they mix em up that’s when the trouble starts.”

  No place like Booneville though, buddy—

  End of the Great Plains,

  late afternoon sun, rusty leaves on trees

  One of these days those boots will walk all over you

  We the People—shelling the Viet Cong

  “Inflation has swept in upon us … Johnson administration rather than a prudent Budget… discipline the American people rather than discipline itself…”

  I lay in bed naked in the guest room,

  my mouth found his cock,

  my hand under his behind

  Till the whole body stiffened

  and sperm choked my throat.

  Michele, John Lennon & Paul McCartney

  wooing the decade

  gaps from the 30s returned

  It’s the only words I know that

  You ll understand…

  Old earth rolling mile after mile patient

  The ground

  I roll on

  the ground

  the music soars above

  The ground electric arguments

  ray over

  The ground dotted with signs for Dave’s Eat Eat

  scarred by highways, eaten by voices

  Pete’s Café—

  Golden land in setting sun

  Missouri River icy brown, black cows,

  grass tufts standing up hairy on hills

  mirrored to heaven—

  Spring one month to come.

  Sea shells on the ground strata’d by the turnpike—

  Old ocean evaporated away,

  Mastodons stomped, dinosaurs groaned

  when these brown hillocks were

  leafy steam-green-swamp-think Marsh nations

  before the Birch Society was a gleam in the

  Pterodactyl’s eye

  —Aeroplane sinking groundward

  toward my white Volkswagen prehistoric

  white cockroach under high tension wires—

  my face, Rasputin in car mirror.

  Funky barn, black hills approaching Fulton

  where Churchill rang down the Curtain

  on Consciousness

  and set a chill which overspread the world

  one icy day in Missouri

  not far from the Ozarks—

  Provincial ears heard the Spenglerian Iron

  Terror Pronouncement

  Magnificent Language, they said,

  for country ears—

&nb
sp; St Louis calling St Louis calling

  Twenty years ago,

  Thirty years ago

  the Burroughs School

  Pink cheeked Kenney with fine blond hair,

  his almond eyes aristocrat

  gazed,

  Morphy teaching English & Rimbaud

  at midnight to the fauns

  W.S.B. leather cheeked, sardonic

  waiting for change of consciousness,

  unnamed in those days—

  coffee, vodka, night for needles,

  young bodies

  beautiful unknown to themselves

  running around St Louis

  on a Friday evening

  getting drunk in awe & honor of the

  terrific future these

  red dry trees at sunset go thru two decades later

  They could’ve seen

  the animal branches, wrinkled to the sky

  & known the gnarled prophecy to come,

  if they’d opened their eyes outa the whiskey-haze

  in Mississippi riverfront bars

  and gone into the country with a knapsack to

  smell the ground.

  Oh grandfather maple and elm!

  Antique leafy old oak of Kingdom City in the purple light

  come down, year after year,

  to the tune

  of mellow pianos.

  Salute, silent wise ones,

  Cranking powers of the ground,

  awkward arms of knowledge

  reaching blind above the gas station

  by the high TV antennae

  Stay silent, ugly Teachers,

  let me & the Radio yell about Vietnam and mustard gas.

  “Torture … tear gas legitimate weapons …

  Worries language beyond my comprehension” the radio

  commentator says himself.

  Use the language today

  “… a great blunder”

  in Vietnam, heavy voices,

  “A great blunder … once you’re in, uh,

  one of these things, uh …”

  “Stay in.” Withdraw,

  Language, language, uh, uh

  from the mouths of Senators, uh

  trying to think of Senators, uh

  trying to think on their feet

  Saying uhh, politely

  Shift linguals, said Burroughs, Cut the Word Lines!

  He was right all along.

  “… a procurer of these dogs

  … take them from the United States … Major Caty … as long as it’s not a white dog … Sentry Dog Procurement Center, Texas … No dogs, once trained, are ever returned to the owner …”

  French Truth,

  Dutch Civility

  Black asphalt, blue stars,

  tail light procession speeding East,

  The hero surviving his own murder,

  his own suicide, his own

  addiction, surviving his own

  poetry, surviving his own

  disappearance from the scene—