Collected Poems 1947-1997

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Collected Poems 1947-1997 Page 38

by Allen Ginsberg


  curtains hanging on New York, one window lit

  in unfinished skyscraper.

  Swami White Beard

  Being-Consciousness-Delight’s photo’s tacked

  to bookshelf filled with Cosmic Milarepa, Wm. Blake’s

  Prophetic Writings, Buddhist Logic & Hymn to the Goddess,

  and many another toy volume of orient lore, poetry crap;

  Poe sober knew his white skull, tranquil Stein

  repeated one simple idea Making Americans on Space Age’s

  edge whiten thought to transparent Place. Peace!

  Done, finished with body cock desire, anger

  shouting at bus drivers, Presidents & Police.

  Gone to other shore, empty house, no lovers

  suffering under bedsheets, inconceived babies calm.

  Surge, a little abdomen warmth, the bus grinds

  cobbles past red light, garbage trucks uplift iron

  buttocks, old meat gravy & tin cans sink to bottom

  in the Airfield. City edge woods wave branches

  in chill breeze darkness under Christmas moon.

  December 14, 1966

  Holy Ghost on the Nod over the Body of Bliss

  Is this the God of Gods, the one I heard about

  in memorized language Universities murmur?

  Dollar bills can buy it! the great substance

  exchanges itself freely through all the world’s

  poetry money, past and future currencies

  issued & redeemed by the identical bank,

  electric monopoly after monopoly owl-eyed

  on every one of 90 billion dollarbills vibrating

  to the pyramid-top in the United States of Heaven—

  Aye aye Sir Owl Oh say can you see in the dark you

  observe Minerva nerveless in Nirvana because

  Zeus rides reindeer thru Bethlehem’s blue sky.

  It’s Buddha sits in Mary’s belly waving Kuan

  Yin’s white hand at the Yang-tze that Mao sees,

  tongue of Kali licking Krishna’s soft blue lips.

  Chango holds Shiva’s prick, Ouroboros eats th’cobalt bomb,

  Parvati on YOD’s perfumèd knee cries Aum

  & Santa Barbara rejoices in the alleyways of Brindaban

  La illaha el (lill) Allah hu—Allah Akbar!

  Goliath struck down by kidneystone, Golgothas grow old,

  All these wonders are crowded in the Mind’s Eye

  Superman & Batman race forward, Zarathustra on Coyote’s ass,

  Lao-tze disappearing at the gate, God mocks God,

  Job sits bewildered that Ramakrishna is Satan

  and Bodhidharma forgot to bring Nothing.

  December 1966

  Bayonne Turnpike to Tuscarora

  Gray water tanks in gray mist,

  gray robot

  towers carrying wires thru Bayonne’s

  smog, silver

  domes, green chinaworks steaming,

  Christmas’s leftover lights hanging

  from a smokestack—

  Monotone gray highway into the gray West—

  Noon hour, the planet smoke-covered

  Truck wheels roar forward

  spinning past the garbagedump

  Gas smell wafting thru Rahway overpass

  oiltanks in frozen ponds, cranes’ feederladders &

  Electric generator trestles, Batteries open under heaven

  Anger in the heart—

  hallucinations in the car cabin, rattling

  bone ghosts left and right

  by the car door—the broken camper icebox—

  On to Pennsylvania turnpike

  Evergreens in Snow

  Laundry hanging from the blue bungalow

  Mansfield and U Thant ask halt Bombing North Vietnam

  State Department says “Tit For Tat.”

  Frank Sinatra with negro voice

  enters a new phase—

  Flat on his face 50 years “I’ve been a beggar & a clown

  a poet & a star, roll myself in July

  up into a ball and die.”

  Radio pumping

  artificial rock & roll, Beach Boys

  & Sinatra’s daughter overdubbed microphone

  antennae’d car dashboard vibrating

  False emotions broadcast thru the Land

  Natural voices made synthetic,

  phlegm obliterated

  Smart ones work with electronics—

  What are the popular songs on the Hiway?

  “Home I’m Comin Home I am a Soldier—”

  “The girl I left behind…

  I did the best job I could

  Helping to keep our land free

  I am a soldier”

  Lulled into War

  thus commercial jabber Rock & Roll Announcers

  False False False

  “Enjoy this meat—”

  Weak A&P SuperRight ground round

  Factories building, airwaves pushing …

  Trees stretch up parallel into gray sky

  Yellow trucks roll down lane—

  Hypnosis of airwaves

  In the house you can’t break it

  unless you turn off yr set

  In the car it can drive yr eyes inward

  from the snowy hill,

  withdraw yr mind from the birch forest

  make you forget the blue car in the ice,

  Drive yr mind down Supermarket aisles

  looking for cans of Save-Your-Money

  Polishing-Glue

  made of human bones manufactured in N. Vietnam

  during a mustard gas hallucination:

  The Super-Hit sound of All American Radio.

  Turnpike to Tuscarora

  Snowfields, red lights blinking in the broken car

  Quiet hills’ genital hair black in Sunset

  Beautiful dusk over human tininess

  Pennsylvanian intimacy,

  approaching Tuscarora Tunnel

  Quiet moments off the road, Tussey Mountains’

  snowfields untouched.

  A missile lost Unprogrammed

  Twisting in flight to crash 100 miles

  south of Cuba into the

  Blue Carib!

  Diplomatic messages exchanged

  “Don’t Worry it’s only the Setting Sun—”

  (Western correspondents assembling in Hanoi)

  “perfect ball of orange in its cup of clouds”

  Dirty Snowbanks pushed aside from Asphalt thruway-edge—

  Uphill’s the little forests where the boyhoods grow

  their bare feet—

  Night falling, “Jan 4 1967, The Vatican Announces Today

  No Jazz at the Altar!”

  Maybe in Africa

  maybe in Asia they got funny music

  & strange dancing before the Lord

  But here in the West No More Jazz at the Altar,

  “It’s an alien custom—”

  Missa Luba crashing thru airwaves with Demonic Drums

  behind Kyrie Eleison—

  Millions of tiny silver Western crucifixes for sale

  in the Realms of King Baudouin—

  Color TV in this year—weekly

  the Pope sits in repose & slumbers to classical music

  in his purple hat—

  Gyalwa Karmapa sits in Rumtek Monastery, Sikkim

  & yearly shows his most remarkable woven Dakini-hair

  black Magic Hat

  Whose very sight is Total Salvation—

  Ten miles from Gangtok—take a look!

  * * * *

  Mary Garden dead in Aberdeen,

  Jack Ruby dead in Dallas—

  Sweet green incense in car cabin.

  (Dakini sleeping head bowed, hair braided

  over her Rudraksha beads

  driving through Pennsylvania.

  Julius, bearded, hasn’t eaten all day

  sitting forward, pursing his lips, calm.)
/>   Sleep, sweet Ruby, sleep in America, Sleep

  in Texas, sleep Jack from Chicago,

  Friend of the Mafia, friend of the cops

  friend of the dancing girls—

  Under the viaduct near the book depot

  Under the hospital Attacked by Motorcades,

  Under Nightclubs under all the

  groaning bodies of Dallas,

  under their angry mouths

  Sleep Jack Ruby, rest at last,

  bouquet’d with cancer.

  Ruby, Oswald, Kennedy gone

  New Years’ 1967 come,

  Reynolds Metals up a Half

  Mary Garden, 92, sleeping tonite in Aberdeen.

  Three trucks adorned with yellow lights crawl uproad

  under winter network-shade, bare trees, night fallen.

  Under Tuscarora Mountain, long tunnel,

  WBZ Boston coming thru—

  “Nobody needs icecream nobody needs pot nobody

  needs movies.”

  … “Public Discussion.”

  Is sexual Intercourse any Good? Can the kids handle it?

  out the Tunnel,

  The Boston Voice returning: “controlled circumstances …”

  Into tunnel, static silence,

  Trucks roar by in carbon-mist,

  Anger falling asleep at the heart.

  White Rembrandt, the hills—

  Silver domed silo standing above house

  in the white reality place

  farm up the road,

  Mist Quiet on Woods,

  Silent Reality everywhere.

  Till the eye catches the billboards—

  Howard Johnson’s Silent Diamond Reality

  “makes the difference.”

  Student cannon fodder prepared for next Congress session

  Willow Hill, Willow hill, Cannon Fodder, Cannon fodder—

  And the Children of the Warmakers’re exempt from fighting

  their parents’ war—

  Those with intellectual money capacities who go to college

  till 1967—

  Slowly the radio war news

  steals o’er the senses—

  Negro photographs in Rochester

  ax murders in Cleveland,

  Anger at heart base

  all over the Nation—

  Husbands ready to murder their wives

  at the drop of a hat-statistic

  I could take an ax and split Peter’s skull with pleasure—

  Great trucks crawl up road

  insect-lit with yellow bulbs outside Pittsburgh,

  “The Devil with Blue Dress” exudes over radio,

  car headlights gleam on motel signs in blackness,

  Satanic Selfs covering nature

  spiked with trees.

  Crash of machineguns, ring of locusts, airplane roar,

  calliope yell, bzzzs.

  January 4, 1967

  An Open Window on Chicago

  Midwinter night,

  Clark & Halstead brushed with this week’s snow

  grill lights blinking at the corner

  decades ago

  Smokestack poked above roofs & watertower

  standing still above the blue

  lamped boulevards,

  sky blacker than th’ east

  for all the steel smoke

  settled in heaven from South.

  Downtown—like Batman’s Gotham City

  battleshipped with Lights,

  towers winking under clouds,

  police cars blinking on Avenues,

  space above city misted w/fine soot

  cars crawling past redlites down Avenue,

  exuding white wintersmoke—

  Eat Eat said the sign, so I went in the Spanish Diner

  The girl at the counter, whose yellow Bouffant roots

  grew black over her pinch’d face,

  spooned her coffee with knuckles

  puncture-marked,

  whose midnight wrists had needletracks,

  scars inside her arms:

  “Wanna go get a Hotel Room with me?”

  The Heroin Whore

  thirty years ago come haunting Chicago’s midnite streets,

  me come here so late with my beard!

  Corner Grill-lights blink, police car turned

  & took away its load of bum to jail,

  black uniforms patrolling streets

  where suffering

  lifts a hand palsied by Parkinson’s Disease

  to beg a cigarette.

  The psychiatrist came visiting this Hotel 12th floor—

  Where does the Anger come from?

  Outside! Radio messages, images on Television,

  Electric Networks spread

  fear of murder on the streets—

  “Communications Media”

  inflict the Vietnam War & its anxiety on every private skin

  in hotel room or bus—

  Sitting, meditating quietly on Great Space outside—

  Bleep Bleep dit dat dit radio on, Television

  murmuring,

  bombshells crash on flesh

  his flesh my flesh all the same.—

  The Dakini in the hotel room turns in her sleep

  while War news flashes thru Aether—

  Shouts at streetcorners as bums

  crawl in the metal policevan.

  And there’s a tiny church in middle Chicago

  with its black spike to the black air

  And there’s the new Utensil Towers round on horizon.

  And there’s red glow of Central Neon

  on hushed building walls at 4 A.M.,

  And there’s proud Lights & Towers of Man’s Central City

  looking pathetic at 4 A.M., traveler passing through,

  staring outa hotel window under Heaven—

  Is this tiny city the best we can do?

  These tiny reptilian towers

  so proud of their Executives

  they haveta build a big sign in middle downtown

  to Advertise

  old Connor’s Insurance sign fading on brick

  building side—

  Snow on deserted roofs & parkinglots—

  Hog Butcher to the World!?

  Taxi-Harmonious Modernity grown rusty-old—

  The prettiness of Existence! To sit at the window

  & moan over Chicago’s stone & brick

  lifting itself vertical tenderly,

  hanging from the sky.

  Elbow on windowsill,

  I lean and muse, taller than any building here

  Steam from my head

  wafting into the smog

  Elevators running up & down my leg

  Couples copulating in hotelroom beds in my belly

  & bearing children in my heart,

  Eyes shining like warning-tower Lights,

  Hair hanging down like a black cloud—

  Close your eyes on Chicago and be God,

  all Chicago is, is what you see—

  That row of lights Finance Building

  sleeping on its bottom floors,

  Watchman stirring

  paper coffee cups by bronzed glass doors—

  and under the bridge, brown water

  floats great turds of ice beside buildings’ feet

  in windy metropolis

  waiting for a Bomb.

  January 8, 1967

  Returning North of Vortex

  Red Guards battling country workers

  in Nanking

  Ho-Tei trembles,

  Mao’s death near,

  Snow over Iowa

  cornstalks on icy hills,

  bus wheels murmuring in afternoon brilliance toward Council Bluffs

  hogs in sunlight, dead rabbits on asphalt

  Booneville passed, Crane quiet,

  highway empty—silence as

  house doors open, food on table,

  nobody home—

  sign thru windshield


  100 Miles More to the Missouri.

  How toy-like Pall Mall’s red embossed pack

  cellophane gleaming in sunshine,

  Indian-head stamped crown crested,

  shewing its dry leaf of history to my eye

  now that I no longer reach my hand to the ashtray

  nor since Xmas have lit a smoke.

  One puff I remember the 18 year joy-musk of manhood

  that curled thru my nostrils first time I kissed

  another human body—

  that time with Joe Army, he seduced me

  into smoking—

  I’ll give Swami a present like Santa Claus—

  no attachment—

  No meat nor tabaccy—even sex questionable

  Now in America craving its billions

  of needles of War.

  Detach yrself from Matter, & look about

  at the bright snowy show of Iowa,

  Earth & heaven mirroring

  eachother’s light,

  tiny meat-trucks rolling downhill

  toward deep Omaha.

  This is History, to quit smoking Anger-leaf

  into one man’s lungs,

  glancing up at gravestone rows

  in hill woods thru rear window.

  This is History: Iowa’s Finest Comics:

  Sunday, Rex Morgan M.D. in snowstorm,

  Mustachio’d villain cruel eyed

  with long European hair

  doubletalking the Doc

  “Meanwhile, under the influence of LSD

  Veronica races through the fields

  in an acute panic”—

  Author Dal Curtis

  In a violet box her big tits fall on snowy ground.

  Gray ice floating down Missouri, sunset into Omaha

  Bishop’s Buffets, German Chocolate, wall to wall carpet

  Om A Hah, Om Ah Hu?

  “The land summoned them and they loved it” cut in granite

  Post Office lintel, Walt Disney

  playing at State, week after his death.

  Table service, fireplace, armchairs,

  homeostasis in Omaha.

  Steve Canyon Comics in Color:

  U.S. Military Seabees chopper

  operation dropping bridges

  over the “Lake of the Black Wind”

  Princess Snowflower will

  “speak over the bullhorn to the

  herdsmen—

  So they won’t think it’s a Chincom trick.”

  Ten-year-olds in Sunday

  morning sunlight on the rug

  dreaming of slack-cheekboned blond

  big cocked Steve Canyon

  fucking the yellow bellies

  tied face down naked on the floor of the lone helicopter

  And on Sunday Evening the Reverend Preacher

  C. O. Staggerflup—

  America’s Hope

  POB 72 Hopkins Minnesota

 

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