—“Shut up or we’ll murder you”—“Om Ah Hu? take it easy”
Lying on the floor shall I shout more loud?—the metal door closed on blackness
one boy felt my broken healed ankle, looking for hundred dollar bills behind my stocking weren’t even there—a third boy untied my Seiko Hong Kong watch rough from right wrist leaving a clasp-prick skin tiny bruise
“Shut up and we’ll get out of here”—and so they left,
as I rose from the cardboard mattress thinking Om Ah Hu? didn’t stop em enough,
the tone of voice too loud—my shoulder bag with 10,000 dollars full of poetry left on the broken floor—
November 2, 1974
II
Went out the door dim eyed, bent down & picked up my glasses from step edge I placed them while dragged in the store—looked out—
Whole street a bombed-out face, building rows’ eyes & teeth missing
burned apartments half the long block, gutted cellars, hallways’ charred beams
hanging over trash plaster mounded entrances, couches & bedsprings rusty after sunset
Nobody home, but scattered stoopfuls of scared kids frozen in black hair
chatted giggling at house doors in black shoes, families cooked For Rent some six story houses mid the street’s wreckage
Nextdoor Bodega, a phone, the police? “I just got mugged” I said
to the man’s face under fluorescent grocery light tin ceiling—
puffy, eyes blank & watery, sickness of beer kidney and language tongue
thick lips stunned as my own eyes, poor drunken Uncle minding the store!
O hopeless city of idiots empty eyed staring afraid, red beam top’d car at street curb arrived—
“Hey maybe my wallet’s still on the ground got a flashlight?”
Back into the burnt-doored cave, & the policeman’s gray flashlight broken no eyebeam—
“My partner all he wants is sit in the car never gets out Hey Joe bring your flashlight—”
a tiny throwaway beam, dim as a match in the criminal dark
“No I can’t see anything here” … “Fill out this form”
Neighborhood street crowd behind a car “We didn’t see nothing”
Stoop young girls, kids laughing “Listen man last time I messed with them see this—”
rolled up his skinny arm shirt, a white knife scar on his brown shoulder
“Besides we help you the cops come don’t know anybody we all get arrested
go to jail I never help no more mind my business everytime”
“Agh!” upstreet think “Gee I don’t know anybody here ten years lived half block crost Avenue C
and who knows who?”—passing empty apartments, old lady with frayed paper bags
sitting in the tin-boarded doorframe of a dead house.
December 10, 1974
Who Runs America?
Oil brown smog over Denver
Oil red dung colored smoke
level to level across the horizon
blue tainted sky above
Oil car smog gasoline
hazing red Denver’s day
December bare trees
sticking up from housetop streets
Plane lands rumbling, planes rise over
radar wheels, black smoke
drifts wobbly from tailfins
Oil millions of cars speeding the cracked plains
Oil from Texas, Bahrain, Venezuela Mexico
Oil that turns General Motors
revs up Ford
lights up General Electric, oil that crackles
thru International Business Machine computers,
charges dynamos for ITT
sparks Western Electric
runs thru Amer Telephone & Telegraph wires
Oil that flows thru Exxon New Jersey hoses,
rings in Mobil gas tank cranks, rumbles
Chrysler engines
shoots thru Texaco pipelines,
blackens ocean from broken Gulf tankers
spills onto Santa Barbara beaches from
Standard of California derricks offshore.
Braniff Air, Denver-Dallas, December 3, 1974
Thoughts on a Breath
Cars slide minute down asphalt lanes in front of
Dallas Hilton Inn
Trees brown bare in December’s smog-mist roll up
to the city’s squared towers
beneath electric wire grids trestled toward country water tanks
distanced under cloud streak crossed with fading
vapor trails.
Majestic in a skirt of human fog, building blocks
rise at sky edge,
Branches and house roofs march to horizon.
I sat again to complete the cycle, eyes open seeing
dust motes in the eye screen
like birds over telephone wires, curve of the eyeball
where Dallas and I meet—
white motel wall of the senses—ear roar
oil exhaust, snuffle and bone growl
motors rolling North Central freeway
Energy playing over Concrete, energy
hymning itself in emptiness—
What’ve I learned since I sat here four years ago?
In the halls of the head or out thru the halls of the senses,
same space
Trucks rolling toward Dallas skyscrapers
or mind thoughts floating thru my head
vanish on a breath—What was it I began
my meditation on?
Police state, Students, Poetry open tongue,
anger and fear of Cops,
oil Cops, Rockefeller Cops, Oswald Cops,
Johnson Cops Nixon Cops
president Cops
SMU Cops Trustee Cops CIA Cops
FBI Cops Goon Squads of Dope
Cops busted Stony Burns and sent him to
Jail 10 years and a day
for less than a joint of Grass, a Citizen
under republic, under Constitution, of Texas?
We sit here in police state and sigh, knowing
we’re trapped in our bodies,
our fear of No meat, no oil, no money, airplanes
sex love kisses jobs no
work
Massive metal bars about, monster machines
eat us, Controlled by army
Cops, the Secret Police, our own thoughts!
Punishment! Punish me! Punish me! we scream
in our hearts, cocks spurting alone
in our fists!
What thoughts more flowed thru our hearts alone
in Dallas? Flowed thru our hearts like oil
thru Hilton’s faucets?
Where shall we house our minds, pay
rent for Selves, how
protect our bodies
from inflation, starvation, old age, smoking
Cancer, Coughing Death?
Where get money to buy off the
skeleton? If we work with Kissinger
Can we buy time, get off on parole? Does
Rockefeller want Underground
Newspapers printing his subsconscious mind’s
nuclear oil wars?
Will 92nd Armored Division be sent to seize
Arabia oilfields
as threatened December’s US News &
World Report?
What’d we remember that destroyed these armies
with a breath?
How pay rent & stay in our bodies
if we don’t sell our minds to Samsara?
If we don’t join the illusion—that Gas is life—
How can we in Dallas SMU
look forward to our futures?
work with our hands
like niggers growing Crops in the field,
& plow and harvest our own corny
fate?
Oh Walt Whitman salutations you knew the laborer,
the sexual intelligent horny handed
; man who lived in Dirt
and fixed the axles of Capitalism, dumbed and laughing at hallucinated Secretaries
Of State!
Oh intellect of body back & Cock whose red neck
supports the S&M freaks of Government
police & Fascist Monopolies—
Kissinger bare assed & big buttocked
with a whip, in leather boots
scrawling on a memo to Chile “No more
civics lectures please”
When the ambassador complained about Torture
methods used in the Detention Stadium!
And I ride the planes that Rockefeller gassed
when he paid off Kissinger!
Stony Burns sits in jail, in a stone cell in
Huntsville
and breathes his news to solitude.
Homage
to the Gurus, Guru om! Thanks to the teachers
who taught us to breathe,
to watch our minds revolve in emptiness,
to follow the rise & fall of thoughts,
Illusions big as empires flowering &
Vanishing on a breath!
Thanks to aged teachers whose wrinkles
read our minds’ newspapers &
taught us not to Cling to yesterday’s
thoughts,
nor thoughts split seconds ago, but
let cities vanish on a breath—
Thanks to teachers who showed us behold
Dust motes in our own eye,
anger our own hearts,
emptiness of Dallases where we
sit thinking knitted brows—
Sentient beings are numberless I vow
to liberate all
Passions unfathomable I vow to
release them all
Thought forms limitless I vow to
master all
Awakened space is endless I vow to
enter it forever.
Dallas, December 4, 1974
We Rise on Sun Beams and Fall in the Night
Dawn’s orb orange-raw shining over Palisades
bare crowded branches bush up from marshes—
New Jersey with my father riding automobile
highway to Newark Airport—Empire State’s
spire, horned buildingtops, Manhattan
rising as in W. C. Williams’ eyes between wire trestles—
trucks sixwheeled steady rolling overpass
beside New York—I am here
tiny under sun rising in vast white sky,
staring thru skeleton new buildings,
with pen in hand awake …
December 11, 1974
Written on Hotel Napkin: Chicago Futures
Wind mills churn on Windy City’s
rooftops Antennae
collecting electric
above thick-loamed gardens
on Playboy Tower
Merchandise Mart’s compost
privies
supply nightsoil for Near North Side’s
back Gardens
Cabbages, celery & cucumbers
sprout in Mayor Daley’s
frontyard
rich with human waste—
Bathtub beer like old days
Backyard Mary Jane like
old days,
Sun reflectors gather heat
in rockpile collectors
under apartment walls
Horses graze in Parks &
streets covered with grass
Mafia Dons shovel earth
& bury Cauliflower
leaves
Old gangsters & their sons
tending grapevines
Mid-March 1975
Hospital Window
At gauzy dusk, thin haze like cigarette smoke
ribbons past Chrysler Building’s silver fins
tapering delicately needletopped, Empire State’s
taller antenna filmed milky lit amid blocks
black and white apartmenting veil’d sky over Manhattan,
offices new built dark glassed in bluish heaven—The East
50s & 60s covered with castles & watertowers, seven storied
tar-topped house-banks over York Avenue, late may-green trees
surrounding Rockefellers’ blue domed medical arbor—
Geodesic science at the waters edge—Cars running up
East River Drive, & parked at N.Y. Hospital’s oval door
where perfect tulips flower the health of a thousand sick souls
trembling inside hospital rooms. Triboro bridge steel-spiked
raftertops stand stone-piered over mansard
penthouse orange roofs, sunset tinges the river and in a few
Bronx windows, some magnesium vapor brilliances’re
spotted five floors above E 59th St under gray painted bridge
trestles. Way downtown along the river, as Monet saw Thames
100 years ago, Con Edison smokestacks 14th street,
& Brooklyn Bridge’s skeined dim in modern mists—
Pipes sticking up to sky nine smokestacks huge visible—
U.N. Building hangs under an orange crane, & red lights on
vertical avenues below the trees turn green at the nod
of a skull with a mild nerve ache. Dim dharma, I return
to this spectacle after weeks of poisoned lassitude, my thighs
belly chest & arms covered with poxied welts,
head pains fading back of the neck, right eyebrow cheek
mouth paralyzed—from taking the wrong medicine, sweated
too much in the forehead helpless, covered my rage from
gorge to prostate with grinding jaw and tightened anus
not released the weeping scream of horror at robot Mayaguez
World self ton billions metal grief unloaded
Phnom Penh to Nakhon Thanom, Santiago & Tehran.
Fresh warm breeze in the window, day’s release
from pain, cars float downside the bridge trestle
and uncounted building-wall windows multiplied a mile
deep into ash-delicate sky beguile
my empty mind. A seagull passes alone wings
spread silent over roofs.
May 20, 1975 (Mayaguez Crisis)
Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox
Hadda be flashing like the Daily Double
Hadda be playing on Tee Vee
Hadda be loudmouthed on the Comedy Hour
Hadda be announced over Loud Speakers
CIA & Mafia are in Cahoots
Hadda be said in old ladies’ language
Hadda be said in American Headlines
Kennedy stretched & smiled & got doublecrossed by low life goons & Agents
Rich bankers with Criminal Connections
Dope pushers in CIA working with dope pushers from Cuba
working with Big Time syndicate Tampa Florida
Hadda be said with big mouth
Hadda be moaned over Factory foghorns
Hadda be chattered on Car Radio News Broadcast
Hadda be screamed in the kitchen
Hadda be yelled in the basement where uncles were fighting
Hadda be Howled on the streets by Newsboys to bus conductors
Hadda be foghorned into N.Y. Harbor
Hadda echo under hard hats
Hadda turn up the Volume in University ballrooms
Hadda be written in library books, footnoted
Hadda be in headlines of the Times & Le Monde
Hadda be barked over TV
Hadda be heard in side alleys thru bar room doors
Hadda be played on Wire Services
Hadda be bells ringing, Comedians stopt dead in the middle of a joke in Las Vegas,
Hadda be FBI chief J. E. Hoover & Frank Costello syndicate mouthpiece meeting in Central Park N.Y. together weekends reported posthumously Time magazine
Hadda be the Mafia & CIA together
started War on Cuba Bay of Pigs & Poison
assassination headlines
Hadda be the Dope Cops & the Mafia
sold all that Heroin in America
Hadda be FBI & Organized Crime working together in Cahoots “against the Commies”
let Lucky Luciano out of Jail take over Sicily Mediterranean drug trade
Hadda be Corsican goons in Office Strategic Services’ Pay busted 1948 dock strikes in Marseilles, sixties port transshipment Indochina heroin,
Hadda be ringing on Multinational Cashregisters
world-wide laundry for organized Criminal money
Hadda be CIA & Mafia & FBI together
bigger than Nixon, bigger than War.
Hadda be a gorged throat full of murder
Hadda be mouth and ass a solid mass of rage
a Red hot head, a scream in the back of the throat
Hadda be in Kissinger’s brain
Hadda be in Rockefeller’s mouth
Hadda be Central Intelligence The Family “Our Thing” the Agency Mafia Organized Crime FBI Dope Cops & Multinational Corporations
one big set of Criminal gangs working together in Cahoots
Hit Men murderers everywhere outraged, on the make
Secret drunk Brutal Dirty Rich
on top of a Slag heap of prisons, Industrial Cancer, plutonium smog, garbaged cities, grandmas’ bedsores, Fathers’ resentments
Hadda be the Rulers wanted Law & Order they got rich on
wanted Protection status quo, wanted Junkies wanted Attica Wanted Kent State Wanted War in Indochina
Hadda be CIA & the Mafia & the FBI
Multinational Capitalists’ Strong arms squads, “Private detective Agencies for the very rich”
And their Armies, Navies and Air Force bombing Planes.
Hadda be Capitalism the Vortex of this rage, this
competition man to man, horses’ heads in the Capo’s bed, Cuban turf & rumbles, hit men, gang wars across oceans,
bombing Cambodia settled the score when Soviet Pilots manned Egyptian fighter planes
Chile’s red democracy bumped off with White House pots & pans a warning to Mediterranean governments
Secret Police embraced for decades, NKVD & CIA keep eachother’s secrets, OGPU & DIA never hit their own, KGB & FBI one mind—brute force
world-wide, and full of money
Hadda be rich, hadda be powerful, hadda hire technology from Harvard
Hadda murder in Indonesia 500,000
Hadda murder in Indochina 2,000,000
Hadda murder in Czechoslovakia
Hadda murder in Chile
Hadda murder in Russia
Hadda murder in America
New York, May 30, 1975, 3 A.M.
Collected Poems 1947-1997 Page 50