I dreamt in adolescence Came true last week over Television,
Now homunculus I made’s out there in American streets
talking with my voice, accounted ledgered opinionated
Interviewed & Codified in Poems, books & manuscripts, whole library
shelves stacked with ambitious egohood’s thousand pages imaged
forth smart selft over half a lifetime! Who’m I now, Frankenstein
hypocrite of good Cheer whose sick-stomached Discretion’s grown
fifty years overweight—while others I hate practice sainthood in Himalayas
or run the petrochemical atomic lamplit machines, by whose power
I slumber cook my meat & write these verses captive of N.Y.C.
What’s my sickness, flu virus or Selfhood infected swollen sore
confronting the loath’d work of poetic flattery: Gurus, Rock stars
Penthoused millionaires, White House alrightniks crowding my brain
with orders & formulae, insults & smalltalk, threats & dollars
Whose sucker am I, the media run by rich whitemen like myself, jew
intellectuals afraid of poverty bust screaming beaten uncontrolled behind bars
or the black hole of narcotics Cops & brutal Mafiosi, thick men in dark hats,
hells angels in blue military garb or wall street cashmere drag
hiding iron muscles of money, so the street is full of potholes, I’m afraid
to go out at night around the block to look at the moon in the Lower East Side
where stricken junkies break their necks in damp hallways of
abandoned buildings gutted & blackwindowed from old fires. I’m afraid
to write my thoughts down lest I libel Nelson Rockefeller, Fidel
Castro, Chögyam Trungpa, Louis Ginsberg & Naomi, Kerouac or Peter O.
yea Henry Kissinger & Richard Helms, faded ghosts of Power and Poesy
that people my brain with paranoia, my best friend shall be Nameless.
Whose public speech is this I write? What stupid vast Complaint!
For what impotent professor’s ears, which Newsman’s brainwave? What jazz king’s devil blues?
Is this Immortal history to tell tales of 20th Century to striplings
naked centuries hence? To get laid by some brutal queen who’ll
beat my hairy buttocks punishment in a College Dorm? To show my ass
to god? To grovel in magic tinsel & glitter on stinking powdered pillows?
Agh! Who’ll I read this to like a fool! Who’ll applaud these lies
December 16, 1977
Ballade of Poisons
With oil that streaks streets a magic color,
With soot that falls on city vegetables
With basement sulfurs & coal black odor
With smog that purples suburbs’ sunset hills
With Junk that feebles black & white men’s wills
With plastic bubbles aeons will dissolve
With new plutoniums that only resolve
Their poison heat in quarter million years,
With pesticides that round food Chains revolve
May your soul make home, may your eyes weep tears.
With freak hormones in chicken & soft egg
With panic red dye in cow meat burger
With mummy med’cines, nitrate in sliced pig
With sugar’d cereal kids scream for murder,
With Chemic additives that cause Cancer
With bladder and mouth in your salami,
With Strontium Ninety in milks of Mommy,
With sex voices that spill beer thru your ears
With Cups of Nicotine till you vomit
May your soul make home, may your eyes weep tears.
With microwave toaster television
With Cadmium lead in leaves of fruit trees
With Trade Center’s nocturnal emission
With Coney Island’s shore plopped with Faeces
While blue Whales sing in high infrequent seas
With Amazon worlds with fish in ocean
Washed in Rockefellers greasy Potion
With oily toil fueled with atomic fears
With CIA tainting World emotion
May your soul make home, may your eyes weep tears.
Envoi
President, ’spite cockroach devotion,
Folk poisoned with radioactive lotion,
’Spite soulless bionic energy queers
May your world move to healthy emotion,
Make your soul at home, let your eyes weep tears.
January 12, 1978
Lack Love
Love wears down to bare truth
My heart hurt me much in youth
Now I hear my real heart beat
Strong and hollow thump of meat
I felt my heart wrong as an ache
Sore in dreams and raw awake
I’d kiss each new love on the chest
Trembling hug him breast to breast
Kiss his belly, kiss his eye
Kiss his ruddy boyish thigh
Kiss his feet kiss his pink cheek
Kiss behind him naked meek
Now I lie alone, and a youth
Stalks my house, he won’t in truth
Come to bed with me, instead
Loves the thoughts inside my head
He knows how much I think of him
Holds my heart his painful whim
Looks thru me with mocking eyes
Steals my feelings, drinks & lies
Till I see Love’s empty Truth
Think back on heart broken youth
Hear my heart beat red in bed
Thick and living, love rejected.
New York, February 8, 1978, 3 A.M.
Father Guru
Father Guru unforlorn
Heart beat Guru whom I scorn
Empty Guru Never Born
Sitting Guru every morn
Friendly Guru chewing corn
Angry Guru Faking Porn
Guru Guru Freely torn
Garment Guru neatly worn
Guru Head short hair shorn
Absent Guru Eyes I mourn
Guru of Duncan Guru of Dorn
Ginsberg Guru like a thorn
Goofy Guru Lion Horn
Lonely Guru Unicorn
O Guru whose slave I’m sworn
Save me Guru Om Ah Hum
Austin, February 14, 1978
Manhattan May Day Midnight
I walked out on the lamp shadowed concrete at midnight May Day passing a dark’d barfront,
police found corpses under the floor last year, call-girls & Cadillacs lurked there on First Avenue
around the block from my apartment, I’d come downstairs for tonight’s newspapers—
refrigerator repair shop’s window grate padlocked, fluorescent blue
light on a pile of newspapers, pages shifting in the chill Spring wind
’round battered cans & plastic refuse bags leaned together at the pavement edge—
Wind wind and old news sailed thru the air, old Times whirled above the garbage.
At the Corner of 11th under dim Street-light in a hole in the ground
a man wrapped in work-Cloth and wool Cap pulled down his bullet skull
stood & bent with a rod & flashlight turning round in his pit halfway sunk in earth
Peering down at his feet, up to his chest in the asphalt by a granite Curb
where his work mate poked a flexible tube in a tiny hole, a youth in gloves
who answered my question “Smell of gas—Someone must’ve reported in”—
Yes the body stink of City bowels, rotting tubes six feet under
Could explode any minute sparked by Con Ed’s breathing Puttering truck
I noticed parked, as I passed by hurriedly Thinking Ancient Rome, Ur
Were they like this, the same shadowy surveyors & passers-by
scribing records of decaying pipes & Garbage piles on Marb
le, Cuneiform,
ordinary midnight citizen out on the street looking for Empire News,
rumor, gossip, workmen police in uniform, walking silent sunk in thought
under windows of sleepers coupled with Monster squids & Other-Planet eyeballs in their sheets
in the same night six thousand years old where Cities rise & fall & turn to dream?
May 1, 1978, 6 A.M.
ADAPTED FROM Neruda’s
“Que dispierte el leñador”
V
Let the Railsplitter Awake!
Let Lincoln come with his ax
and with his wooden plate
to eat with the farmworkers.
May his craggy head,
his eyes we see in constellations,
in the wrinkles of the live oak,
come back to look at the world
rising up over the foliage
higher than Sequoias.
Let him go shop in pharmacies,
let him take the bus to Tampa
let him nibble a yellow apple,
let him go to the movies, and
talk to everybody there.
Let the Railsplitter awake!
Let Abraham come back, let his old yeast
rise in green and gold earth of Illinois,
and lift the ax in his city
against the new slavemakers
against their slave whips
against the venom of the print houses
against all the bloodsoaked
merchandise they want to sell.
Let the young white boy and young black
march singing and smiling
against walls of gold,
against manufacturers of hatred,
against the seller of his own blood,
singing, smiling and winning at last.
Let the Railsplitter awake!
VI
Peace for all twilights to come,
peace for the bridge, peace for the wine,
peace for the letters that look for me
and pump in my blood tangled
with earth and love’s old chant,
peace for the city in the morning
when bread wakes up,
peace for Mississippi, the river of roots,
peace for my brother’s shirt,
peace in the book like an airmail stamp,
peace for the great Kolkhoz of Kiev,
peace for the ashes of these dead
and those other dead, peace for the black
iron of Brooklyn, peace for the lettercarrier
going from house to house like the day,
peace for the choreographer shrieking
thru a funnel of honeysuckle vines,
peace to my right hand
that only wants to write Rosario,
peace for the Bolivian, secret as a lump of tin,
peace for you to get married, peace
for all the sawmills of Bio-Bio,
peace to Revolutionary Spain’s torn heart
peace to the little museum of Wyoming
in which the sweetest thing
was a pillowcase embroidered with a heart,
peace to the baker and his loaves,
and peace to all the flour: peace
for all the wheat still to be born,
peace for all the love that wants to flower,
peace for all those who live: peace
to all the lands and waters.
And here I say farewell, I return
to my house, in my dreams
I go back to Patagonia where
the wind beats at barns
and the Ocean spits ice.
I’m nothing more than a poet:
I want love for you all,
I go wander the world I love:
in my country they jail the miners
and soldiers give orders to judges.
But down to its very roots
I love my little cold country.
If I had to die a thousand times
that’s where I’d want to die:
if I had to be born a thousand times
that’s where I’d want to be born,
near the Araucanian wilds’
sea-whirled south winds,
bells just brought from the bellmaker.
Don’t let anybody think about me.
Let’s think about the whole world,
banging on the table with love.
I don’t want blood to come back
and soak the bread, the beans
the music: I want the miner
to come with me, the little girl,
the lawyer, the sailor, the dollmaker,
let’s all go to the movies and come
out and drink the reddest wine.
I didn’t come here to solve anything.
I came here to sing
And for you to sing with me.
Boulder, 1978–1981
Nagasaki Days
I A Pleasant Afternoon
for Michael Brownstein & Dick Gallup
One day 3 poets & 60 ears sat under a green-striped Chautauqua tent in Aurora
listening to Black spirituals, tapping their feet, appreciating words singing by in mountain winds
on a pleasant sunny day of rest—the wild wind blew thru blue Heavens
filled with fluffy clouds stretched from Central City to Rocky Flats, Plutonium sizzled in its secret bed,
hot dogs sizzled in the Lions Club lunchwagon microwave mouth, orangeade bubbled over in waxen cups
Traffic moved along Colefax, meditators silent in the Diamond Castle shrine-room at Boulder followed the breath going out of their nostrils,
Nobody could remember anything, spirits flew out of mouths & noses, out of the sky, across Colorado plains & the tent flapped happily open spacious & didn’t fall down.
June 18, 1978
II Peace Protest
Cumulus clouds float across blue sky
over the white-walled Rockwell Corporation factory
—am I going to stop that?
*
Rocky Mountains rising behind us
Denver shining in morning light
—Led away from the crowd by police and photographers
*
Middleaged Ginsberg & Ellsberg taken down the road
to the grayhaired Sheriff’s van—
But what about Einstein? What about Einstein? Hey, Einstein Come back!
III Golden Courthouse
Waiting for the Judge, breathing silent
Prisoners, witnesses, Police—
the stenographer yawns into her palms.
August 9, 1978
IV Everybody’s Fantasy
I walked outside & the bomb’d
dropped lots of plutonium
all over the Lower East Side
There weren’t any buildings left just
iron skeletons
groceries burned, potholes open to
stinking sewer waters
There were people starving and crawling
across the desert
the Martian UFOs with blue
Light destroyer rays
passed over and dried up all the
waters
Charred Amazon palmtrees for
hundreds of miles on both sides
of the river
August 10, 1978
V Waiting Room at the Rocky Flats Plutonium Plant
“Give us the weapons we need to protect ourselves!”
the bareheaded guard lifts his flyswatter above the desk
—whap!
*
A green-letter’d shield on the pressboard wall!
“Life is fragile. Handle with care”—
My Goodness! here’s where they make the nuclear bomb-triggers.
August 17, 1978
VI Numbers in Red Notebook
2,000,000 killed in Vietnam
13,000,000 refugees in Indochina 1972
200
,000,000 years for the Galaxy to revolve on its core
24,000 the Babylonian Great Year
24,000 half life of plutonium
2,000 the most I ever got for a poetry reading
80,000 dolphins killed in the dragnet
4,000,000,000 years earth been born
Boulder, Summer 1978
Plutonian Ode
I
1 What new element before us unborn in nature? Is there a new thing under the Sun?
At last inquisitive Whitman a modern epic, detonative, Scientific theme
First penned unmindful by Doctor Seaborg with poisonous hand, named for Death’s planet through the sea beyond Uranus
whose chthonic ore fathers this magma-teared Lord of Hades, Sire of avenging Furies, billionaire Hell-King worshipped once
5 with black sheep throats cut, priest’s face averted from underground mysteries in a single temple at Eleusis,
Spring-green Persephone nuptialed to his inevitable Shade, Demeter mother of asphodel weeping dew,
her daughter stored in salty caverns under white snow, black hail, gray winter rain or Polar ice, immemorable seasons before
Fish flew in Heaven, before a Ram died by the starry bush, before the Bull stamped sky and earth
or Twins inscribed their memories in cuneiform clay or Crab’d flood
10 washed memory from the skull, or Lion sniffed the lilac breeze in Eden—
Before the Great Year began turning its twelve signs, ere constellations wheeled for twenty-four thousand sunny years
slowly round their axis in Sagittarius, one hundred sixty-seven thousand times returning to this night
Radioactive Nemesis were you there at the beginning black Dumb tongueless unsmelling blast of Disillusion?
I manifest your Baptismal Word after four billion years
15 I guess your birthday in Earthling Night, I salute your dreadful presence lasting majestic as the Gods,
Sabaot, Jehova, Astapheus, Adonaeus, Elohim, Iao, Ialdabaoth, Aeon from Aeon born ignorant in an Abyss of Light,
Sophia’s reflections glittering thoughtful galaxies, whirlpools of star-spume silver-thin as hairs of Einstein!
Father Whitman I celebrate a matter that renders Self oblivion!
Grand Subject that annihilates inky hands & pages’ prayers, old orators’ inspired Immortalities,
20 I begin your chant, openmouthed exhaling into spacious sky over silent mills at Hanford, Savannah River, Rocky Flats, Pantex, Burlington, Albuquerque
Collected Poems 1947-1997 Page 55