Collected Poems 1947-1997

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Collected Poems 1947-1997 Page 78

by Allen Ginsberg


  useless to jack off to your youthful shadow anymore.

  And I your genius poet first love ignored hypoglycemic,

  impotent, gouty, squint-eyed, halfway bald—

  Reading this book gives me youth back again, not old

  in vain, at last you bring love to Catullus & Poetry

  humble enough to print these translations by yourself.

  December 2, 1987, 4:30 A.M.

  Grandma Earth’s Song

  I started down Capitol Hill side along unfamiliar black central avenues warily uncertain which streets thru Fillmore district to City Hall valley center,

  and as I passed a block or two I saw a fragile crone marching toward me up hill, Grandma Bag-lady ragged dressed with firm ancient steps Old Ma Earth

  dragging a shopping cart filled with cans bottles & plastic newspapers tied

  with silk stockings wandering alone singing out loud on way to Civic Center

  When dull roots write Laws

  Jerusalem to New York

  Poor Jews break Arab Jaws

  Blacks eat greasy pork

  What’s the Planet News?

  Wall Street’s poison pill

  Palestinians stone Jews

  Water runs downhill

  Young soldiers gonna die

  Old presidents get AIDS

  They bankrupted the sky

  The ozone layer fades

  Crazy people got money

  I own State Capitols

  Sheriff calls me honey

  The army’s a bunch of fools

  I want my welfare stamps

  I want my movie show

  I got ten kerosene lamps

  I’m 99 years old

  This town’s already dead

  This country’s on the skids

  This state’s made out of lead

  I can’t feed my kids

  My name is Gaia ah ha ha

  Put me in jail I screw the sky

  Nothing to win or lose Poppa

  Born your gonna die

  Adam bombs & newsboy hoaxes

  Fakers yak the Oval Room

  I live in cardboard boxes

  They killed the ocean’s womb

  Tear up your welfare check

  I’ll eat my way to Heaven

  Throw me in Walnut Creek

  I’ll vomit Pacific Ocean

  Wakening as she passed by I thought, she’s improvising street doggerel epic popular song cackling in everyone’s Immortal brain Anything comes to mind’s the right politics to ruin Police State.

  February 13, 1988, 7:30–9:00 A.M.

  Salutations to Fernando Pessoa

  Every time I read Pessoa I think

  I’m better than he is I do the same thing

  more extravagantly—he’s only from Portugal,

  I’m American greatest Country in the world

  right now End of XX Century tho Portugal

  had a big empire in the 15th century never mind

  now shrunk to a Corner of Iberian peninsula

  whereas New York take New York for instance

  tho Mexico City’s bigger N.Y.’s richer think of Empire State

  Building not long ago world empire’s biggest skyscraper—

  be that as’t may I’ve experienced 61 years’ XX Century

  Pessoa walked down Rua do Ouro only till 1936

  He entered Whitman so I enter Pessoa no

  matter what they say besides dead he wouldn’t object.

  What way’m I better than Pessoa?

  Known on 4 Continents I have 25 English books he only 3

  his mostly Portuguese, but that’s not his fault—

  U.S.A.’s a bigger country

  merely 2 Trillion in debt a passing freakout,

  Reagan’s dirty work an American Century aberration

  unrepresenting our Nation Whitman sang in Epic manner

  tho worried about in Democratic Vistas

  As a Buddhist not proud my superiority to Pessoa

  I’m humble Pessoa was nuts big difference,

  tho apparently gay—same as Socrates,

  consider Michelangelo da Vinci Shakespeare

  inestimable comerado Walt

  True I was tainted Pinko at an early age a mere trifle

  science itself destroys ozone layers this era antiStalinists

  poison entire earth with radioactive anticommunism.

  Maybe I lied somewhat

  rarely in verse, only protecting others’ reputations.

  Frankly too Candid about my mother tho meant well

  Did Pessoa mention his mother? she’s interesting,

  powerful to birth sextuplets

  Alberto Cairo Alvaro de Campos Ricardo Reis Bernardo Soares &

  Alexander Search simultaneously

  with Fernando Pessoa himself a classic sexophrenic

  Confusing personae not so popular

  outside Portugal’s tiny kingdom (till recently a second-rate police state)

  Let me get to the point er I forget what it was

  but certainly enjoy making comparisons between this Ginsberg &

  Pessoa

  people talk about in Iberia hardly any books in English

  presently the world’s major diplomatic language extended throughout

  China.

  Besides he was a shrimp, himself admits in interminable “Salutations to

  Walt Whitman”

  whereas 5′7½″ height

  somewhat above world average, no immodesty,

  I’m speaking seriously about me & Pessoa.

  Anyway he never influenced me, never read Pessoa

  before I wrote my celebrated Howl already translated into 24 languages,

  not to this day’s Pessoa influence an anxiety

  Midnight April 12 ’88 merely glancing his book

  certainly influences me in passing, only reasonable

  but reading a page in translation hardly proves “Influence.”

  Turning to Pessoa, what’d he write about? Whitman

  (Lisbon, the sea etc.) method peculiarly longwinded,

  diarrhea mouth some people say—Pessoa Schmessoa.

  April 12, 1988

  May Days 1988

  I

  As I cross my kitchen floor the thought of Death returns,

  day after day, as I wake & drink lemon juice & hot water,

  brush my teeth & blow my nose, stand at toilet a yellow stream

  issuing from my body, look out curtained windows, across the street

  Mary Help of Christians R.C. Church, how many years

  empty the garbage pail, carry black plastic bags to the sidewalk,

  before I boil the last soft egg,

  day after day glance my altar sitting pillow a sidelong look & sigh,

  pass bookcases’ Greek lyrics & volumes of Military Industrial Secrecy?

  How many mornings out the window Springtime’s grey clouds drift over a wooden owl

  on the Rectory roof, pigeons flutter off the street lamp to an iron fence, I return to kitchen

  oatmeal cooking in an iron pot, sit in a wooden chair, choose a soupspoon, dreaming out the window eat my gruel

  as ailanthus trees bud & grow thick green, seaweed in rainy Atlantis,

  lose leaves after snowfall, sit bare-branched in January’s rusty winds?

  Snap photographs focus’d on the clothesline, courtyard chimneypots a block away?

  How many years lie alone in bed and stroke my cock

  or read the Times on a pillow midnite, answer telephone talk, my Stepmother

  or Joe in Washington, wait for a knock on the door it’s portly Peter sober hesitant

  inquiring supper, rarely visiting, rueful a life gone by—you got the monthly rent?

  armfuls of mid-morn mail arriving with despairing Secretaries—

  rise and tuck my shirt in, turn the doorlock key, go down hallway stairs,

  enter New York City, Christine’s Polish restaurant around East 12
th Street corner on 1st Avenue

  taxi uptown to art museums or visit Dr. Brown, chest x-rays, smoking cough or flu

  Turn on the News from Palestine, Listen to Leadbelly’s tape lament, Black Girl, Jim Crow, Irene—and

  Sunday Puerto Ricans climb concrete steps week after week to church.

  II

  Sox in the laundry, snap on the kitchen light midnite icebox

  raid, sun-dried tomatoes, soft swiss cheese & ham, Pineapple juice,

  low rent control $260 per mo, clear sanded gymseal’d floors, white walls,

  Blake’s Tyger on the bedroom bookcase, cabs rattling on dark asphalt below,

  Silence, a solitary house, Charles Fourier on bedside table waiting inspection, switch light off—

  Pajamas in drawer for sleep, 80 volumes behind the headboard for browsing—

  Irving Howe’s Yiddish Poetry, Atilla József, Sashibusan Das Gupta’s Obscure Religious Cults, Céline, De Vulgari Eloquentia—

  What riches for old age? What cozy naps and long nights’ dreams? Browsing in Persepolis and Lhasa!

  What more ask existence? Except time, more time, ripe time & calm

  & Warless time to contemplate collapsing years, tho body teeth brain elbow ache,

  a crooked creak at backbone bottom, dry nostrils, mottled ankle

  & smart tongue, how many years to talk, snap photos, sing in theaters

  improvise in classroom street church radio, far from Congress?

  How many more years eyes closed 9 A.M. wake worrying

  the ulcer in my cheek is’t cancer? Should I have charged Burroughs’ biographer for photos

  reprinted from 40 years ago? Miles the editor’s stylistic competence OK

  for Lit Hist Beat Generation? Should I rise & meditate

  or sleep in daylight recuperate flu? phone ringing half an hour ago

  What’s on the Answer Machine? Give back Advances to Harper’s?

  Who promised deadlines for this photo book? Wasn’t I up 2 A.M. revising Poems?

  Spontaneous verse?!? Take a plane to Greenland, visit Dublin?

  PEN Club meet May 17, decision Israeli Censorship Arabic Press?

  Call C—— O—— Yiddish translator poetress Zionist yenta?

  Write concentration camp expert moralist Elie Wiesel, what’s his word

  “Arabs shd throw words not stones?”—that quote accurate from the Times?

  Should I get up right now, crosslegged scribbling Journals

  with motor roar in street downstairs, stolen autos doctor’d at the curb

  or pull the covers over achy bones? How many years awake or sleepy

  How many mornings to be or not to be?

  How many morning Mays to come, birds chirp insistent on six-story roofs?

  buds rise in backyard cities? Forsythia yellow by brick walls & rusty bedsprings near the fence?

  III

  How many Sundays wake and lie immobile eyes closed remembering Death,

  7 A.M. Spring Sunlight out the window the noise a Nuyorican drunkard on the corner

  reminds me of Peter, Naomi, my nephew Alan, am I mad myself, have always been so

  waking in N.Y. 61st year to realize childless I am a motherless freak

  like so many millions, worlds from Paterson Los Angeles to Amazon

  Humans & Whales screaming in despair from Empire State Building top to Arctic Ocean bottom—?

  May 1–3, 1988

  Numbers in U.S. File Cabinet (Death Waits to Be Executed)

  100,000,000 buffalo 17th century on North American Plains

  $136,000,000,000 Farm Program costs encouraged chemical overuse 1980s decade

  $4,500,000 Agriculture Department research on Natural farm methods 1980s

  300,000 National junkies

  100,000 alcohol deaths yearly

  385,000 tobacco deaths heart attack cancer a year

  30,000 deaths “illicit substances” yearly

  $11,000,000,000 budget war on drugs 1990

  1,000,000,000 people on world malnourished diseased

  3,600,000 estimated American Homeless

  300,000 mental patients dumped on streets 1970s–1980s

  300 homeless slept outdoors Tompkins Park N.Y.C. July 29, 1989

  17,000 meals served St. Peter’s soup kitchen Morristown N.J.

  110,000,000 man-made deaths Wars holocausts fatality camps XX Century

  3°–8° Fahrenheit increase earth temperature next century computers project

  Lambert 3-6606 Louis Ginsberg’s phone for 20 years in Paterson N.J.

  65 Decibels sound level ordinary speech

  100 Decibels rock concert sound level

  28,000,000 current cases hearing loss U.S.A.

  6,000 workers, Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant

  $300,000,000 yearly pay & benefits Rocky Flats Colorado

  1% Colorado manufacturing activity’s at Rocky Flats Nuclear Facility

  70 FBI agents raided Rocky Flats investigating 10,000 gallon toxic waste tanks 1989

  $100,000,000,000 to 200,000,000,000 estimate nuclear weapons complex cleanup costs

  Savings & Loan Association bankruptcy taxpayers’ costs it says here $500,000,000,000

  70,000 Salvadorians killed in Civil War majority by Government Paramilitary Death Squads funded by U.S.A.

  40,000 names Doris Lessing too on National Automated Immigration Lookout System barred entering U.S.A.

  3,000 citizens killed by Shining Path, Peru 1972–1979

  3,000 citizens disappeared in Government custody Peru 1972–1979

  U.S. produces 24% planetary Greenhouse gas, consumes 40% world’s gasoline

  $2,000,000,000,000-plus U.S. National debt 1990 ante Iraq War

  $65 cost of Harry Smith’s eyeglasses

  20 largest World Cities by year 2000 none U.S.-European none speak English

  1 in 10 Salvadorians displaced in decade’s counterinsurgency war

  1 sun per known solar system

  1 set Wisdom teeth

  1 mother of all

  1 wrong move

  1 bad apple

  1 way street

  1 anus each

  1 non-God

  1 down 2 to go

  March 1990

  Return of Kral Majales

  This silver anniversary much hair’s gone from my head and I am the King of May

  And tho I am King of May my howls & proclamations present are banned by FCC on America’s electric airwaves 6 A.M. to midnight

  So King of May I return through Heaven flying to reclaim my paper crown

  And I am King of May with high blood pressure, diabetes, gout, Bell’s palsy, kidneystones & calm eyeglasses

  And wear the foolish crown of no ignorance no wisdom anymore no fear no hope in capitalist striped tie & Communist dungarees

  No laughing matter the loss of the planet next hundred years

  And I am the King of May returned with a diamond big as the universe an empty mind

  And I am the King of May lacklove bouzerant in Springtime with a feeble practice of meditation

  And I am King of May Distinguished Brooklyn English Professor singing

  All gone all gone all overgone all gone sky-high now old mind so Ah!

  April 25, 1990

  Elephant in the Meditation Hall

  Yes all spiritual groups scandal the shrine room

  What about San Francisco Roshi & the board director’s wife

  What about high living limousine expense accounts in Moscow?

  What about the late Rajneesh & poisoned gefilte fish in Oregon?

  What’s hiding under Rajneeshis’ Orange skullcaps? Brains?

  Then old L.A. Mountain Roshi even tap’d his young girls

  and East Coast Roshi’s semen dribbled from Hawaii to the broom closets of the Catskills

  Maezumi Roshi caused grief his senseis’ hearts wrung out with midnight sake & beer

  Later he thanked them for A.A.

  Veteran Zenmas
ter with motorcycle & community farm chorale felt up little boys

  & a big guy too, tough as nails

  Remember a strange Mongolian Russian fruitcake Lama in Polk Gulch Bay Area?

  Vajracharya Trungpa! Dont mention the naked poet at the Halloween Party!

  And the whispered transmission regent died of AIDS (disciple a straight guy sick they say)

  Marxists were right, religion the people’s opium!

  But who’re they to talk lookit Mao a Marxist his picture on every Chinese wall & Little Red Book

  wherefore everyone stood up bedtime nites reciting his dread slogans?

  They still had pictures of Stalin on truckcab windows in Gori 1985 a scandal!

  And New Left carried psychedelic pictures of Mao, Che Guevara & Castro up and down Empire State’s stairways

  A scandal of the sixties! And marvelous atheist Khmer Rouge read Marx Sartre & Erich Fromm,

  how many’d they murder with religious good intentions?

  What US President hasn’t sponsored war, Lumumba’s assassination, an H-bomb,

  trillion dollar Savings & Loan mistakes? Scandals! taxpayers gotta subsi dize Banks!

  Now we gotta digest Plutonium? how evacuate CIA?

  Scandal hundreds homeless under Brooklyn Bridge freezing Xmas &

  New Year’s Eve! Millions homeless in America!

  Who’ll gotta pay for 500,000 U.S. boys & girls visiting Arabian Deserts?

  Who’ll cough up billions for Iraq War to save a President’s face?

  Twelve Billion dollars mickeymouse the year’s drug wars?

  El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala we paid death squads for decades

  Nobody does anything right! Gods, Popes, Mullahs, Communists, Poets, Financiers!

  My own life, scandal! lazy bum! secondhand royal scarlet ties & Yves St. Laurent Salvation Army blazers

  How many boys let me caress their thighs!

  How many girls cursed my cold beard? I better commit suicide!

  That wouldn’t work either, it’ll be a beatnik scandal

  after Cassady’s railroad track death, Joan Burroughs’ bullet in head,

  Orlovsky sane in Bellevue 1st Ave., Kerouac’s liver collapse & ruptured esophagus!

  Trapped in living nightmare, I made a big mistake I got born,

  The world came out of a black hole, whole universe

  a scandal, illusion, everyone deluded, a cosmic elephant in the meditation planet,

 

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