pavement a dark Turkish bath the cornice gapes at midnight
Seattle! -- department stores full of fur coats and camping
equipment, mad noontime businessmen in gabardine coats talk-
ing on streetcorners to keep up the structure, I float past, birds
cry,
Salvation Army offers soup on rotting block, six thousand
beggars groan at a meal of hopeful beans.
1956
PSALM III
To God: to illuminate all men. Beginning with Skid Road.
Let Occidental and Washington be transformed into a
higher place, the plaza of eternity.
Illuminate the welders in shipyards with the brilliance of
their torches.
Let the crane operator lift up his arm for joy.
Let elevators creak and speak, ascending and descending in
awe.
Let the mercy of the flower's direction beckon in the eye.
Let the straight flower bespeak its purpose in straightness --
to seek the light.
Let the crooked flower bespeak its purpose in crookedness --
to seek the light.
Let the crookedness and straightness bespeak the light.
Let Puget Sound be a blast of light.
I feed on your Name like a cockroach on a crumb -- this
cockroach is holy.
Seattle 1956
TEARS
I'm crying all the time now.
I cried all over the street when I left the Seattle Wobbly Hall.
I cried listening to Bach.
I cried looking at the happy flowers in my backyard, I cried at
the sadness of the middle-aged trees.
Happiness exists I feel it.
I cried for my soul, I cried for the world's soul.
The world has a beautiful soul.
God appearing to be seen and cried over. Overflowing heart of
Paterson.
Arctic, 1956
READY TO ROLL
To Mexico! To Mexico! Down the dovegrey highway, past
Atomic City police, past the firey border to dream
cantinas!
Standing on the sunny metropolitan plateau, stranger prince
on the street, dollars in my pocket, alone, free --
genitals and thighs and buttocks under skin and
leather.
Music! Taxis! Marijuana in the slums! Ancient sexy parks!
Continental boulevards in America! Modern downtown
for a dollar! Dungarees in Les Ambassadeurs! And
here's a hard brown cock for a quarter!
Drunkenness! and the long night walks down brown streets,
eyes, windows, buses, interior charnels behind the
Cathedral, lost squares and hungry tacos, a calf's head
cooked and picked apart for meat,
and the blackened inner roofs and tents of the Thieves'
Market, street crisscrossed on street, a naked hipster
labyrinth, stealing, pausing, loitering, noticing drums,
purchasing nothing
but a broken aluminum coffee pot with a doll's arm sticking
up out of the mouth.
Haha! what do I want? Change of solitude, spectre of
drunkenness in paranoiac taxicabs, fear and gaiety of
unknown lovers
coming around the empty streetcorner dark-eyed and watching
me make it there alone under the new hip moon.
S.F. 1956
WROTE THIS LAST NIGHT
Listen to the tale of the sensitive car
who was coughed up out of earth in Pittsburgh.
She screamed like a Swedish Prime Minister
on her first flight down the red neon highway,
she couldn't stand the sirens and blind lights
of the male cars Fords Oldsmobiles Studebakers
-- her assembly line foreman had prophecied wild wreck
on Sunset Boulevard headlights & eyeballs broken fenders &
bones.
She rode all over Mexico avoiding Los Angeles
praying to be an old junkie in a bordertown graveyard
with rattley doors and yellow broken windowpanes
bent license plate weak brakes & unsaleable motor
worn out by the slow buttocks of teen-age nightmare
panting under the impoverished jissom of the August moon,
Anything but that final joyride with the mad producer
and his bombshell intellectual star on the last night up from
Mexicali.
SQUEAL
He rises he stretches he liquefies he is hammered again
He's divided in shares he litters the floor of the Bourse
He's cut by adamantine snips and sent by railway car
Accumulated on the margin by bony Goldfinger has various
Visions of being an automobile consolidates
The fortune of spectral lawyers heirs weep over him
He melts he undergoes remarkable metamorphoses peculiar
Hallucinations he coughs up debentures beaten
By immense hammers in a vast loft pours in fire spurts
Upward in molten forges he levels he dreams and he cools
And the present adjusted steel squints.
A hunchback tuberculosis salesman drives him cackling to St
Louis
In the rain Hack no will of his own Creep next resale Crank
San Pedro tomorrow St Joe Squeak will it never end Hohokus --
Crashes into a dirty locomotive the bastard never
Mind stock averages decline slightly here's the mechanic
Blam the junkyard Help the smelter later a merger pressure
accumulates
He's had it now Eek he's an airplane Whine he wants to go home
Suddenly he dives on the market like a bomb.
1958
AMERICAN CHANGE
The first I looked on, after a long time far from home in
mid Atlantic on a summer day
Dolphins breaking the glassy water under the blue sky,
a gleam of silver in my cabin, fished up out of my jangling
new pocket of coins and green dollars
-- held in my palm, the head of the feathered indian, old
Buck-Rogers eagle eyed face, a gash of hunger in the cheek
gritted jaw of the vanished man begone like a Hebrew
with hairlock combed down the side -- O Rabbi Indian
what visionary gleam 100 years ago on Buffalo prairie
under the molten cloud shot sky, 'the same clear light 10000
miles in all directions'
but now with all the violin music of Vienna, gone into
the great slot machine of Kansas City, Reno --
The coin seemed so small after vast European coppers
thick francs leaden pesetas, lira endless and heavy,
a miniature primeval memorialized in 5c. nickle candy-
store nostalgia of the redskin, dead on silver coin,
with shaggy buffalo on reverse, hump-backed little tail
incurved, head butting against the rondure of Eternity,
cock forelock below, bearded shoulder muscle folded
below muscle, head of prophet, bowed,
vanishing beast of Time, hoar body rubbed clean of
wrinkles and shining like polished stone, bright metal in my
forefinger, ridiculous buffalo -- to New York.
Dime next I found, Minerva, sexless cold & chill, ascend-
ing goddess of money -- and was it the wife of Wallace Stevens,
truly?
and now from the locks flowing the miniature wings of
speedy thought,
executive dyke, Minerva, goddess of Madison Avenue,
forgotten useless dime that can't buy hot dog, dead dime --
Then we've George Washington, less pri
mitive, the snub-
nosed quarter, smug eyes and mouth, some idiot's design of the
sexless Father,
naked down to his neck, a ribbon in his wig, high fore-
head, Roman line down the nose, fat checked, still showing his
falsetooth ideas -- O Eisenhower & Washington -- O Fathers --
No movie star dark beauty -- O thou Bignoses --
Quarter, remembered quarter, 40c. in all -- What'll you
buy me when I land -- one icecream soda? --
poor pile of coins, original reminders of the sadness,
forgotten money of America --
nostalgia of the first touch of those coins, American
change,
the memory in my aging hand, the same old silver reflec-
tive there,
the thin dime hidden between my thumb and forefinger
All the struggles for those coins, the sadness of their re-
appearance
my reappearance on those fabled shores
and the failure of that Dream, that Vision of Money
reduced to this haunting recollection
of the gas lot in Paterson where I found half a dollar
gleaming in the grass --
I have a $5 bill in my pocket -- it's Lincoln's sour black
head moled wrinkled, forelocked too, big eared, flags of announce-
ment flying over the bill, stamps in green and spiderweb black,
long numbers in racetrack green, immense promise, a
girl, a hotel, a busride to Albany, a night of brilliant drunk in
some faraway corner of Manhattan
a stick of several teas, or paper or cap of Heroin, or a $5
strange present to the blind.
Money money, reminder, I might as well write poems to
you -- dear American money -- O statue of Liberty I ride en-
folded in money in my mind to you -- and last
Ahhh! Washington again, on the Dollar, same poetic
black print, dark words, The United States of America, innumer-
able numbers
R956422481 One Dollar This Certificate is Legal Tender
(tender!) for all debts public and private
My God My God why have you foresaken me
Ivy Baker Priest Series 1935 F
and over, the Eagle, wild wings outspread, halo of the
Stars encircled by puffs of smoke & flame --
a circle the Masonic Pyramid, the sacred Swedenborgian
Dollar America, bricked up to the top, & floating surreal above
the triangle of holy outstaring Eye sectioned out of the
aire, shining
light emitted from the eyebrowless triangle -- and a desert
of cactus, scattered all around, clouds afar,
this being the Great Seal of our Passion, Annuit Coeptes,
Novis Ordo Seculorum,
the whole surrounded by green spiderwebs designed by
T-Men to prevent foul counterfeit --
ONE
S.S United States, 1958
'BACK ON TIMES SQUARE, DREAMING OF TIMES SQUARE'
Let some sad trumpeter stand
on the empty streets at dawn
and blow a silver chorus to the
buildings of Times Square,
memorial of ten years, at 5 AM, with
the thin white moon just
visible
above the green & grooking McGraw
Hill offices
a cop walks by, but he's invisible
with his music
The Globe Hotel, Garver lay in
grey beds there and hunched his
back and cleaned his needles --
where I lay many nights on the nod
from his leftover bloody cottons
and dreamed of Blake's voice talking --
I was lonely,
Garver's dead in Mexico two years,
hotel's vanished into a parking lot
And I'm back here -- sitting on the streets
again --
The movies took our language, the
great red signs
A DOUBLE BILL OF GASSERS
Teen Age Nightmare
Hooligans of the Moon
But we were never nightmare
hooligans but seekers of
the blond nose for Truth
Some old men are still alive, but
the old Junkies are gone --
We are a legend, invisible but
legendary, as prophecied
NY 1958
MY SAD SELF
To Frank O'Hara
Sometimes when my eyes are red
I go up on top of the RCA Building
and gaze at my world, Manhattan --
my buildings, streets I've done feats in,
lofts, beds, coldwater flats
-- on Fifth Ave below which I also bear in mind,
its ant cars, little yellow taxis, men
walking the size of specks of wool --
Panorama of the bridges, sunrise over Brooklyn machine,
sun go down over New Jersey where I was born
& Paterson where I played with ants --
my later loves on 15th Street,
my greater loves of Lower East Side,
my once fabulous amours in the Bronx
faraway --
paths crossing in these hidden streets,
my history summed up, my absences
and ecstasies in Harlem --
-- sun shining down on all I own
in one eyeblink to the horizon
in my last eternity --
matter is water.
Sad,
I take the elevator and go
down, pondering,
and walk on the pavements staring into all man's
plateglass, faces,
questioning after who loves,
and stop, bemused
in front of an automobile shopwindow
standing lost in calm thought,
traffic moving up & down 5th Avenue blocks
behind me
waiting for a moment when. . . .
Time to go home & cook supper & listen to
the romantic war news on the radio
. . . all movement stops
& I walk in the timeless sadness of existence,
tenderness flowing thru the buildings,
my fingertips touching reality's face,
my own face streaked with tears in the mirror
of some window -- at dusk --
where I have no desire
for bonbons -- or to own the dresses or Japanese
lampshades of intellection --
Confused by the spectacle around me,
Man struggling up the street
with packages, newspapers,
ties, beautiful suits
toward his desire
Man, woman, streaming over the pavements
red lights clocking hurried watches &
movements at the curb --
And all these streets leading
so crosswise, honking, lengthily,
by avenues
stalked by high buildings or crusted into slums
thru such halting traffic
screaming cars and engines
so painfully to this
countryside, this graveyard
this stillness
on deathbed or mountain
once seen
never regained or desired
in the mind to come
where all Manhattan that I've seen must disappear.
NY 1958
The music of the spheres -- that ends in Silence
The Void is a grand piano
a million melodies
one after another
silence in between
rather an interruption
of the silence
Tho the music's beautiful
Bong Bong Bon----
-
gnob
gnob
gno-----
THE circle of forms
Shrinks
and disappears
back into the piano.
BATTLESHIP NEWSREEL
I was high on tea in my foc'sle near the forepeak hatch listening to the stars
envisioning the kamakazis flapping and turning in the soiled clouds
ackack burst into fire a vast hole ripped out of the bow like a burning lily
we dumped our oilcans of nitroglycerine among the waving octapi
dull thud and boom of thunder undersea the cough of the tuburcular machinegunner
flames in the hold among the cans of ether the roar of battleships far away
rolling in the sea like whales surrounded by dying ants the screams the captain mad
Suddenly a golden light came over the ocean and grew large the radiance entered the sky
a deathly chill and heaviness entered my body I could scarce lift my eye
and the ship grew sheathed in light like an overexposed photograph fading in the brain.
1959
I BEG YOU COME BACK & BE CHEERFUL
Tonite I got hi in the window of my apartment
chair at 3: AM
gazing at Blue incandescent torches
bright-lit street below
clotted shadows looming on a new laid pave
-- as last week Medieval rabbiz
plodded thru the brown raw
dirt turned over -- sticks
& cans
and tired ladies sitting on spanish
garbage pails -- in the deadly heat
-- one month ago
the fire hydrants were awash --
the sun at 3 P.M. today in a haze --
now all dark outside, a cat crosses
the street silently -- I meow
and she looks up, and passes a
pile of rubble on the way
to a golden shining garbage pail
(phosphor in the night
& alley stink)
(or door-can mash)
-- Thinking America is a chaos
Police clog the streets with their anxiety,
Prowl cars creak & halt:
Today a woman, 20, slapped her brother
playing with his infant bricks --
toying with a huge rock --
Reality Sandwiches: 1953-1960 Page 4