And there was no cop there --
I looked around my shoulder --
a pile of crap in the opposite direction.
Tear gas! Dynamite! Mustaches!
I'll grow a beard and carry lovely
bombs,
I will destroy the world, slip in between
the cracks of death
And change the Universe -- Ha!
I have the secret, I carry
Subversive salami in
my ragged briefcase
'Garlic, Poverty, a will to Heaven,'
a strange dream in my meat:
Radiant clouds, I have heard God's voice in
my sleep, or Blake's awake, or my own or
the dream of a delicatessen of snorting cows
and bellowing pigs --
The chop of a knife
a finger severed in my brain --
a few deaths I know --
O brothers of the Laurel
Is the world real?
Is the Laurel
a joke or a crown of thorns? --
Fast, pass
up the ass
Down I go
Cometh Woe
-- the street outside,
me spying on New York.
The dark truck passes snarling &
vibrating deep --
Leaving us flying like birds into Time
-- eyes and car headlights --
The shrinkage of emptiness
in the Nebulae
These Galaxies cross like pinwheels & they pass
like gas --
What forests are born.
September 15, 1959
TO AN OLD POET IN PERU
Because we met at dusk
Under the shadow of the railroad station
clock
While my shade was visiting Lima
And your ghost was dying in Lima
old face needing a shave
And my young beard sprouted
magnificent as the dead hair
in the sands of Chancay
Because I mistakenly thought you were
melancholy
Saluting your 60 year old feet
which smell of the death
of spiders on the pavement
And you saluted my eyes
with your anisetto voice
Mistakenly thinking I was genial
for a youth
(my rock and roll is the motion of an
angel flying in a modern city)
(your obscure shuffle is the motion
of a seraphim that has lost
its wings)
I kiss you on your fat cheek (once more tomorrow
Under the stupendous Disaguaderos clock)
Before I go to my death in an airplane crash
in North America (long ago)
And you go to your heart-attack on an indifferent
street in South America
(Both surrounded by screaming
communists with flowers
in their ass)
-- you much sooner than I --
or a long night alone in a room
in the old hotel of the world
watching a black door
. . . surrounded by scraps of paper
DIE GREATLY IN THY SOLITUDE
Old Man,
I prophesy Reward
Vaster than the sands of Pachacamac
Brighter than a mask of hammered gold
Sweeter than the joy of armies naked fucking on the battlefield
Swifter than a time passed between
old Nasca night and new Lima in the dusk
Stranger than our meeting by the Presidential Palace in an old cafe
ghosts of an old illusion, ghosts of indifferent love --
THE DAZZLING INTELLIGENCE
Migrates from Death
To make a sign of Life again to you
Fierce and beautiful as a car crash in the Plaza de Armas
I swear that I have seen that Light
I will not fail to kiss your hideous cheek when your coffin's closed
And the human mourners go back
to their old tired Dream.
And you wake in the Eye of the Dictator of the Universe.
Another stupid miracle! I'm mistaken again!
Your indifference! my enthusiasm! I insist! You cough!
Lost in the wave of Gold that flows thru the Cosmos.
Agh I'm tire of insisting! Goodby,
I'm going to Pucallpa to have Visions.
Your clean sonnets?
I want to read your dirtiest
secret scribblings,
your Hope,
in His most Obscene Magnificence. My God!
May 19, 1960
Note: Chancay, Pachacamic, Nasca -- Pre-incaic cultures of coastal desert Peru. Myriad relics found by graverobbers opening the sand of these necropolises.
AETHER
11:15 PM May 27
4 Sniffs & I'm High,
Underwear in bed,
white cotton in left hand,
archtype degenerate,
bloody taste in my mouth
of Dentist Chair
music, Loud Farts of Eternity --
an owl with eyeglasses scribbling in the cold darkness --
All the time the sound in my eardrums of trolleycars below
taxi fender cough -- creak of streets --
Laughter & pistol shots echoing
at all walls --
tic leaks of neon -- the voice of Myriad
rushers of the Brainpan
all the chirps the crickets have created
ringing against my eares in the
instant before unconsciousness
before, --
the teardrop in the eye to come, --
the Fear of the Unknown --
One does not yet know whether Christ was
God or the Devil -Buddha is more reassuring.
Yet the experiments must continue!
Every possible combination of Being -- all
the old ones! all the old Hindu
Sabahadabadie-pluralic universes
ringing in Grandiloquent
Bearded Juxtaposition,
with all their minarets and moonlit
towers enlaced with iron
or porcelain embroidery,
all have existed --
and the Sages with
white hair who sat crosslegged on
a female couch --
hearkening to whatever music came
from out the Wood or Street,
whatever bird that whistled in the
Marketplace,
whatever note the clock struck to say
Time --
whatever drug, or aire, they breathed
to make them think so deep
or simply hear what passed,
like a car passing in the 1960 street
beside the Governmental Palace
in Peru, this Lima year I write.
Kerouac! I salute yr
wordy beard. Sad Prophet!
Salutations and low bows from
baggy pants and turbaned mind and hornèd foot
arched eyebrows & Jewish Smile --
One single specimen of Eternity -- each of us poets.
Breake the Rhythm! (too much pentameter)
. . . My god what solitude are you in Kerouac
now?
-- heard the whoosh of carwheels in the 1950 rain --
And every bell went off on time,
And everything that was created
Rang especially in view of the Creation
For
This is the end of the creation
This is the redemption Spoken of
This is the view of the Created
by all the Drs, nurses, etc of creation;
i.e.,
--
The unspeakable passed over my head for
the second time.
a
nd still can't say it!
i.e. we are the sweepings of the moon
we're what's left over from perfection --
The universe is an OLD mistake
I've understood a million times before
and always come back to the same scissor brainwave--
The
Sooner or later all Consciousness will be eliminated
because Consciousness is
a by-product of --
(Cotton & N2O)
Drawing saliva back from the tongue --
Christ! you struggle to understand
One consciousness
& be confronted with Myriads --
after a billion years
with the same ringing in the ears
and pterodactyl-smile of Oops
Creation, known it all before.
A Buddha as of old, with sirens of
whatever machinery making cranging noises in
the street
and pavement light reflected in the facade
RR Station window in a
dinky port in Backwash
of the murky old forgotten
fabulous whatever
Civilization of
Eternity, --
with the RR Sta Clock ring midnight,
as of now,
& waiting for the 6th
you write your
Word,
and end on the last chime -- and remember
This one twelve was struck
before, and never again; both.
..........I stood on the balcony
waiting for an explosion
of Total Consciousness of the All --
being Ginsberg sniffing ether in Lima.
The same struggle of Mind, to reach the
Thing
that ends its process with an X
comprehending its befores and afters,
unexplainable to each, except in a prophetic
secret recollective hidden
half-hand unrecorded.
way.
As the old sages of Asia, or the white beards of Persia
scribbled on the margins of their scrolls
in delicate ink
remembering with tears the ancient clockbells of their
cities
and the cities that had been --
Nasca, Paracas, Chancay & Secrecy of the Priests
buried, Cat Gods
of all colors, a funeral shroud
for a museum --
None remember but all return to the same thought
before they die --what sad old
knowledge, we repeat again.
Only to be lost
in the sands of Paracas, or wrapped in a mystic shroud
of Poesy
and found by some kid in a thousand years
inspire what dreadful thoughts of his own?
It's a horrible, lonely experience. And Gregory's letter, and Peter's . . .
May 28 7:30 PM
...In the foul dregs of Circumstance
'Male and Female He created them' with mustaches.
There ARE certain REPEATED
(pistol shot) reliable points
of reference which the insane
(pistol shot repeated outside
the window) -- madman suddenly
writes -- THE PISTOL SHOT
outside -- the REPEATED situations
the experience of return to the
same place in Universal Creation
Time -- and every time we return
we recognise again that we
HAVE been here & that is the
Key to Creation -- the same pistol shot
-- DOWN, bending over his book of Un
intelligable marvels with his mustache.
(my) Madness is intelligable reactions to Unintelligable phenomena.
Boy -- what a marvellous bottle,
a clear glass sphere of transparent
liquid ether --
(Chloraethyl Merz)
9 PM
I know I am a poet -- in this universe -- but what
good does that do -- when in another, without these mechanical
aids, I might be doomed to be a poor Disneyan Shoe Store
Clerk -- This consciousness an accident of one of the Ether-
possible worlds, not the Final World
Wherein we all look Crosseyed
& triumph in our Virginity
without wearing Rabbit's-foot
ears or eyes looking sideways
strangely but in Gold
Humbled & more knowledgeable, acknowledge
the Vast mystery of our creation --
without giving any sign that
we have heard from the
GREAT CREATOR
WHOSE NAME I NOW
PRONOUNCE:
GREAT CREATOR OF THE UNIVERS, IF
THY WISDOM ACCORD IT
AND IF THIS NOT BE TOO
MUCH TO ASK
MAY I PUBLISH YOUR NAME?
I ASK IN THE LIMA
NIGHT
FEARFULLY WAITING ANSWER,
hearing the buses out on
the street hissing,
Knowing the Terror of the World Afar --
I have been playing with Jokes
and His is too mighty to hold
in the hand like a Pen
and His is the Pistol Shot Answer
that brings blood to the brain
And--
What can be possible
in a minor universe
in which you can see
God by sniffing the
gas in a cotton?
The answer to be taken in
reverse & Doubled Math
ematically both ways.
Am I a sinner?
There are hard & easy universes. This is neither.
(If I close my eyes will I regain consciousness?)
That's the Final Question -- with
all the old churchbells ringing and
bus pickup snuffles & crack of iron
whips inside cylinders & squeal of brakes
and old crescendos of responsive
demiurgic ecstasy whispering in streets of ear
-- and when was it Not
ever answered in the Affir-
mative? Saith the Lord?
A MAGIC UNIVERSE
Flies & crickets & the sound of buses & my
stupid beard.
But what's Magic?
Is there Sorrow in Magic?
Is Magic one of my boyscout creations?
Am I responsible? I with my flop?
Could Threat happen to Magic?
Yes! this the one universe in which
there is threat to magic, by
writing while high.
A Universe in which I am condemned to write statements.
'Ignorant Judgements Create Mistaken Worlds--'
and this one is joined in
Indic union to
Affirm with laughing
eyes --
The world is as we see it,
Male & Female, passing thru the years,
as has before & will, perhaps
with all its countless pearls & Bloody noses
and I poor stupid All in G
am stuck with that old Choice --
Ya, Crap, what Hymn to seek, & in
what tongue, if this's the most
I can requite from Consciousness? --
'That I can skim? & put in words?
Could skim it faster with more juice --
could skim a crop with Death, perchance
-- yet never know in this old world.
Will know in Death?
And before?
Will in
Another know.
And in another know.
And
in another know.
And
Stop conceiving worlds!
says Philip Whalen
(My Savior
!) (oh what snobbery!)
(as if he cd save Anyone) --
At least, he won't understand.
I lift my finger in the air to create
a universe he won't understand, full
of sadness.
-- finally staring straight ahead in surprise
& recollection into the mirror of
the Hotel Commercio room.
Time repeats itself. Including
this consciousness, which has seen
itself before -- thus the locust-whistle
of antiquity's nightwatch in my eardrum . . .
I propounded a final question, and
heard a series of final answers.
What is God? for instance, asks the answer?
And whatever else can the replier reply but reply?
Whatever the nature of mind, that
the nature of both question and answer.
& yet one wants to live
in a single universe
Does one?
Must it be one?
Why, as with the Jews
must the God be One?
O what does
the concept ONE mean?
IT'S MAD!
GOD IS ONE!
IS X
IS MEANINGLESS --
ADONOI --
IS A JOKE --
THE HEBREWS ARE
WRONG -- (CRIST & BUDDA
ATTEST, also wrongly!)
What is One but Formation
of mind?
arbitrary madness! 6000 years
Spreading out in all directions simultaneously --
I forgive both good & ill
& I seek nothing, like a painted savage with
spear crossed by orange black & white bands!
'I found the Jivaros & was
entrapped in their universe'
I'm scribbling nothings.
Page upon page of profoundest nothing,
as scribed the Ancient Hebe, when
he wrote Adonoi Echad or One --
all to amuse, make money, or deceive --
Let Wickedness be Me
and this the worst of all
the universes!
Not the worst! Not Flame!
I can't stand that -- (Yes that's
for Somebody Else!
Yet I accept
O Catfaced God, whatever comes! It's me!
I am the Flame, etc.
O Gawd!
Pistol shot! Crack!
Circusmaster's whip --
IMPERFECT!
and a soul is damned to
HELL!
And the churchbell rings!
and there is melancholy, once again, throughout the realm.
and I'm that soul, small as it is.
HAVE FELT SAME BEFORE
The death of consciousness is terrible
and yet! when all is ended
what regret?
'S none left to remember or forget.
And's gone into the odd.
The only thing I fear is the Last
Chance. I'll see that last chance too
before I'm done, Old Mind. All them
old Last Chances that you knew before.
Reality Sandwiches Page 5