Rep Gordon Canfield
(Mine Own Dear Congressman)
Canfield votes like a
Typical politician,
Guided strictly by
November Intuition.
For Canfield is
But half a man—
The other half
Republican.
—New Jersey, ca. Fall 1942
Published in: Columbia Jester, vol. 43, no. 1 (October 1943), p. 10.
We leave the youthful pennants and the books,
Discard the little compasses and rulers,
We open up our eyes and test our souls,
Prepare ourselves to wield more mighty tools.
Abandon dusty tales of history,
Of good King Arthur’s Knights and Kubla Khan,
We wake, and enter now the world to find
A living tumult in the struggle of man.
For these are giant times, and history
Is fashioned as the minutes burn away.
Buildings of old beliefs are being bombed
And rotted walls are crumbling down today.
Ready are we to meet the challenge hurled:
“To battle, conquer, and rebuild the world.”
—New Jersey, ca. 1943
Published in: Senior Mirror (June 1943), p. 63.
A Night in the Village
(With Edgar Allen Ginsberg)
In Greenwich Village, night had come.
The darkened alleyways were dumb —
The only voices we could hear
Were lonely echoes, sounding clear
From basement bars, where reddish light
Obscenely sweated in the night,
Where neons called to passers-by
“Enter, drink, and dream a lie,
Escape the street’s reality,
Drink gin and immortality.”
I smiled to my comrades two:
We found a door and entered through;
We stumbled to a smokey brawl,
Reality fled beyond recall.
We sat down jesting, wit in flower,
Disputed wildly, burned the hour;
We drank a river of delight,
While pleasure’s flame was kindled bright;
Memory came, and memory flew,
Dreams were lost, and born anew …
Suddenly it seemed, I woke —
My throat was tight, as if to choke
My tongue from talk; though in my ear
The bawdy bawl was ringing clear,
Its meaning I no longer guessed;
My heart was thundering in my breast.
I looked up horrified to see
Eternity glaring down at me!
I looked about in wild alarm —
Death met my glance. He raised his arm:
Futility, mirrored everyplace,
Dwelled in every person’s face —
In every visage was that taint.
Underneath a woman’s paint,
Undisguised by colored lead,
Leered a mocking white Death’s head.
Under the lurid light, the room
Was flushed with shame and vivid doom.
Reflected in a whiskey glass,
Fate’s yellow eyes were molten brass;
In undertones, beneath a note,
Death spoke out of the singer’s throat;
While, staring through a drunkard’s eyes,
Fate confounded drinker’s lies:
For all the drinks that they had tried,
Death still sat there at their side.
And Death peered with contemptuous calm
From the barman’s open palm.
Thus, waiting patiently, alas,
Conferring there, and clinking glass,
And toasting Death, their drinking mate,
Bent Time, Futility, and Fate.
A woman’s laughter rent the gloom —
And back came once again the room.
—New York, Spring 1944
Published in: Columbia Jester, vol. 43, no. 6 (May 1944), p. 2.
A weary lover
Once he was,
Who wept as only
A lover does.
Or laughed as only
A lover must.
Now his mouth
Is ringed with dust.
The credit’s his —
He was quite brave,
To shut his loving
In his grave.
This single pleasure
I have had:
I sang a song
When I was sad.
But since my lips
Would rot, in time,
I put my singing
In a rhyme.
On other lips
My songs will ring,
Now I am dead
And must not sing.
—New York, August 20, 1944
“Epitaph for a Suicide” was published in: Allen Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice (DaCapo Press, 2006). “Epitaph for a Poet” was published in: Columbia Jester, vol. 43, no. 9 (October 1944), p. 13.
Winds around the beaches blow:
Things being as they are, although
Half clearly understood, and I
Uncurious of mystery;
Such thoughts as once were my despair,
— The frantic sea, the silent air,
The changing moon, the frigid shore —
I find delight me more and more.
I had not dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.
—ca. 1946
Published in: Columbia Review, vol. 27, no. 3 (February 1947), p. 32.
To live and deal with life as if it were a stone.
Time like a turning stone that grinds my bones.
Time is a dog that gnaws my bones
and grinds my soul to sticks and stones
It’s not mere time
that pricks my pride;
Just let my bones
Be satisfied.
—May 21, 1949
Published in: James E. B. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary. (University of Chicago Press, June 1984), p. 88.
Behold! the swinging swan
Where the geese have gamboled
Say my oops
Beat my bones
All my eggs are scrambled.
—1949
Published in: Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Take Care of My Ghost, Ghost (Ghost Press, ca. June 1977), p. 3.