To Frank O’H ara & John Ashbery & Kenneth Koch
How real is Bolivia
With its snowy Andes lifting over the modern city
Now that one is in La Paz
Which means the peace in Spanish
Tho the natives speak their native tongue
Especially the women in brown bowler hats
Sitting in the mud with their hands over their noses
Selling black potatoes and blue onions
In the marketplace which covers the hillside
Over which one can see electrical towers
And airplanes landing from Santiago and Lima Caracas
It is strange how real Bolivia is
Its capital cupped in a valley in the Altiplano
Two miles up in the sky
So that I have a headache and continually take aspirin
Which is relatively expensive tho the taxis are 10 cents
And the poverty seems especially created to make me seem a Prince
With my beard and black hat and dungarees
Strolling thru the market buying silver flies, spiders & butterflies
And green and purple shawls the ladies use
To carry babies and garbage in
While I watch them over rich green pig stews
In the Rembrandtian restaurant filled with waiting bearded prophets
Dressed in rags and ancient grey hats over their white brows
All the same I feel a little out of place in Bolivia
Which was a beautiful name in my geography book
Lazing alone in my hotel room with two extra empty beds
Tho I have seen various unhoused Indian boys
I’d gladly share my solitude with, not knowing their names —
And the coca leaf does not really get me high as I expected
So that I masturbated 3 times this week
And wrote postcards to all my friends
In NY, Paris, Florence & Kyoto
— I think I’ll take a trip to Machu Picchu
Which is a famous Inca ruined city in Peru.
—La Paz, Bolivia, April 1960
Unpublished.
Yesterday I was writing in Heaven or of Heaven
or the day before yesterday, and this morning back
where
I started from dreaming of man. And
went to a Turkish Bath
wrapped my belly in a white towel
and sat self-conscious in the
steam hot room
staring at my knees
Then under a shower soaped my balls and ass
Then lay down in the small dark dormitory
with a white cloth over my genitals and
put my arms behind my head
and relaxed — a hand crept up my leg
and a mouth came down on my cock
and a warm slurp greeted my Mysticism
— but an old German with white hair and steel-rimmed
glasses
Sneaked in and interrupted the younger Peruvian
and after saluting my knees and belly with kisses
and further slurps
flopped down to suck, and I thought now after
4 months OK I’ll come —
watching hissing in Spanish
heche-te bastante de saliva
make a lot of saliva
The old gentleman lifted his wings and
sat down with his ass over my prick
like a tomb
and began sucking away with his asshole
till I thought I would come
(in an hour) but he quit —
and sucked off the Peruvian
and I lay back with open eyes in the dark
in Lima
and enjoyed my nudity and the creepy sex of the world
waiting for some white-skinned Angel to come
Finish off the job.
—Lima, Peru, May 26, 1960
Published as “May 26, 1960” in Marrahwannah Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 1 (January 1967), p. 14.
Moonlit nite
entered bamboo roof shelter
lay on ground on robe
— entered the Great Being
again
— we are all one Great Being
whose presence is familiar
— To be It, need to be
also the mosquito
that bites me
— I am also a mosquito
on the Great Being
—Peru, June 6, 1960
Published in: Yage Letters Redux (City Lights, 2006), p. 101 appendix.
I lost
Tears again last nite
Screwed out of Heaven
by a bitter face with eyeglasses
and a nightstick
Waving Death over America
Walt Whitman, the fuzz
is making Fate
the masses are terrified
No comrade walks the road
over mountains overlooks
the old metropolis from
under your vast hat —
I was trying to get the Prince to wake up!
O California
O soup of anxiety!
— ca. 1960
Published in: Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, no. 5, vol. 6 (April 1964), p. 5.
On top, the vast city
100,000,000 people
milky mist, spires of radio
antennae like Venus —
The Marine Band marching hymn
without a name on the Jukebox
Fifes and Flutes in Space Drums
& brass in all bright beauty
way up in the airy window
crashing around my head
I danced for joy to hear again
cleansed of all old associations
the nameless Hymn
without armies
in Space.
— Tokyo, Japan, ca. July 1965
Published in: Ferret, vol. 2, no. 6 (October 16, 1963), p. 5.
I was waiting for Eternals
superimposed on blue sky
and apartment building walls
I was in 15 years before
come back through future doors.
I can’t wait forever,
I didn’t and came back here
by myself feeling sure
lost in this University
with other males and females
looking in Creeley’s live eye,
and we all told similar tales
— San Francisco, October 14, 1963
Unpublished.
War is black magic
Belly flowers to North and South Vietnam
include everybody.
End the human war.
Name hypnosis and fear is the
Enemy — Satan go home!
I accept America and Red China
To the human race.
Madame Nhu and Mao Tse-Tung
Are in the same boat of meat.
— San Francisco, October 30, 1963
Unpublished.
The black and white glare blink in the inky Air Force night
as the Helikopter rose straight up the television frame
carrying President Johnson toward the newsphoto White House
past the tail flag of the giant United States of America super-jet
settled at rest and lonesome under the klieg light field
swarmed with cops brass photographers microphones blip McNamara chill
Long nosed Oswald suspect in Dallas of halfmast pro Castro assassination
—November 22, 1963
Published in: Poetry Newsletter, no. 1 (November 1964), p. 2.
As the fire burns out tranquility returns
The angry voice at the back of the throat
softens, and quiet descends
on the body
The room becomes clear in the
afternoon light of the stage
The actors talk, growling, the eye
rests lightly on the invalid
and tenderness sighs from the pit
of the breast.
Lightness, lightness, as a breeze of
morphine, but no fear
in the belly that the police will
attack
or the rare powder disappear. Ah!
Let’s stay where we are in this cafe
all evening,
No more coffee, I want to sit quiet
without talking
watching the red haired lady with a cane,
the string of pearls, the slap, the dark
backs of heads —
Oh shut your filthy mouth! I hate you!
Footlights! The heart attack! The gold ring
screaming in the sunlight.
I tip my head relax’d on my shoulder,
lean on a table, and gaze thru
no eyes.
— ca. May 1964
Published in: Synapse, no. 3 (January 1965), p. 10.
Loudspeakers drifting
clouds of music
Trumpets of prophesy!
Flutes of high-conscious
Shabda yoga
The giant cranes over
red buildings —
green railroad bridges
over the thruway
to New York
Temples domes
& black smoke–
stacks
in the towers of
the hilled
city of brick
Stone iron and glass
aluminum plastic
George Washington
High School
street!
RR arch jumping
the street valleys
whirling orange curveways
the dawn line
old apartments on
green mounts
rising buttressed in
the grass road —
Plonk of bass guitars
New York Mets
Stadium
The river mysterious
empty stream
Yankee Stadium’s giant
chest — castellated
storage warehouse?
Neal at the wheel
shouting hoarse
abennied and slept
& et in the millionaire
mystic gated
abode —
Surrounded by river &
forest, poor dear —
Zawk, Zawk
Zawk! — the
giant milk
truck swooping
up the hill
by the apartment
rise to the skyway overpass
elevated
6 lane concrete
Rising thru grey Bronxes
to black railroad
subway flight —
ports
down the curved
bowling alley
so much like S.F. [San Francisco]
The road
grasses & fences
I mean curving balconies
riding — the pink
purple — violined
hearse
over the gunk river
Back under black
Els on their thin
heights —
Oh this endless pro–
liferation of concrete
under the arch bridges
carrying highway above
highway
above their roofs the
buildings baby
faced peeks be low —
places & things —
Under the fluorescent
ceilings below
the city —
Higher higher, up the
high asphalt balconies
over the calm Harlem
River
into the artery fluted
into the head of the
Amsterdam Avenue idiot
at dawn —
old gals in the window
spying on the
street —
O hero of Bakersfield!
—Millbrook to New York City, June 27, 1964
Published in: Poets at Le Metro, vol. 15 (July 1964), pp. 4–5.
Little Flower M.M. [Marianne Moore]
I sit three miles from your flat
glass Manhattan the bridges grown old
your breasts the huge river
insect steelworks in the Navy Yard
your ears your mouth pursed small woman
in this same night myself New
York this Universe
I have a cold you have seventy seven years
a pain in my chest, I
eat no more meat I smoke much you
must understand this impulse to confession
all I can do a message
may arrive as a soft electric shock of feeling:
Man is no form no mighty molecule no just
idea alone — all that Thing —
I feel man tender radiance at Heart between
breast and belly, that physical place
where the Self urges — delicate sensation
//
must not moralize. From my breast to yours a
skinny birthday ray.
—New York, ca. October 1964
Published in: Tambimuttu, ed., Festschrift for Marianne Moore’s Seventy Seventh Birthday (Tambimuttu and Mass, ca. April 1965), p. 100.
Don’t know who I am
Whether President of Atlantis
with ruby dancing boys
longhaired smiling at my baldness
and teenaged nymphs
placing small soft hands on my belly fur
Or irresponsible rich prince-garbage man
of wavy quiet boulevards
of pacific water
So this minute I accept my
self
A big hairy Fish
— Cambridge, MA, morning, November 12, 1964
Published in: Fag Rag, no. 10 (Fall 1974), cover.
Albion Albion your children dance again
Jerusalem’s rock established in the basements of satanic mills
In the Sink, stone basement of City
Vibrations of Vox electronic shudder thru brick & flesh,
Children beautifully collared and sleeved, with tapered
silk dungarees,
each pubescent body thin & handsome shaking his hips,
each darling daughter alone on the concrete snapping
her fingers —
The longhair guitarist snarls into a silver microphone
& builds the drum beat to a heavy charge
and screams on the high note — a circle
of flesh is formed
he screams claps and shudders, a circle of
flesh dances round,
six boys and two girls, shuffling left
shuffling right hey hey,
shuffling left shuffling right the Yoruba
dance step come back to Mersey’s Shores —
I stop writing and move my hips —
the Circle is
Complete.
—England, ca. May–June 1965
Published in: Pete Morgan ed., C’Mon Everybody (Corgi Books, 1971), p. 39.
And the plane bobs
back & forth like
a boat at Kennedy
asphalt Space Station
glass buildings,
Taking off from Earth, to fly
the day after Stevenson did die
heart attacked on Grosvenor
Square’s July sunset
leafy calm.
And I —
‘Om Om Om’ etc —
repeat my prayers
after devouring the NY Post
in tears —
The radars revolve in their Solitude —
Once more o’er these states
Scanning the cities and fields
Once more for the Rockies, to look
down on my own spermy history —
Once more the roar of Life Insurance
murmuring in the empty plane
5 hrs 20 min glimpse
The most beautiful Mantra, ‘Hari
Om Namo Shivaye —’
And the vibration of Shiva
in my belly merges
with the groan of machine
flying into milky sky —
If we should crash the flops of bloody
Skin won’t be singing
that sweet song —
Once more the green puddles of
moss in the messy grey bay
once more wingtip lifting to the sun
& whine of dynamos in the
stunned ear,
and shafts of light on the page
in the airplane cabin —
Once more the cities of cloud
advancing over New York —
Once more the houses parked like used
cars in myriad row lots —
I plug in the Jetarama Theater
sterilized Earphones —
THE RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES!
We’re above the clouds! The
Sunlight flashes on a giant
bay!
Earth is below! The horns of
Siegfried sound gigantic in
my ear —
The banks of silver clouds like mountain
ranges
I spread my giant green map
on the air-table —
The Hudson curved below to the
floor-drop of the World,
Mountain range after mountain range,
Thunder after thunder,
Cumulus above cumulus,
World after world reborn,
in the ears with the Rhine
Journey brasses —
Spacey Sublime
charges of Aether and Drumbeat
Ascending & Descending
the Empty Aeternitas, free —
Click! over upper NY State
a witty guitar bumps with
announcer! oops Peter Sellers
sounds breathing in ye ear
‘The Fleshpots! The Muckrakers!’
The little silver cow clouds flow
eastward under the wing,
the horizon’s a blue mug, there’s
green furze of forest naked &
unpioneered with little
strings of highway & houses
brown pendant —
Lakes with little bungalows —
Once more it’s summer and the folks at
ease by their pastoral garages
reading the Journal American
Headline screams
100,000 more U S Troops to Vietnam
Adlai Flopped Dead Of Heart Attack On Sidewalk
and a cloverleaf to transport the family
past the Electronic Gasworks —
‘Tis the LSD in the balmy upstate
Breeze seeping from Underground
Factory banks —
Switch the channel!
Surf music, oolee!
the moons, all seven of them
rising over the Mauna Loas
of my Grammar School Decade —
Orange moons, green moons,
blue moons, purple moons,
white moons sinking under wan waves,
Black moons over the lower
East Side
Red moons over China —
Skipping along one by one,
bouncing over the cragged horizon
of Jupiter thru the
clip clop ethereal violin strings
and the violas running thru my
solar plexus,
they’re skipping down the
Hollywood streets in duck pants
and 1940s nylon skirts —
It’s total Idiocy! a new song
from the tragic Fiji Island
love affair, a 30 year old
teenager weeping into her brassiere,
her boyfriend’s just sailed off
for Korea and left her
sobbing with orgasms
from the Bowery in W W I.
descending Melachrino
— Ugh!
In certain moods it cd / be
seductive, over the
wingtip it’s a Mediterranean
Blue approaching Cleveland (?)
hung with puffclouds &
Hawaiian guitars shining in
the sunlight —
A children’s show! over the
low Catskills! Speaking in
a monstrous little voice,
Pyramus & Thisbe — Up here? —
The Lion’s part, ‘you may do
it extempore for it is nothing but
roaring’ —
Distracted from her ‘wide body
in the rain’ — I gotta smoke
some Hashish in the bathroom.
‘With impish glee, changes the
head of Bottom into a donkey’ —
and the bottom hills are garden
green stretched all ways
with scratch-brown patchy
valley runnels —
Appears a tray with Old Fashioned!
I’ll be drunk before this idiocy’s over!
//
Finished the salad and daydreamed of war
and entered the air above checkered farmlands
to Lake Erie —
I disappeared in a cloud of smoke
in the plastic lavatory,
flushing my breath
down the maelstrom in the toilet —
hours and hours to go o’er America
and beef being served above the white
carpet-clouds —
A fucking police state! I
feel at bay, in mid-air!
‘Breaking’ the ‘Law’ — dread
in the breast guilt in
the head, as I punched the
odorous green soap spigot to perfume
the washbowl & drown
the sweet Eastern smell
I carried —
Now I’ll make that thornful pilgrimage
on feet of meat & bone across that
land I see stripped
& ruled below my
magic carpeted-cabin.
Another sip of old fashioned!
I’ll go to jail down there, heart
because love’s in my hands,
buttocks kissed in the Rockies,
but because this dreamy muzaked
liquored luxurious air-ride’s
Euphoria’s no heaven
If it costs blood-flaps on the smooth
hairless skin of high cheeked
Vietnamese teenagers.
Everybody forgets who’s body
suffers the physical pain of Orders
undreamt in these High Air
Conditioned modern Powers.
Bam! Brahms brasses bang bright bombs
down over Ohio’s highways
I eat meat and a pea
Klemperer changes to Dance of
the Seven Veils, the Head
of John America cut off
will be presented: Coffee —
And other Channels
Keep pushing Rock & Roll
Bottom on Shakespeare, Hallelujah
Waikiki, Bedtime Story,
Decline of the West Frug,
They’ll even begin the movie
I finish my cheesecake —
Anything to keep me from looking down
on that innocent vastitude
Bottomed with Earth speckled
with townships houses like
white dots, park centers,
Man has overtaken his universe,
says the music, and pictures
of Mars are expected when
I set my sneakers on Land —
Beethoven proclaims ethereal Joy!
Strauss is sadder by 2 centuries
and still the longing strain
Screams in my ears from
middleeurope Concert Halls
I do declare that I am God!
I do declare by my beard & fame
that I will die!
I do declare war on Satan!
I do declare I am willing to
take the glory death on
my hideous stomach
and sing my Prophesy before
the Nations! —
ye stuffed with vengeance!
Hark ye Angel Recordings! Hark
ye Joel Sebastian!
May I ask ye Sir Army, whom
ye hope to Kill?
Hark ye Chicago, the time for
Earth’s Revolution’s here!
Hark ye hopeless lovers, thine own
sweet will be done!
As Huncke came despairing Eastward
from this blue vast lake,
What misery has been created
to drown the joyful chant
of all our souls?
Oh great bend of shore, the men
on thee too many,
Chicago flowing with
red smoke
Pouring out hatred of Communism
It’s you angry Hell Hounds
who have created Stalin and
his 15,000,000 murdered
Slavic hysterics —
and your weak suited newsmen
and your Hearst Bank Mind
that has pushed the Communist
party to murder
your own asshole!
It’s your bombs over Korea, it
is your fire in Vietnam, it
is your shooed diplomat
across his desk that has lied
like a Communist bureaucrat
when the order came to cease the
penetration of the flesh with
sharp instruments —
Wagner rides again! Hark
Ye, Ministers of Power and
ye Presidents of America
Ye Premiers of vast China
and ye Dalai Lamas of
Tibet —
Hark ye balding soldiers
reading Mainliner
on the jetplane speeding
thru the Wagner Dooms
above these blue
atomic waters and
Scratched terrain
Towers —
At this moment there is a skeletal
man lying on the leafshit cobbles
of Dasawamedh Ghat,
At this moment by our will a
child is beaten in the balls by
a mad communist lieutenant
in an Albanian Phnom-penh —
At this moment Joe Christ Screams
and falls raving on the
neck of a homosexual in Hué —
He bites his neck, he kisses,
he sucks the blood of the corpse —
At this moment a symphony of screams
arises in Uruguay as the riot
is ‘quelled’ by teeth-bash,
At this moment bombs on Barcelona burst
At this moment the charming children
of Joliet cower in Detention,
planning raids on weak villages
where Me-Kong hath sprouted —
I prophesy thee death, Rock Island
lined with white bungalows —
for thy mean farm’s television
only communication to Saigon —
A bank of white cloud advances
as I advance on the Xylophones —
Bongo Rock! Nigeria advances
with clouds! Earth is
Hidden in white fleece
as the drums batter in Mechanic invisibility —
We’re all out west, the squares
of perfect farmland, introduced
by Thelonious Monk Off Minor —
which penetrates these grouped hives
of suburbia diminutive on the Planet —
That Classical channel always
resounds thru hemispheres of
Empty Becoming,
Being filled with drumbeats and total
orchestra shaking Ascensions
Crane’d’ve come to Forever
If he could —
Over Indiana, the flutes —
Over Iowa and Omaha
A technicolor picture begins
on channel one — Elec
tronic Bee music.
The great steel safe door
crashes shut.
The buzzing sciencefiction
lights & gauges ascend like
Brahms didn’t —
A new man is born —
The police answer the telephone —
CIA looks at its wristwatch —
They leave the atomic testing area
Goodnight Doctor! —
The glass door opens automatically,
a wolf runs round the barbed
wire, it’s not state prison,
it’s a scientific laboratory.
Paid for by Hollywood US Govt.
Your own taxes Dearie, it’s
Y O U
Mr Electronics Nightclub
totally disconnected on yon farmhouse
in mid afternoon amid the
peaceful buzzing of the cows —
that created this faraway red bongo
music issuing from tank eyes
on the screen — your desire
by the boathouse.
A yacht on the screen in color
with a gangster spy conversation
‘outspoken on the immorality of war’
‘superb loan operator’ …
Actually on this screen a confrontation
a pacifist (who’ll turn out
to be a murderous spiderman?)
‘about the most secret chemical
warfare station on this hemisphere.’
‘Reagan has been murdered and
Dr. Baxter has vanished’ —
So it’s not my paranoia
as I ride over these peaceful green
silent squares of Anonymous
Stevenson birthstate —
The movie on this airplane is projecting
the same angst as my hashish
bathroom —
So I share in this vast fantasy
which rises like poison gas
from the man-wormed farmlands
approaching Missouri River —
‘There’s something beyond the Botulinus —
Indestructible,’
our fantasies’ guineapig doom —
The germ of Death loosed
on Earth —
The sacred drawer opened
The Satan Bug
Disappeared!
//
Oh heaven what have we come to
up here looking down on
ourselves,
man’s consciousness is split
out of his self —
‘Have they
told you
just what
this new
Virus
will do?’
‘Paranoids … they’re very
brilliant the most of them
— my choice a Messiah’
as the ‘obey or else’
culprit who stole the
Satan Bug.
Shit the movie’s attacking
us Messiahs.
Not in this consciousness can I
resolve the confusion of Syntax.
Thin veil above the land,
the dotted grid of planet smoke —
above the rills’ erosions on
(I’m smoking Cancers)
This hashi is depressing,
Or else the mind I’m in,
or else the plane I sit within,
or else the movie croaking in
the loudspeaker,
or else America itself
that made the mind movie airplane
national Paranoia.
‘Who is this? Who is this!’ on
the telephone.
‘We have to get
everyman in the country to find him!’
And westerly the land’s become
Dry brown — and mottled
with Glacier tracks streaming
South — Epochs of
Paranoia have come & gone,
The Great White Ice skidded
its way
rippling the terrain like
wind over Summer water,
the bemedalled soldier lights
another cigarette —
and now it’s flat land and exact
Squares of Arnold’s fishing property —
//
Invisible police networks are set
up in the movie,
always complaining, always compleynts
Violins piercing the ears —
The Glacial skids
ruining the land for farming
½ million years later —
And the clouds’ve covered the entire
visible earth;
— that was the Platte I
saw before, streaked with Neal;
now great Rockies streaked
with snow —
Remove the earphones at the
climax, undivided attention
to the
patches of summer snow on
the razor hills — a
green valley & its brown road
settled in between
black shoulders —
waves of mountains slant
an inch above the old
human hummingbird hills —
hollows filled with white cold —
misted over by small vast
fog —
So I turn back to the
Satan Bug movie — they’re
in a green Ford riding thru desert Utah —
As we pass the sunny Wasatch
glittering blue south —
Help police! invading a baseball
diamond
to find the Doomsday
Bomb in Los Angeles
‘Power for its own sake!’
Over a grand canyon.
Shake Baby Shake!
‘You’ve got every reason on
Earth to be mad.’
And of course the Beatles
swinging into a Sea of Clouds
‘What this loven man can do,’
Typhoid Mary! We’re
all hypocrites, tell me Why
The Beatles shouldn’t spill the beans
Secret which might
Land them in Bedlam,
instead of Spoleto if
he spoke without
450 corrections.
And if I opened my mouth I’d
be accused of treason in every
direction, high teacup Jazz,
Marxist, Demorep, Castroite, Maoist —
One’d be fallen on and torn to
pieces by Chinese teeth,
American knives, Scouse
bicycle chains, Vedado
cops hairy hands,
Demolished by the Dept. of Social
Undermining, thrown
in Ft Leavenworth, sent
to Siberia, reeducated in
Archangel,
sent to work on a Commune
in the fields beneath
the Potala.
Meanwhile flying over a red
desert, —
Is civilization going to
Blow up?
//
In ten years I’ve climbed over
this sunny windowsill John Wieners
Now from Olympian Heights I look
Down
on the rough giant earth black
Streaks of snow on foreign hills
the vast cloudmass walled
over the South, above
the Impenetrable Blue Space
skied upward
as Brahms crash swirls
round my eardrums,
and what should I prophesy,
Messiah?
The wing tip pierces thru
mist white Brahms —
I must come back to my body.
No more question but the force
of wingtip lifting upward
to reveal the heaven-roof
as music burst
thru the Stereophonic
grey tipped earphones
Vast as the visible
Universe —
//
our desire mounting, past Mars,
our hearts beating a million years,
Otto Klemperer enraged on
the podium,
Salomé dancing again in
the airplane cabin,
Demands of the Beethovenian fist
in the Lightningstorm!
I am that I am,
renewed week after week,
planeride after planeride,
Despair after streetcorner
headache despair.
Joyfully flying to death,
till the atom cellular
consciousness invades
with its cancerous stabs and
flashes of electric chair.
All so solid it can’t even be a
dream
Tho the phantom orgasm
of paraplegics proves
you can come in pure
Consciousness
& spurt your semen all over
painted blue in Lima
while the groin’s dead
limp & wrinkled under
the transparent cellophane
sheets of Experiment.
It’s too sad! It’s too happy!
It’s here, unfolding like
a giant rose,
It changes slow as eternity
shifts, it flies in triumph
thru the western clouds,
it approaches its old
memory city to find
its loves grown old & sane
and its own body middleaged
It flies toward old wrinkled faces,
It’s inexplicable, it rises
Triumphant above the Very
Earth and Screams
in Delight
over
the cumulus clouds.
Fasten your seatbelts in
the Mist!
The violins are ascending in
every direction!
//
‘We have climbed to 35,000 feet!’
The desert flows like a river
thru the mountains passes,
wrinkled like our own faces
above the smooth sand.
Nevada’s rough belly
breathless below!
I’ll get drunk & give no shit,
& not be a Messiah.
and have long talks goofing
with Wieners in Belvedere
by a stinky pond,
drinking Dorian Gray martinis.
And ‘twixt earnest & joke
Enjoyed the Ladeye, John.
We’re stuck in our
Selves.
And who else to be stuck in?
A courteous Astronaut come
down from the Horizon
to gaze in our eyes with patience,
take our hand, and lift it
trembling, to his khaki breast —
Half the visible universe
excluded from this fantasy
but who’s counting?
Olson? Creeley
stumbling over his pecker?
Me, murmuring, what a beautiful
big pecker you got to a
pimply 16 year old boy
with his pants down on
my pallet,
who talked all night about his
intellectual disorders
till my belly softened & I kissed
him on his shirt?
Beethovenian Climaxes Impossible?
Wagnerian Valkyric rides
Immaterial?
Salomé dances too Incredible?
What’re we groveling in but the
most magnificent Aluminum Heaven?
complete with transcontinental
cloudcities —
Complete with million horsepower
Jetroar astounding to any
pre war Daedalus —
Clouds racing eastward, the
plane lowering slowly thru
the veils, over the
Down
into the inhabited shores,
the myriad minute boxes stacked
in rows, curved in clusters
planted like vast letters in
the giant flats
above the empty silent Space-
hangar in South Peninsula —
Over the Bay, pointing toward
Golden Gate & Tamalpais
Home,
to the weak sad destiny
of aging companion selves
trembling above the red broadcasting
towers,
Down to the brown rippled
water, past yacht basin parks
past outdoor movies empty
sunlight glaring off the
white billboards,
OM, Down to the
ground roar tremble
along the white line
Jetbrakes roaring,
Brahms screaming
Symphony concluding
down the runway
to the metalvoiced
Terminal,
United.
—Finit 7:30 p.m., July 15, 1965
Published in: City Lights Journal, no. 3 ([January 1] 1966), pp. 108–28.
Entering Kansas City high
thin trees lining the highway wire balcony
over the Gulf, lit with orange flares
in the smoke in front of the green signs
where all-night factories pin-point grey-clouded space illumined
blue bright craned robot lamps.
Street after street each valley dark at midnight
rooms and attics lit, hills banded with caterpillars
of street illumination
high-tension wires across the railroad track mid-
city
Kansas and Missouri meeting
7th Street North Business District fine
black mist
winking antenna
lights Sensitive City, ooh!
Crost the wheeled bridges
by wheat elevators’ rounded parade
red U.S. Mail box blue-legged on the
sidewalk
a huge truck stopped at a red light
roar of jet harshness on the sky ear
along the road by Smitty’s Bait Minnows
Eat:
Air Reduction, Ohio Chemical
another viaduct above lone railroad
track assemblage of switch and
switch-light shack,
underneath river highway
lights
reflected doubled
along the curved level silver-black water,
the fear
of the police state under the bridge,
tail lights speeding up the alley
under the super highway overpass
concrete-vaulted
an instant later, the iron-ringed auto bridge and
sentinel stacks lit again with their feeding
ladders aluminum’d
Up the shining asphalt, lit-blue
outskirts’ roads and trailers parked camping
row on row under the hill.
Rainbow Boulevard at night Kansas U Medical
Center
Greek column’d, mid-American brick
Jewel
Restaurant, with a little church with a
cross held
and the State Drive-in Bank, Safeway
empty-lit Brain-blood volume increased
stopped in a side street Club 423 red signs.
—Midnite, February 12, 1966
Published in: Great Society, no. 1 (1966), p. 10.
Cafeteria’s metallic counter, iced tea & a blue check,
a yellow haired baby long tressed kissing father’s shaven
cheek,
fluorescent ceiling re-mirrored thru plate glass
over parkinglot darkness,
Melancholy to sit here middle-aged
with worn sleeve & hairy hand
exposed, alone.
—June 8, 1966
Published in: Allen Ginsberg, Scrap Leaves (Poet’s Press, 1968), p. 7.
How many people have been busted?
How many people, their doors broken down,
dragged weeping in their nightgowns
to the station?
How many boys been slapped around
by midnight cops downtown in
the colored section?
How many musicians pushed out of jobs?
How many students kicked out of school?
How many businessmen hiding paranoiac behind their
doors afraid of disgrace
by narco bulls
hiding behind guns and badges
with their ignorance and misinformation?
How many cats shaken down beaten up &
asked for payoffs by Treasury fuzz?
How many pounds of pot seized & sold on black market
by cops?
How many scholars and doctors pressured,
warned, blackmailed, prosecuted?
How many newspapers radio stations bombarded with
dopefiend T-man propaganda?
What divine congressional investigation will ever undo
all these decades of calumny, injustice,
brainwash, jail?
— 1966
Published in: High Times, no. 225 (May 1994), p. 36.
Crescent faces row-tiered hanging
balconied face the great red
Striped flag podium microphonic reverberation
from one body outward
breathed painfully from rich suited abdomen
— mouth opening circle of white teeth — bells
clanging
Taillights along the Nashville city edge —
In the leather car, acrid perfume
sucked in the lung,
Majesty of Speech and Chant, on the lawn
Under the streetlight
dry grass crowded with sweating college shirted blond
& forehead-starred’ Semite singing —
In the far cities riot under the Spring
moonless midnite Black Power.
—April 8, 1967
Published in: Spectrum, vol. 5, no. 3 (Spring 1967), pp. 24–25.
After Wales Visitacione July 29 1967
The Great Secret is no secret
Senses fit their rosy winds —
Visible is visible, rain mist
curtains wave thru the bearded vale —
Foxgloves erect green buds, mauve
bells droop trembling doubled down
the stem, spiked antennae —
Daisies push their inch of yellow air,
No imperfection on the budded mountain,
valley vegetables tremble, horses dance
in the warm rain
white sheep speckle the mountainside & move eating
green atoms shimmer
in grassy mandalas
Blue atoms shimmer in the sky, grey atoms wet the
Wind’s Kabbalah
A solid mass of Heaven, mist-infused, ebbs thru the
Vale, a wavelet of Immensity lapping gigantic
thru Llanthony Valley
motion at the bottom of the sky,
earth rolls the days, sun hangs
the planet on its lightbeams
Mists drawn from the ocean & driven like lambs thru
the
meadows of Wye to these mounts, to the
edges of London —
pheasants croak flapping up from Fern steep
meadow —
Heaven shifting its cloudy floor on the
million feet of daisies
Each flower Buddha-eye, buds mirroring eyeball
manufactured many
Sat on a rock crosslegged in dusk rains
slit eyed, breath steady, mind moveless,
My own breath
trembles the white daisies by the roadside,
The breath of Heaven and my own breath
symmetric,
central emptiness manifests body
giant valley veined with tree-lined
canals manufactured over centuries,
sprouty bushes fringing households walls, hill
breast nippled with hawthorn,
belly meadows haired with fern —
Same breath that waved in the valley
drawn into my belly, slowly breathed
— Sounds of Aleph & Aum
thru forests of gristle, my skull
& Lord Hereford’s Knob an equal windy place —
to my navel the
same breath as breathes thru Capel-y-ffin,
All Albion is one!
Stokely Carmichael flying on the same wind to Cuba
angry at the windy thistle’s silly thorns?
News of the World ploughs in abstract fields
to harvest money not physical potatoes in silence,
& the physical sciences and in ecology, that is
the wisdom of earthly relationships,
mouths and eyes interknit
hoof, wing & leaf
bearing the giant body forward 10 centuries in
Llanthony,
orchards of mind language manifest human —
cows and sheep pass by twos to death
horses born for cancer of the snout —
I lay on a hill and entered Wales in Visitacione nameless
bard on her hill thru Blake’s eye,
Wordsworth’s particular thistle,
Stare close, no imperfection in the grass, symmetric
Maya
covering moist ground, smell of brown Vagina,
harmless.
The whole mass of Heaven balanced on a grassblade,
Gigantic sun at the end of heaven
& the lightest rose at the cottage door
weighed equal, on the exquisite scales
trembling everywhere
in balance the death of a brown grassblade, the
birth of a soft mushroom
Sheep look up revolving their jaws with empty eyes,
pacific gods
little gods that look at me curious & keep distant
Creatures revolving thru births and deaths, unharmed
horses in a tiny gigantic vale in Wales.
I am Bard to my own nature nameless as the very Vast I
look at.
Lay down on the warm hillside & groaned release from
my body
sighed thru my breast a great Ooh!
Knelt before the thorn,
a mammal aware in the warm grass that smelled of my
sperm,
mixing my beard with the wet hair
of the mountainside, tasting the violet
hair of the thistle, sweetness.
Lifted my head and groaned.
Water from the sky came making noise, as
I babble to vastness
Earth and sky met and made noise between them
Death’s black angel lifted
white fleshed day in his arm for a joyous kiss — in
the afternoon rain.
— Wales and London, July 29–August 2, 1967
Published in: La Huerta, vol. 1, no. 3 (1973), pp. 57–60.
Baudelaire’s Noctambules
Old Navy, Lipp, street cafes
Crowded chattering
autos exploding on cobblestone
grey St. Germain stone’s stillness
Mabillon broods
with a beard oxygen shadow,
Lovers walk hand in hand with
empty eyes
Beautiful youths grow pimples sleeping
on the Seine with the police
under Notre Dame’s silent
grey lacework —
Sad, as bored Apollinaire gave up
the ghost on Pont Mirabeau
Sad, as Tzara sat at Deux Magots
collating spit-soiled letters
from Artaud
Sad, as Michaux walks solitary
down Rue Segur to the Seine
brooding loveless —
Sad, as the cafes close for
the summer,
Sad, as a decade ago I shopped
with Orlovsky weeping in bed
Gregory upstairs in fury
scribbling American
Burroughs enchambered considering
Silent blues —
Sad, as no poets emerged from
the streets, gaiety eyes
& eyebrows sharp with
new Francs
not old eternity, not old
Sadness of Meat realizing
Frenchness a moment
enthusiastic as the virgin belly of Jean-Arthur
arriving in Paris bedbugged
Screaming in melodious slang —
Merde! Le Con! Salaud! shriek
the bourgeois sharpies with
shaved short hair at the zinc bar,
bored with their jamais & red girls
No music, no magic Vulnerables
in manly wristwatches —
No beautiful faces on these
ancient streets yet —
I’ve been faithful w/ my beard
10 years,
& now arrive in silken gold-crost robe
hair perfumed & long, hero of
my own universe
& sit in the White Queen at 2 A.M.
recalling the ghosts of Paris, of the
50s as Hemingway
in Montana lamented a thought for a night
of the Great Lesbians
shining in 1924 surrounding Cloiserie
de Lilas —
Bill Myself Peter & Gregory the
angels of pain a decade
incognito
The barman’s bald, I’m bald,
& Gregory’s broke in New York —
More ghosts as sad as ourselves will
pass St. Sulpice or gaze
over the chimneyed roofs & mansards
curved along the Seine
Wondering what magic of Paris
was promised, what charm
that now’s the fat barman spilling
blue-labeled lemonade
over the stainless steel drain.
—Paris, 2:20 a.m., August 25, 1967
Published in: Big Sky, no. 10 (1976), pp. 130–131.
Dreamed, that I met Leroi
his American speech slightly thickened &
slurred from learning Yoruba
& thinking in Afric syntax —
We lay together, our
legs wrapped & twined round
each other’s bodies, soft cheeks
together, I had difficulty making
out his words, and though he
was not aloof and I thought
he spoke against my Jews,
flashed thru my mind to
tell him this fault, I
listened instead, and sad
said “What will happen
to me Leroi? I may
perish for all this War
in America” — He lay his
head next to mine & held
me close, dawning on me
his tragic fear & sympathy
all along despite what
the newspapers said — But
dont remember his dream
& his body brown & warm as
we pressed our breasts together,
I felt his hard on at first,
which went away as we
clung closer. He wanted
to protect me in the War
storm, but was unable
for the great force that was
upon us, of strangeness and
alien white mind in America,
rising from Iowa, Kansas,
Nebraska, Wisconsin, Brooklyn.
— Cedar Falls, Iowa, February 23, 1968
Published in: Diane di Prima, ed., War Poems. (The Poets Press, 1968), pp. 37–38.
Government Anarchy prolongs illegal planet war over decades in Viet-nam. Federal Anarchy plunges U.S. cities into violent chaos.
Conscientious objection to war tax payment subsidizing mass murder abroad and consequent ecological disaster at home will save lives & labor and is the gentlest way of political revolution in America.
If money talks, several hundred thousand citizens refusing tax payments to our War Government will short-circuit the nerve system of our electronic bureaucracy.
—December 16, 1969
Published in: Tax Talk (ca. December 29, 1969), p. 4.