Spring green buddings, white-blossoming trees, Mayday
picnic
O Maypole Kings Krishnaic Springtime O holy Yale
Panther Pacifist Conscious populace awake alert
sensitive tender
children’s bodies — and a ring of quiet Armies around
town —
planet students cooking brown rice for scared
multitudes —
Oh souls all Springtime prays your bodies
quietly pass mantric peace Fest grass freedom thru our
nation
thru your holy voices’ prayers
your bodies here so tender & so wounded with Fear —
Metal gas fear, the same fear whales tremble war
consciousness
Smog city — Riot court paranoia — Judges, tremble!
Armies weep your fear —
O President guard thy sanity
Attorneys General & Courts obey the Law
and end your violent War Assemblage
O Legislatures pass your Creeds of order
& end by proper Law illegal war!
Now man sits Acme Conscious over his gas machine
covered Planet —
Springtime’s on, for all your sacred & satanic magic!
Ponds gleam clouded heaven — Black voices chant thru
car radio
Oh who has heard the scream of death in jail?
Who has heard the quiet Maytime Om beneath wheel–
whine and drumbeat
In railyards on wire tower’d outroads from New Haven?
—New Haven, CT, May 1, 1970
Published in: Strike Newspaper (May 2, 1970), p. 3.
For the Soul of the Planet Is Wakening
For the soul of the planet is
Wakening, the time of dissolution
of material forms is here, our
generation’s trapped in Imperial
Satanic cities & nations, & only
the prophetic priestly consciousness
of the bard — Blake, Whitman
or our own new selves — can
steady our gaze into the
fiery eyes of the tygers of the
Wrath to come
—before September 21, 1970
Published as a broadside: For the Soul of the Planet Is Wakening (Desert Review Press, 1970).
Hiss, gaslamp —
Night wind shakes leaves.
*
Hemp smoke in wood hall,
Kerosene leaked at lampbase
knocked off desk.
*
Yellow light on knotted wall,
Aladdin chimney, brass
wick cutter, pencil bottle
plastic passport, staple shine.
*
Who am I? Saliva,
vegetable soup,
empty mouth?
*
suck in, hold, exhale —
light as ashes.
*
Eye lids heavy, dreamed yesterday dawn
kissing the two eyed horse.
—Xmas Meditation on Milarepa, 1970
Published in: Coyote’s Journal, no. 9 (1971), back cover. In addition the fourth and fifth parts have been collected in Ginsberg’s Collected Poems, but not the other four parts.
hearing Così Fan Tutte
scratches his nose.
— ca. 1970
Published in: Clothesline, no. 2 (1970), p. 36.
Gregory Corso’s genius despised,
Muses bored,
Mediocrity is prized —
Bullshit the award.
Hum! Hum! Hum!
— ca. early 1971
Published in: Washington Post (March 3, 1971), p. C1.
Everybody dies the day after they graduate High School
—August 30, 1971
Published in: Embers (Wayne Valley Senior High School, 1972), p. 134.
… Blue Starfish
Violet minnow,
Sea cucumber
Coral tide …
—Fiji, March 3, 1972
Published in: Allen Ginsberg, First Blues (Full Court Press, 1975), p. 35.
Chugging along in an old open bus
past the green sugarfields
down a dusty dirt road
overlooking the ocean in Fiji
thinking of your big MacDougal street house
& the old orange peels
in your mail-garbage load
smoggy windows you clean with a
squeegee —
—Fiji, March 3, 1972
Published in: Allen Ginsberg, First Blues (Full Court Press, 1975), p. 34.
Inscribed In George Whitman’s Guest Register
Cold January ends snowing on sidewalks,
Millions of kids cry & sing in Lowell,
Massachusetts is full of bearded pubescent saints,
Notre Dame’s lit up white as Whitman’s beard,
I got a $1 wool suit from Salvation Army and a tie
flowered from 1967 and a new round watch
& no beard, & Gregory a leopard spotted coat
on his back returned your Pomes Pennyeach —
talking of Jonathan Robbins the punk Jersey Rimbaud,
& Brion’s operation, & who’s been in & out the
bookshop
— This morning acid wakefulness overlooking the
Seine
Gregory claimed death’s democracy while the river
streets
floated in Eternity eyeballed from the balcony, solid
evanescent apartments under a grey familiar sky —
Back and forth to Paris, utopian socialists’ beards grow
longer
and whiter — someday the whole city’ll be white as
Notre
Dame’s snow-illumined facade, George’s goatee, this
page
—Shakespeare & Co. Bookshop, Paris, ca. 10 a.m.,
January 31, 1976
Unpublished.
Noisy beets boiling in the pressure cooker
Gas mantle mirrored white gold in the window
Answering letters, September first midnight
— Cherry Valley, NY, September 1, 1973
Published in: Bombay Gin, no. 7 (Summer/Fall [1980] 1979), p. 82.
A mountain outside
a room inside
a skull above
Snow on the mountain
flowers in the room
thoughts in the skull.
— Teton Village, WY, November 1973
Published in: Poetry Project Newsletter, no. 11 (January 1, 1974), p. 6.
You’re going to grow old, white haired withered gasping
stretched on sick-room bed helpless conscious oxygen
tent paralyzed
Several days secure immobile protected in coma
Fortunate karma, family billions, born power wealth
nurses richest doctors & medicines the world
unguents, attendants, gases, needles, morphines private
suites —
Then suddenly realize no help — coma spreading thru
brain nerves
— your power Powerless, your money sand, dreamtime,
illusion
Lonely as an arthritic-handed charwoman washing the
floor in your skyscraper —
You stare at the ceiling and disappear, board rooms and
Arabian derricks vanish with your extinction
Remember pain suffering you caused others Power
Head!
Stop & Frisk laws on your deathbed conscience! No-
Knock you introduced the Nation 1963
Anyone’s head bashed to the door — police in his own
home no warning —
fragile in hospital sheets remember your tough-
mouthed Violence Governor
Built insubstantial buildings highways drained liquid
chemicals
from earth to spread over unsuspecting mortals
poisoning their air
Crazy cars roam the landscape lonesome scared of your
police — You worshipped petroleum bank’s
money monopoly with your brothers —
Your anger ordered massacre the guards and prisoners
Attica Prison yard
How you hid in your Albany mansion reading papers on
your lap
willing Mass Murder in Jail while junkies screamed Stop
their Torture
How you screamed back a year later in front of Labor
Unions to send junkies to death!
Yea you money addict power fixer petroleum pusher
grow whitehaired sickened frail someday, body pained,
gasping for morphine
on deathbed remember Ego’s actions & hatreds
Strangle to death as I will Governor, no guards protect
you
Die blind wondering where the President went —
Reborn a red necked cursing gas station attendant on
thruways paved in Hell
Because you pounded the table mandatory death
penalty for junkies 1973
You energy-junkie Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller be reborn
in your own image.
—January 28, 1974
Published in: Seven Days (October 5, 1974), p. 7.
Eyes Full Of Pitchpine Smoke
(by Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder)
Eyes full of pitchpine smoke
Ears full of frogs
How can I keep my books?
Pitchpine smoke
drives mosquitoes crazy
they all go over to the Greensfelders
Bookkeeping in the moonlight
— frogs count
my checks.
—Kitkitdizzie, CA, June 16, 1974
Published in: End, no. 9 (1975), p. 24, and the third section
“Bookkeeping in the moonlight …” is in Ginsberg’s Collected Poems as one of “Sad Dust Glories.”
Freedom of speech
Oh yeah, scared of the cops
freedom of speech
I’m an average citizen
scared of the cops
freedom of speech
I’m an average citizen
scared of the cops
That’s my attitude
That’s my attitude too
That’s my attitude
That’s my attitude too
That’s my attitude
That’s my attitude too
—Boulder, CO, ca. June 1975
Unpublished.
Nothing lonelier
than on a Greyhound
crossing Donner Pass
Superhighway 80
thru Truckee to Reno
age 20,
rolling on concrete
past pines icy
Castle Peak.
— ca. 1975
Published in: Allen Ginsberg, Sad Dust Glories (Workingmans Press, September 18, 1975), p. 3.
Imagination
(by Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg)
Magnifying &
transmitting
unworded
eyebrain
on command
manikins
from the compartment
wallpaper
the cockpit
with star-come
Megagalactic
Broadways
delight
Buddha-junkies
Muhammad-Ali-fight
Wipe
the muleteer
shitface
off the Zoroastrian-mount
Fly
//
mechanics
into the see-mind
Fish
with eyes like mine
for aery sharks
no DNA
remembers
Vivid
pilots
cosmosian-skinned
land
—Paris, January 30, 1976
Published in: Beatitude, no. 29 ([August] 1979), p. 50.
Garbage lurks by the glass windows
Two guys light a match
Smoke rolls over Eighth Street where
Spade queens walk lipsticked looking for a taxi
Spoon out their handkerchiefs
Coughing against the black dust rising up
Out of Imiri Baraka’s latest volume of poems
The Whole Earth Catalogue up in flames
The water pumps methods for making home-made
yogurt
The crackling red fires running over the San Francisco
Communal catalogue
Herbert Marcuse exploding in flames
Howl, fiery volume after volume
Over the precipice
Fire spreads through the Skira catalogues
The Rembrandt canvas girl
Brown holes appear in priceless Van Goghs, Roman
statuaries
Smoke covered smudged Venus de Milo
//
Up on the front in embers Andy Warhol’s Philosophy From
A To B
Tennessee Williams autobiographical life in ashes
William Carlos Williams’ poetry follows him
To a white dusty grave
Shakespeare himself leaves not a rack behind
—New York City, ca. May 6, 1976
Published in: Villager, vol. 44, no. 20 (May 13, 1976), p. 2.
Surrounded by transmission wires
and tombstones with old names
the sound of trains and auto tires
protested modern claims —
Weeping a little, earth thrown down
on your coffin lid
oblivion you called your town
Newark wherein you hid
Came out to see your fresh dug grave
red earth, as rounded Rose
the family gather’d, what could save
your memory, what we chose.
I knew the earth that covered you
was your own choice of bed
that year had water often true
of the highway we drove that led
To a small graveyard outside Newark
where remnants gather’d round
families that remember’d the odd quirk
That made you sing in sound
//
Silent movie cousins
Grandfathers whose faces mime
grandchildren by the dozens.
Brothers tearless in the mist
Sisters silent in fog
Nephews whose dead lips were kissed
gold haired children in smog
Poets of the days of youth
Passed, and were forgotten
Brothers in law dead in the booth
of Belmar’s wharves gone rotten
Sisters uncles cousins passed
Friends from olden days
Drawers of the laundry cart,
Drugstore brothers ways —
Now I am fifty, olden days
echo like a chord
familiar from old phonographs
or photographs of yore —
Tears, tears and weeping thoughts
Sighs sighs & tears
as your coffin steers
Its way down underneath the earth,
down below life and breath
Form is emptiness and birth
Shows my Father’s death
It’s midnite on your burial day
I sit at your old desk
rhymes running thru my head that lay
a music on your breast —
Legs once strong were withered, now
can’t support the player
Silent still and settling underground
layer under layer etc.
To capture all that golden look
Naomi gave to you
& you gave to your own true love
would be something olden new
Clear, sight and yellow sun
air, trees and moon
Shine still over Paterson
as when you were young
//
Thru the farmer’s fields
Newark to Paterson you’d pass
Industry’s new wheels
Now silence sits and buzzes in
The house you lived in long
a silent candle in the living room
burns all this one night long
Edith sleeps and sighs and dreams
I sit up late at night
Heavy hearted that my youth
and yours, are gone from sight
Candle that with yellow flame
keeps the watch for me
while you spend your first night at home
in new eternity
— ca. July 9, 1976
Unpublished.
Kidneystone Opium Traum
(for Michael Brownstein)
Its always acting like that beginning
you get in your car & drive in the opposite direction
lock bumpers with a truck going backward
Get out & taxi to the railroad station
Its bombed out & empty in Munich or its Albany
Suspicious of the train schedule suspicious of hot dogs
Suspicious of this suspicious, of that, you take a plane
to Hawaii and act suspicious at the baggage check-in
You delay the flight an hour arguing with the pilot
Suspicious the plane will take you by mistake to Buenos
Aires
You want to go to Hong Kong but don’t know the way
By foot impossible, by boat too long, by super jet
suspiciously easy. Burroughs always wanted a slow boat
to China but you didn’t, you’re suspicious of all forms of
transportation —
Cash in your ticket let’s go home, let’s stay where we
are —
I’m suspicious of any move you’ll make
—Boulder, CO, ca. August 3, 1977
Published in: Portage (1978), p. 36.
Homage to Paris At The Bottom Of The Barrel
(for Philip Lamantia)
Take your god Shuddering morsel
Take delicious Lipstick
God white pussycat
Tiger moon dropped on the roof
Your god Snowflake
Gold ears Celluloid eyelids
Plaster Paris Poet bust
Take your god unreasonable Mamma
Pythagorean spaghetti
Your god oregano Henna
Hermetic multiplication of red Semen
Like solid matter kidneystones
Banana republic grammarschool silkstocking muscles
Your god Spittle-heart God atombomb
Crashed thru time like an umbrella
Descending from the Chrysler Building
O Chorusgirl God
Chant Radio City Music Hall forever
Hula hula purple gardens green sunsets
Volcanic ash sliding off your skull
With noise like a wet apple core falling into the
wastepaper basket.
— ca. 1977
Published in: David Applefield, et al., Fire Readings (Frank Books, 1991), p. 133.
Belly up and Jack me off
Harder Harder suck me off
Bebe I’m old I’m old
I can’t come I want you to see me
straining naked Help me Help me
come Please I can’t you make me
This is me This is me ah this is me —
I want you to suck my thick cock
yes this is me Please this is me
—March 6, 1978 1:30 a.m.
Published in: United Artists, no. 12 (January 1981), p. 101.
Verses Included In Howl Reading Boston City Hall
… when the blonde & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword
who were busted for eye-contact in the Boston Public
Library men’s room
when a handsome youthful policeman flashed his Irish
loins & winning smile over urinal, & then
exhibited his badge
who were arrested for teenage porn ring headlines in
Boston Globe when the octogenarian bachelor
D.A. got hysterical screaming through his iron
mask at election time
lusting lusting lusting for votes, for heterosexual
ballotboxes’ votes,
who arrested bus driving fairies & put them in an iron
cage, & yelled at little homeless boys
& made them sing and dance in tears to please the
plainclothes courts
& fink on lonesome middleaged bearded lovers
kneeling to worship kid Dionysus in Revere
Lord of orgies, ecstasies, poolhalls & pinball machines
set up by Syndicate near the old amusement
park freakshow fronting Atlantic Ocean …
—Boston, April 1978
Published in: Fag Rag, no. 23/24 (Fall 1978), p. 1.
Things I gotta do
I remembered
when I sat down to meditate
after weeks wandering streets of iron thoughts
I have to go back to the universe
Buddha imagination
Practice path, four foundations and castle of thousand
days mental breath exercise
But on this desk Friday and Saturday New York Times
its Monday noon’s lost news
Seven Days the pacifist radicals’ temporary magazine
St. Marks Church Poetry Newsletter, the Society of Useful
Manufacturers Newsletter
and poems from Paterson’s souls born after the acid
wars
Does Murray Kempton’s book Briar Patch really prove
that the FBI’s Gene Roberts started the New
York chapter of the Black Panthers?
This Gene Roberts witnessed Malcolm X’s assassination
on stage up in Harlem as his bodyguard
a government agent
Scott Nearing approved Stalin
but his Making Of A Radical, enlightened my momma’s
history
hereby also Irving Rosenthal’s letter from anonymity
the True Levelers tilling common land in Cobham,
England April 1, 1649
“Digge up, manure and sowe corn upon George Hill in
Surrey”
Free, Irving Rosenthal proclaims
As I look out my $300 a month apartment window in
New York at TV antennae under gray sky on
the Lower East Side
I can’t write this poem I got too much to do
Of Time and The River and The Web In The Rock on my desk
old second hand books I found
got to read it before I die
The Yipster Times, old police state news,
David Erdman’s Symmetries of the Song of Los
a paper on my bookshelf a year
and my Musiphonic radio which once stood on my
father’s desk
Mahler’s symphonies flying through the air
my dirty red bandana needs washing, windows too
six foot bookshelf of unread Buddhist classics
Lotus Sutra and haikus, telephone ringing
young scholar ear waiting my attention
desk with 365 unanswered letters
undigested news clips to file under CIA FBI Cosa Nostra
dope surveillance lies & truths in my cabinet
file drawers
ten years journals now typed
I haven’t edited the misspellings and blanks the typist
left
anti-nuclear protest decade now
consider a factory loft on Mill Street, Paterson
can I go home again?
A farm to till and pay nut trees for next generation
Thin out my bedroom library
Keep Plato, Prajnaparamita, David Cope and Gampopa
Visit my stepmother Mother’s Day
A brother to cheer
Nephews to make money for and rescue from the
mental bomb
best friend to call, his day off Monday
A poetry secretary to instruct correspondence
a poem on junk mail to recall
I’ll get up now
breakfast and talk to George Balmer before I xerox my
Blake music sheets
edit Shambhala’s Talking Poets and read up my file on
nuclear poison.
—early May 1978
Unpublished.
On the Ferris Wheel rising to the full moon
by the canal, looking down on Ocean Grove
over a red-bulb-rooft green-lit carousel, silver Chariot of
Muse with her Lyre, revolving all too fast
through years from 1937 with cousin Claire in Asbury
Park
wandering Sunday morning from Belmar with a few
pennies dimes for tickets in Playland —
the wire-mesh railed cage swinging under a canvas-
flowered awning toward the full moon forty
years later,
a bent hunchback at the gate pulling his iron-rod
handle to bring the iron-spoked circle hung
with pleasure cars to rest.
Whacky shack’s painted toy-wizard witch-monster
window
Machinery’s laughing screaming lifting wooden eyelids
at fair skinned blond boys rubber-bumping electric cars
along a sheet-tin floor,
with trolleypole antennae sliding and sparking across
the silvery ceiling.
I used to ride the skooter with my cousins Clare and Joel
Gaidemack or brother Gene,
cars shocking lightly on the happy floor, wheeling the
turning round the curve, I looked up in the mirror
and saw a bald white bearded man in a white shirt
staring in my eyes —
and entered in the giant wood barrel-form slippery
rolling underfoot reflecting mirrored through
its other end Time Tunnel,
Time in the car with stepmother Edith at the wheel
returning from the shore, the panic of Eternal
space unchanging
through which our phantom bodies pass now highway
grandeur’d under blue sky.
And poor little Clarie’s gone, a ghost in my mind —
walking the big sandy beach, jumping granite boulders
sharp edged on the jetty with
all us who played Jungle Camp in the Belmar weed-
grown empty lot’s leafy bower
before going to Asbury, the Mayfair Theater Sunday see
Paul Muni’s movie Dr. Pasteur.
One family house, sat on the porch at night and beat
away the mosquitoes
near the tiny Playland where Eugene worked, by a 20
foot Ferris wheel & carousel with tiny horses
going round
merrily on 16th Avenue across from ocean’s wide
beach —
Old ladies with rolls of fat round their waists and silk
stockings
on boardwalk benches faced the blue water spread’s
sunny waves —
Ocean side infancy, pails in brown salt puddles of
sandcastles
A thrill at the heart, hearing German Attack Poland
radio, I biked to tell Esther Cohen
or Claire Mann niece of movie mogul Louis B. Mayer
of Metro Goldwyn Mayer owned Mayfair
Theater —
Riding under the full moon on the Ferris Wheel last
night 40 years ago,
grabbing the brass ring from the horse riding up and
down whirling slowly ecstatically to carousel
toot tune
repeated, the floating balance and calm of marijuana
meditation
Now Mindy her second daughter’s alive young
vegetarian eyes
by the ocean at Long Beach, in the run down section
cleaned white in late May shine —
So return through the past to this moment on Route 36
Sandy Hook to Perth Amboy
past Exxon whose gas our car burns the Rockefellers —
David
they say wants to be loved liked respected — as long as
he’s loved and pharmacied —
I was car sick on the bus to Morristown, Naomi in
Greystone that war year? she too afraid of
Hitler —
my first mother a victim of persecution of Jewess crazed
by Earth Electric
Meanwhile I went to the shore every year from 1935 till
World War II
when I went to High School and campaigned for Irving
Abramson for Congress
& lost to Congressman Gordon Canfield Republican
Isolationist
I write newsletters to Paterson papers, thirteen years
old saved vast clipping pix of Hitler and
Hindenburg blow up
Claire whirling away at dances with her boyfriends, a
normal Jewish crowd
that went to showers and proms. When I think of the
bodies chill graves coffins & absence —
Then Claire grew up and got married to Jerry Gorlin
and moved to the ocean library in Rumsen,
NJ —
Cornell Hospital later rosey on the bed, hair cut for
cancer therapy, I gave her a Buddhabook —
Sudden hearted Death, old Claire young cousin Claire
Louis, Rose, and Claire, names returning from Belmar
through Perth Amboy and the Raritan River
Bridge, outlooking Raritan Bay
— distant towers of World Trade Center, passing White
Gas tanks flat on the marshes of Linden
Watercastles and barber-striped transmission towers
electric-armed with wires
& smokestacks smelling industrial not far from Louis
Cracker stacks and flues & ironstairwayed metal tubes
smoking at Elizabeth’s border
& the big brown gas tanks sinking into earth on their
skeleton struts —
Newark airport, insurance buildings at left hand New
York’s skein of towers resting on the right
horizon
Railroad Southern red cars under Jersey City’s red-brick
church, green-copper spiked under blue sky
Look how bright Manhattan! towery below the hill, car
graveyard by the Turnpike,
Higher than Empire State
Mayor Hague’s Hospital, scandals not run properly
my Grandmother didn’t like the way she was
treated.
Past the Exxon sign thru Holland Tunnel’s bathroom-
polished tile
Good old N.Y. cobblestoned and sunny
—May 20, 1978
Published in: American Poetry Review, vol. 8, no. 3 (May/June 1979), p. 26.
A Brief Praise Of Anne’s Affairs
She was born in Greenwich Village
She saw Gregory Corso ambling
by MacDougal Street looking for an angry fix
She has a mother who translates
the Greek poets including Sikelianos
She has affairs with Poets & Poetesses,
Novelists, Bards & Carpenters
She has affairs with international
Shamanic minstrels dancing naked
She has affairs with herself on the side
like anybody else
She sits & meditates & prostrates
She has affairs with books
she writes, publishes, copulates
gives birth to books
She’s been around the world to
Amsterdam and Kathmandu
She comes back & has affairs with
Buddha inside out in 10 directions
She goes away again like a
princess covered
with diamonds & has affairs
with sapphires
emeralds, amber & rubies
She had an affair w/ the ancient
Christian Church St. Marks in the
Bowery lasting a decade till
the church burned down
She has affairs with William S.
Burroughs when he isn’t
looking and when he is
looking
She edits Full Court Books
like a basketball queen
She coordinates the J.K. School
of Disembodied Poetics with
her left pinkie and a
nervous breakdown full
of personal perfumo
She sings Contralto verses
like a 19th century opera
star
She orates her vowels like an
owl, she whistles consonants
like a fragile canary
She flies over her house in
Boulder like an eagle
She’s friends with Andrei
Voznesensky, Chögyam Trungpa
& Bob Dylan
She belongs in the White House
surrounded by coke-sniffing
Vajrayana bureaucrats
She eats she sleeps she shits &
pisses with ordinary mind
She teaches Apprentices
how to listen like Plato
She knocks me out, she thrills
my bones, she supports my
skull with her right hand
She’s the Muse of Naropa
She’s 80 years old in Ted Berrigan’s
whitehaired mind
She’s Anne Waldman
—August 2, 1978
Published in: Possible Flash, no. 1 (1979), pp. 17–18.
Popeye and William Blake Fight to the Death
(by Kenneth Koch and Allen Ginsberg)
[Note: Ginsberg’s lines are in bold.]
Popeye sat upon his chair,
Reading William Blake.
Blake got up and screamed out there,
“This seaman is a fake.”
I as William Blake complained
Of Popeye reading me.
William Blake could not attain
My great Popeye sublimity.
William Blake sat there and stared,
At Popeye’s bulging muscle.
William Blake had never dared,
To engage him in a tussle.
Mary Blake however, sat,
Right next to Olive Oil,
And cooked her spinach in a pot,
In fact was Mary’s foil.
Mary Blake washed underwear,
While Sweetpea crawled about.
Mary Blake she wept a tear,
And Sweetpea gave a shout.
//
Said, “Why is Popeye present?
I think I’ll walk old Bill around
And try to shoot a pheasant.”
Mary Blake on Primrose Hill,
Saw Alice called the goon,
Wonderland it was presumed,
To see the beast so soon.
Mary Blake’s apocalypse,
Popeye’s Deuteronomy,
Made her kiss Bill on the lips,
And praise his male economy.
Bill and Mary sat down nude
And tried to read the Bible.
Mr. Stothard came in rude,
And acting rather trodled
Mary Blake said “Popeye, there,
Sweetpea and Olive Oil,
Please throw Stothard through the air”,
Popeye began to boil.
Mr. Stothard was a friend,
of Popeye and the Blakes,
Wandering wall-eyed through the streets,
Your rhymes are somewhat fake
Stothard, he could never rhyme
And he could never spell,
William Blake both at one time,
Could do it rather well.
William Blake a vision had,
Of Popeye high ascending.
For Milton was that little lad,
With Heaven’s azure blending.
William Blake said, “Milton sir,”
And Popeye answered “Dearest.”
Please come back to earth bestir,
For earth is quite the clearest.
Milton floating in the air,
was really Popeye reader.
Said however, “I am there”,
Then Blake declared a battle dire
On Milton and his spirit
And he threw Popeye in the fire
You’d think that that would clear it.
But Popeye rose a stronger man,
The modern spirit lighting.
And closed the Blake up in a can,
On nightmares they were riding.
Then Popeye cried, “I’ve won the battle.”
And Blake said “Down the shade,”
And Olive said, “You’ve quite a clout,”
And Mary stayed unlaid.
Somehow our subject ought to be
The battle of these Titans.
However Allen as you see,
We haven’t got to the fightin’.
There has been combat old and new,
And yet what was the issue?
Something to do with shades and you,
And Olive frail as tissue.
Something to do with Blake’s foresight
And Sweetpea’s backward looking.
Something to do with Mary’s fright,
And Olive’s awful cooking.
Milton entered in the air,
And flew above the comics.
Blake in the morass floundered there,
And wrote on many topics.
//
Which Padgett has suggested.
Thus the last line given to you,
We don’t know who was bested.
—St. Mark’s Poetry Project, New York, May 9, 1979
Unpublished.
Dawn I’ve been up all night answering letters
— Now to write a poem for 360 child poets:
Don’t grow up like me, you never get enough sleep!
It’s 6 AM, my friends are arguing, crying in the kitchen
Sausages are smoking on the stove, the poor pigs,
Taxis are passing down Avenue A to work
Buses are grinding down the street empty
Birds are twittering on the church steeple, cats
yowling in the alley,
Punk Rock’s already playing on the phonograph
— It’s Thursday October 4th, time to go to bed.
—New York, October 4, 1979
Published in: Wit and Whimsy, vol. 2 (June 19, 1980), p. 3.