Second Spontaneous Collaboration Into the Air, Circa 23 May 1980
(by Ted Berrigan and Allen Ginsberg)
Playing tapes of Woody Guthrie singing “Dust-
Pneumonia Blues”
We drove two hours across sun-baked pleasant hilly
Oklahoma landscape
Chatting about the latest war propaganda news
In a red Ford, rich man’s car & all the gossip we could
scrape
Up from the sandstone ruins of Arlo’s father’s hillside
house —
Bearing freshly removed gifts, shingle nails, to take
back to New York City friends
We sat awhile, stood awhile, scratched our heads, &
searched out a little mouse
It wasn’t a mouse, it was a man from Wisconsin, who’d
also come to see Woody’s house! Then
I walked by myself down the dirt alley & saw a shack
where no one lived with a large TV
And when I rose from meditation you led us down the
mockingbird lane & showed that shack to me
An old grey-haired woman eating peanuts out of her
hand & putting them into her mouth
Came through the screen-door onto the porch to feed
her cat while we stood looking south
We snapped our photographs in Oklahoma looking
downhill on the plains
There were four of us & now we’re gone & Woody’s
house remains.
—May 23, 1980
Published in: United Artists, no. 11 (September 1980), p. 28.
A tall student
walks down the mall
in full moonlight
passing silent window displays
where naked mannequin
observes her fingernails
—Boulder, CO, ca. July 1980
Unpublished.
Good God I got high bloodpressure answering
letters from Germany, Argentina, France!
I should meditate under the clouds again.
—ca. December 1980
Unpublished.
An “autograph hound” armed
with a golden platter and a
gun
kneeled before John and
killed the Beatles.
A stringy-haired artist
tiptoed thru St. Peter’s
and unsculpted
Michelangelo’s
polished marble elbow with a
hammer,
Christ defenseless lying in his
stone Mama’s arms.
Staring out of the canvas
under their Feathered Hats
Rembrandt’s Night Watchers
were blind to the Slasher
that tore thru their coats with
a razor.
Lisa’s smile forever from
the Louvre?
—ca. December 8, 1980
Published in: Rolling Stone, no. 335 (January 22, 1981), p. 70.
“Reagan’s been shot”
The click of the door.
—Boulder, CO, March 30, 1981
Published in: Shearsman, no. 7 ([first quarter] 1982), p. 31.
in shiny
leather cap and neat jacket
held up his aluminum splint
bandaged finger
Shouting to the subway tunnel’s tile walls
“Dirty Nigger! Dirty Nigger!”
all the platform’s length
under 14th Street —
Continued grieving crosstown
“Dirty Nigger! Dirty Nigger!”
through the crowded car
till the last stop, “Shut up!
Shut up!” at the exit door
a half-white lady hissed
And far down the 8th Avenue platform’s
forest of iron pillars
“Dirty Nigger! Dirty Nigger!”
still echoed —
Climbing the subway stairs
I still heard the distant
“Dirty Nigger” voice as I walked
to the Port Authority Bus Terminal
—New York, March 30, 1981
Published in: American Poetry Review, vol. 14, no. 6 (November/December 1985), p. 16.
Thundering Undies
(by Allen Ginsberg and Ron Padgett)
Passing through Manhattan’s sodium vapor sidestreet
glare
with pink electric powderpuffs overhead,
mmmmm, that Catholic churchwall’s old as Science
tho Science is older, but O please don’t tell me about it
tonight,
no pain please in the strange spring light,
tho my baby’s waiting on the corner with 160 pounds of
meat
on her 148 bones all for sale for 25 bucks.
Furious & Aurelius, now that we’re back in town, tell her
to take cosmetics from the air, and let the dark blue city
sift slowly down to where lamplight shadows her checks
& her lips shine dayglo purple moist with sperm of her
300 adorers
— O come let us adore her, weird Madonna of the street
and not in real great shape, though we’re in far-off
Elsewhere
with our sad souls and aching teeth! Too late for old
loves,
but a little nosegay of pansies cut by Time’s tractor
where
the pasture meets the dirt road and my heart meets the
flower bed
dug up years ago to make East 12th Street, where you
float
a little off the ground, thinking of the withered posy of
pussy-
willows cox-stamens & rosepetal lips dumped in the garbage can
by unthinking lovers I used to sleep & giggle with,
crazed, hateful & disappointed, Catullus.
—April 21, 1981
Published in: Mag City, no. 12 (1981), p. 16.
Now that bow arrow brush & fan are balanced in the
hand
— What about a glass of water? —
Holding my cock to pee, the Atlantic gushes out.
Sitting down to eat, Sun and Moon fill the plate.
—July 8, 1981
Published in: Mag City, no. 12 (1981), p. 15.
Pinsk After Dark
(by Ted Berrigan and Allen Ginsberg)
Reborn a rabbi in Pinsk, reincarnated backward time
I gasped thru my beard full of mushroom barley soup;
two rough-faced blonde Cossacks, drinking wine,
paid me no heed, not remembering their futures —
Verlaine & Rimbaud.
—February 12, 1982
Published in: Anne Waldman, ed., Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan (Coffee House Press, 1991), p. 116.
Two Scenes
(by Ted Berrigan and Allen Ginsberg)
Time Mag’s Central American Expert sd
Gen. Haig was “an asshole” —
What a surprise in private on the telephone,
we dated each other up for next Thursday.
I stood outside the Kiev tonight, nose pressed
to the plate glass, feet freezing
in city mush, and watched two aging lovers
inhale their steaming bowls of mushroom barley
soup.
—February 12, 1982
Published in: Anne Waldman, ed., Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan (Coffee House Press, 1991), p. 118.
All the Centuries are the same.
Up to date, fashionably dressed in
skin, hair, worm mucous,
bark & feather
Fire burns continuously in the
hearth pit
warmth beats thru hearts,
footsteps walk to the grave
hole
or pass out the cemetery at the
low gate in the iron fence
to the grocery store on the hill,
Chautauqua Meadows
past caves & pine woods to the
mountain wall Flatironed
against blue space
Clouds float above
as sailed over Jurassic
Dinosaur heads lifted staring
higher than palm fronds
at the shining wall where Michael
stands on the gate house arch
with brilliant sword
Millennia’s five billion
skulls.
Amazed Generation! Found Generation!
Diamond Generation! Brainwashed
Generation! Amnesiac
T.V. Bureaucracy Voidoids!
New Wave Punk Generation!
Neutron Bomb blast Babies!
Apocalypse Spermatozoa!
Did you grow up imbibing
Microchip sex waters?
Will you marry me in the
next Millennium?
Must I wait for the Great Year?
The only thing different Century
after Century
is the sun rises in a different
Fish or Water Pot
every two Millennia!
But that’s already happened 167,000 times!
—April 22, 1982
Published in: City, vol. 1, no. 9 (1984), pp. 61–62.
You want money?
fill out the forms
the universe will unroll its endless bank notes at this
majestic stroke of your pen
money from Chilean coal miners’ sweat in Loda
mineshafts
money from whales’ ambergris
opium clipper ship profits from Indochina
luckor laundered by the CIA through the Buck Rogers
Foundation in the 21st century
peace money plucked from Venezuela by Chase Bank
pouring black gold on Wall Street
What?
yours for the asking
all the empty diamonds of South Africa
multi-national sapphires
blue oceans of desire
emeralds dragged up from Amazon River bottom by Mr.
Ludwig and U.S. Steel
Ford’s amber pennies,
Rockefeller’s oily rubies red as boy’s blood in Bolivia
walk off with the treasury building under your left arm
like a kiddie bank on Market Street
pick up the Federal Reserve and put it in your back
paper money, thin as dreams
take a wasted tree write your own tender
sign your own name as if you were a Secretary of the
Treasury
this suffering money comes from nowhere, goes
nowhere
this unborn money’s made by labor millions who cut
coastal forests
sucking oil up in Evanston Wyoming
dredging uranium on gold peninsulas aboriginal
preserve
burning electric to fuel book sights for pots and pans
that bit your ears off in Santiago
rob the bank and scatter money back to the trees and
fields and mountains
spend on art with ever returning agronomy
beautiful speech, practical windmills
children’s meditative pencils
nightsoil recycled to daylit meadows
walnut forests green shade legible flowers
hazel nut shaded city streets
labor intensive persimmons near the Great Lakes’ clear
blue.
—Boulder, CO, April 28, 1982
Unpublished.
Cats scratching my leg, nails in my raw skin,
pulling at wool pants’ threads —
Shall I sit here dignified & let you scratch me to Death
or rise from my chair, angry, at war with white kittens?
— ca. April 1982
Published in: John Castlebury, ed., Windhorse (Samurai Press, July 1982), p. 50.
I used to live in gay sad Paris!
Decades in taxi-honk New York!
Smelly London, watery Venice,
Bright Tanger, and dark Benares!
Now I meditate in the mountains.
—Boulder, CO, May 1982
Published in: Karel Appel, Street Art (H.J.W. Becht, 1985), p. 249.
As the rain drips from the gutter on to the bushes of the imperial court lawn
And a motorcycle putters up Cascade Avenue
The ice cream man having delivered his sandwiches
The poets began to consider their minds
— The Drawing Room, the Kalapa Court, Boulder, CO,
July 26, 1982
Published in: Friction, vol. 1, no. 2/3 (Winter [February 27, 1983] 1982), p. 82.
Having bowed down my forehead on the pavement on
By the car wheels of the guru
Whose vehicle I had once stolen in the presence of my
father
Having taken a vow to be his love-slave
For this and other lifetimes, if any
Having been humiliated in my Ginsberg-hood and
praised for the same Ginsberg-hood
I accept the homage of my teacher-pupil and remain
with my forehead on the pavement at his feet.
— The Drawing Room, the Kalapa Court, Boulder, CO,
July 26, 1982
Published in: Friction, vol. 1, no. 2/3 (Winter [February 27, 1983] 1982), p. 84.
They say Blacks work sweating
in hot mines thousands of feet
deep in mountains of South Africa
to bring up gold & diamonds shining
on earth into the hands of White
bankers, politicians, police & armies.
—November 8, 1982
Published in: American Poetry Review, vol. 14, no. 6 (November/December 1985), p. 16.
Back to Wuppertal
in a car, thru snowy forests
Belgium to Köln and
the highway filled with trans-European trucks
Peter barefoot
his toes on the dashboard, I was
humming
base thump parts to “Airplane Blues”
Steven reading Lennon’s last conversation in a book
—Jurgen Schmidt in his silk foulard
sparkled with sequins
driving & thinking, “Netherlands fields
pass by, I stay;
I pass by, Netherlands fields remain”
and threw up his right hand remembering
he just thought that.
—February 4, 1983
Published in: Joachim Ortmanns and Wolfgang Mohrhenn, eds., Allen Ginsberg on Tour February 16, 1983 (Lichtblick Video, 1983).
Am I a Spy from the moon?
a lunar Communist?
A Capitalist Counterrevolutionary
from the land of Big Prick?
No I just wandered in from
the Buddhafields
for a cup of bloody tea.
— Wuppertal, West Germany, February 16, 1983
Published in: United Artists, no. 12 (January 1981), p. 100.
Awakened at dawn trying to run away —
Got caught dream
shop-lifting
—August 1983
Published in: Notebook, no. 3 (April 1984), p. 4.
Flatirons
Boulder hangs under
sky —
Brown leaves fall down
—November 1, 1983
Published in: Daily Camera (November 20, 1983), Sunday Camera Magazine section, p. 1.
Up late Sunday, late nite reading thru New York Times
Danced slow motion Tai Chi once,
boiled water, hot lemonade purifies the liver
Twice more the 13 steps of Tai Chi,
cleaned my face, teeth, altar in my bedroom,
filled seven brass cups with water & laid them out
straight rowed
Sat for an hour — Why’d the New York Times call Living
Theatre riffraff?
Has CIA taken over culture? am I a mad bohemian with
bad bile?
The steamheat radiator burned down ancient forests,
my window was open, excess heat escaped
I could hear chattering & cries of children
from the church steps across the street —
well dressed adults stepped out fur collared
as I looked up from my pillow —
hundreds of fluffy snowflakes filled the air
above East 12th Street’s lamps & cars
floating down like dandelion seeds from grey sky
floating up and drifting west and east by the fire escape.
—New York, January 29, 1984
Published in: Alan Moore and Josh Gosciak eds., A Day in the Life. (Evil Eye Books, 1990), pp. 132–133.
Surviving death,
Feminine-jawed Williams: grey Rutherford house-gable
Tara, Quan Yin, Kannon
“Same eyes as an Indian holyman”
Avelokiteshvara
whose fingers touched the window on Ridge
Road
“There’s a lot of Bastards out there.”
Bunting stands on a marble floor, my Kaddish?
“Too many words …”
Sd the Newcastle Times Financial Editor
on marble lobby floor
“Salutations dear Bunting, I’m leaving for yr
Istanbool”
So, blond hair to shoulder, Newcastle Tom
Pickard
snapped his photo
— ca. April 1984
Published in: Unmuzzled Ox, vol. 12, no. 2 (issue 24) (1986), p. 17.
Rose is gone
from Stuyvesant Town
died when I was away
92 years old —
my mother’s Communist friend
Rose Savage
— died a couple years ago
When I was teaching in Buddhaland —
She had Man Ray paintings
on her wall
and my mother Naomi screamed for her
at 288 Graham Avenue in 1937
thinking the Murderers were
at large
— Then I got mad at her defending Stalin
when she was old half deaf, her voice cracked
white handed in her apartment —
vegetables, nuts, bananas and carrots —
a little boiled chicken — in her ice box
She couldn’t get around after 1978
couldn’t walk to the Safeway.
//
Where’s Rose? Where’s Naomi?
Where’s our old apartment
on East 7th Street?
—June 24, 1984
Published in: Camp Kerouac Summer ’84 (Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Writing Program/Naropa Institute, July 1984), p. 40.
3’d day down Yangtze River, yesterday
passed vast mountain gorges and hairpin
river-bends, mist sun and cement factory
soft coal dust everywhere, all China
got a big allergic cold. Literary delegation
homebound after 3 weeks, now I’m
traveling separately like I used to — except
everywhere omnipresent kindly Chinese
Bureaucracy meets me at airports & boats
& takes me to tourist hotels & orders meals. I’m
trying to figure a way out — envious of 2
bearded hippies traveling 4th class in
steerage eating tangerines & bananas —
sleepers in passageways on mats, Chinese
voyagers playing checkers. Saw Beijing,
Great Wall, tombs & palaces, Suchow’s
Tang gardens, Hangchow’s West Lake walkway
dyke to hold the giant water in years of drought
built up by governors Tsu-Tung-Po and Po-Chu-I.
Saw Cold Mt. Temple w/ Snyder who’d
head its bell echo across ocean.
— China, November 11, 1984
Published in: Big Scream, no. 20 (February 15, 1985), p. 4.
African Spirituality Will Save the Earth
Seattle Gospel Chorus
clap hands
raise your voice
shake your ass
save the earth
Bluefields Moravian church amazing
the whiteheaded virgins dissolve in three-chord
harmony
Praise The Lord!
Wrap around the May Pole
tears in your eyes
freedom of the body
trust the Lord the heart energy
clap your hands
have a dream in Bluefields
bow down to the imperial crown
the lone May King
too old to dance except shuffle the streets
just at the right time
nods approval, applauds the chorus
break down your empire O armed victor
animosity
—Bluefields, Nicaragua, January 29, 1986
Unpublished.
Face to face
with silent grace
Take your place
in the old rat race
—ca. February 1986
Published in: Poetry Project Newsletter, no. 119 (February 1986), p. 7.
Edith Sitwell’s gone
and Frances Waldman too
Cyril Connolly you know who
Tom Driberg far away
Lionel Trilling’s gone
so’s Mark Van Doren
Raymond Weaver and Professor Andrew Shapp
Kerouac Cassady Lew Welch
Poor Bobby Kaufman who lived upstairs on Second
Street
John Lennon and Robert Kennedy
several presidents I never met
my mother Naomi, my father Louie
W.H. Auden and Chester his lover Kallman
Cannastra and Dorothy Day
Catholic Workers gone underground where worms
make hay
many others
Rose Savage, Man Ray,
my Aunt Rose, sad Lady Day
Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Martin Luther
King still young
Ahh David Kennedy gone
Ahh Hibiscus
Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen
young John Hoffman
so long ago, what he looked like I don’t know
all these gone, I’ll be gone too
Going where my old Dean McKnight went
Dwight Macdonald, and Joan Vollmer and Tom
O’Bedlam
Ian Sommerville and Michael Portman
Jimi Hendrix and Howard Alk
if they went out how could I balk?
Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin
I never met with Charlie Chaplin
Bertrand Russell sent me a letter
I got sick and felt even better
I’ve tried honesty boiled in oil
digested by ego loving gargoyle
Enough, I gotta go to sleep at night all alone
I’ve no wife my eyes closed without the moon
I’ve stayed up midnight till afternoon.
—Naropa, Boulder, CO, ca. May 22, 1986
Unpublished.
Bob Dylan Touring with Grateful Dead
Bob Dylan Touring with the Grateful Dead
acid crowd federal narcs in the capitol, alert alert,
Now’s their chance
Boy George already forgotten in headline video
pleads new songs even in pain
indifferent yuppie high school tank topped athletes
shudder blonde bodies vomiting in the back seat
car crashed into an Iowa lamp pole
better not get high in the Detroit stadium naked for the
narcs, a bust, a bust
the agricultural poet drunk in his red bikini in the
Buddhist garden
if I feel dread, what feels he alone with his family crazy
in outer Long Island?
Where can he go with alcohol and the landlord’s
eviction notice comes to us all?
gentrification will oust us from our nest
where put books and file cabinets heavy with paper gold?
Wake, smoke another cigarette with aching back
the last in breath through cancered throat
too late to go back to college a smokeless virgin
lead a purist spotless life of commercial crime
unfair, an 80-year old stepmother’s bride broods in her
garden apartment
climb up on the ladder and fix the triumph of death on
the wall?
Have I learned the Book Of The Dead in time?
breathing Manhattan’s springtime
bomb Libya,
Ukrainian wheat crop poisoned by radioactive burst
whispers in the UN corridors 70th floor
the Secretary General sees a black cloud approach
over Queens and Brooklyn in a hundred years
down the street Gregory tokes a joint by Dag
Hammarskjöld’s private bus stop
the driver smelt incense, out into the kiosk he whispered
to the supervisor
What’s that smell? Is that a police patrol by the fire
hydrant?
Where will the drunken farmer go if they kick him out
of the Buddhist retreat?
the sky turned black
dread heaven over Columbia Library dome
and later in the bookstore, animal clerks glared
wounded behind the cash register
skeletons standing in place behind the counters and
shelves
filled with Plotinus and Sir Thomas Aquinas.
— ca. May 22, 1986
Unpublished.