Poem Rocket

 

‘Be a Star-screwer!’—Gregory Corso

Old moon my eyes are new moon with human footprint

no longer Romeo Sadface in drunken river Loony Pierre eyebrow, goof moon

O possible moon in Heaven we get to first of ageless constellations of names

as God is possible as All is possible so we’ll reach another life.

Moon politicians earth weeping and warring in eternity

the not one star disturbed by screaming madmen from Hollywood

oil tycoons from Romania making secret deals with flabby green Plutonians—

slave camps on Saturn Cuban revolutions on Mars?

Old life and new side by side, will Catholic church find Christ on Jupiter

Mohammed rave in Uranus will Buddha be acceptable on the stolid planets

or will we find Zoroastrian temples flowering on Neptune?

What monstrous new ecclesiastical design on the entire universe unfolds in the dying Pope’s brain?

Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon

he promises the stars he’ll make us a new universe if it comes to that

O Einstein I should have sent you my flaming mss.

O Einstein I should have pilgrimaged to your white hair!

O fellow travellers I write you a poem in Amsterdam in the Cosmos

where Spinoza ground his magic lenses long ago

I write you a poem long ago

already my feet are washed in death

Here I am naked without identity

with no more body than the fine black tracery of pen mark on soft paper

as star talks to star multiple beams of sunlight all the same myriad thought

in one fold of the universe where Whitman was

and Blake and Shelley saw Milton dwelling as in a starry temple

brooding in his blindness seeing all—

Now at last I can speak to you beloved brothers of an unknown moon

real Yous squatting in whatever form amidst Platonic Vapors of Eternity

I am another Star.

Will you eat my poems or read them

or gaze with aluminum blind plates on sunless pages?

do you dream or translate & accept data with indifferent droopings of antennae?

do I make sense to your flowery green receptor eyesockets? do you have visions of God?

Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?

This is my rocket my personal rocket I send up my message Beyond

Someone to hear me there

My immortality

without steel or cobalt basalt or diamond gold or mercurial fire

without passports filing cabinets bits of paper warheads

without myself finally

pure thought

message all and everywhere the same

I send up my rocket to land on whatever planet awaits it

preferably religious sweet planets no money

fourth dimensional planets where Death shows movies

plants speak (courteously) of ancient physics and poetry itself is manufactured by the trees

the final Planet where the Great Brain of the Universe sits waiting for a poem to land in His golden pocket

joining the other notes mash-notes love-sighs complaints-musical shrieks of despair and the million unutterable thoughts of frogs

I send you my rocket of amazing chemical

more than my hair my sperm or the cells of my body

the speeding thought that flies upward with my desire as instantaneous as the universe and faster than light

and leave all other questions unfinished for the moment to turn back to sleep in my dark bed on earth.

Amsterdam, October 4, 1957