On top of that if you know me I pronounce you an ignu
Ignu knows nothing of the world
a great ignoramus in factories though he may own or inspire them or even be production manager
Ignu has knowledge of the angel indeed ignu is angel in comical form
W. C. Fields Harpo Marx ignus Whitman an ignu
Rimbaud a natural ignu in his boy pants
The ignu may be queer though like not kind ignu blows archangels for the strange thrill
a gnostic women love him Christ overflowed with trembling semen for many a dead aunt
He’s a great cocksman most beautiful girls are worshipped by ignu
Hollywood dolls or lone Marys of Idaho long-legged publicity women and secret housewives
have known ignu in another lifetime and remember their lover
Husbands also are secretly tender to ignu their buddy
oldtime friendship can do anything cuckold bugger drunk trembling and happy
Ignu lives only once and eternally and knows it
he sleeps in everybody’s bed everyone’s lonesome for ignu ignu knew solitude early
So ignu’s a primitive of cock and mind
equally the ignu has written liverish tomes personal metaphysics abstract
images that scratch the moon ‘lightningflash-flintspark’ naked lunch fried shoes adios king
The shadow of the angel is waving in the opposite direction
dawn of intelligence turns the telephones into strange animals
he attacks the rose garden with his mystical shears snip snip snip
Ignu has painted Park Avenue with his own long melancholy
and ignu giggles in a hard chair over tea in Paris bald in his decaying room a black hotel
Ignu with his wild mop walks by Colosseum weeping
he plucks a clover from Keats’ grave & Shelley’s a blade of grass
knew Coleridge they had slow hung-up talks at midnight over tables of mahogany in London
sidestreet rooms in wintertime rain outside fog the cabman blows his hand
Charles Dickens is born ignu hears the wail of the babe
Ignu goofs nights under bridges and laughs at battleships
ignu is a battleship without guns in the North Sea lost O the flowerness of the moment
he knows geography he was there before he’ll get out and die already
reborn a bearded humming Jew of Arabian mournful jokes
man with a star on his forehead and halo over his cranium
listening to music musing happy at the fall of a leaf the moonlight of immortality in his hair
table-hopping most elegant comrade of all most delicate mannered in the Sufi court
he wasn’t even there at all
wearing zodiacal blue sleeves and the long peaked conehat of a magician
harkening to the silence of a well at midnight under a red star
in the lobby of Rockefeller Center attentive courteous bare-eyed enthusiastic with or without pants
he listens to jazz as if he were a negro afflicted with jewish melancholy and white divinity
Ignu’s a natural you can see it when he pays the cabfare abstracted
pulling off the money from an impossible saintly roll
or counting his disappearing pennies to give to the strange bus-driver whom he admires
Ignu has sought you out he’s the seeker of God
and God breaks down the world for him every ten years
he sees lightning flash in empty daylight when the sky is blue
he hears Blake’s disembodied Voice recite the Sunflower in a room in Harlem
No woe on him surrounded by 700 thousand mad scholars moths fly out of his sleeve
He wants to die give up go mad break through into Eternity
live on and teach an aged saint or break down to an eyebrow clown
All ignus know each other in a moment’s talk and measure each other up at once
as lifetime friends romantic winks and giggles across continents
sad moment paying the cab goodby and speeding away uptown
One or two grim ignus in the pack
one laughing monk in dungarees
one delighted by cracking his eggs in an egg cup
one chews gum to music all night long rock and roll
one anthropologist cookoo in the Petén Rainforest
one sits in jail all year and bets karmaic racetrack
one chases girls down East Broadway into the horror movie
one pulls out withered grapes and rotten onions from his pants
one has a nannygoat under his bed to amuse visitors plasters the wall with his crap
collects scorpions whiskies skies etc. would steal the moon if he could find it
That would set fire to America but none of these make ignu
it’s the soul that makes the style the tender firecracker of his thought
the amity of letters from strange cities to old friends
and the new radiance of morning on a foreign bed
A comedy of personal being his grubby divinity
Eliot probably an ignu one of the few who’s funny when he eats
Williams of Paterson a dying American ignu
Burroughs a purest ignu his haircut is a cream his left finger
pinkey chopped off for early ignu reasons metaphysical spells love spells with psychoanalysts
his very junkhood an accomplishment beyond a million dollars
Céline himself an old ignu over prose
I saw him in Paris dirty old gentleman of ratty talk
with longhaired cough three wormy sweaters round his neck
brown mould under historic fingernails
pure genius his giving morphine all night to 1400 passengers on a sinking ship
‘because they were all getting emotional’
Who’s amazing you is ignu communicate with me
by mail post telegraph phone street accusation or scratching at my window
and send me a true sign I’ll reply special delivery
DEATH IS A LETTER THAT WAS NEVER SENT
Knowledge born of stamps words coins pricks jails seasons sweet ambition laughing gas
history with a gold halo photographs of the sea painting a celestial din in the bright window
one eye in a black cloud
and the lone vulture on a sand plain seen from the window of a Turkish bus
It must be a trick. Two diamonds in the hand one Poetry one Charity
proves we have dreamed and the long sword of intelligence
over which I constantly stumble like my pants at the age six— embarrassed.
New York, November, 1958