Laughing Gas

          To Gary Snyder
The red tin begging cup you gave me,
I lost it but its contents are undisturbed.

I

High on Laughing Gas
I’ve been here before
the odd vibration of
the same old universe

the nasal whine of the dentist’s drill
    singing against the nostalgic
        piano Muzak in the wall
insistent, familiar, penetrating
    the teeth, where’ve I heard that
        asshole jazz before?

The universe is a void
  in which there is a dreamhole
  The dream disappears
        the hold closes

  It’s the instant of going
  into or coming out of
  existence that is
  important—to catch on
  to the secret of the magic
        box

Stepping outside the universe
    by means of Nitrous Oxide
anesthetizing mind-consciousness

    the chiliasm was an impersonal dream—
one of many, being mere dreams.

    the sadness of birth
    and death, the sadness of
changing from dream to dream,
  the constant farewell
  of forms …
        saying ungoodby to what
didn’t exist

The many worlds that don’t exist
all which seem real
all joke
all lost cartoon

At that moment the whole goofy-spooky of the Universe WHAT?! Joke Being slips into Nothing like the tail of a lizard disappearing into a crack in the Wall with the final receding eyehole ending Loony Tunes accompanied by Woody Woodpecker’s hindoo maniac laughter in the skull. Nobody gets hurt. They all disappear. They were never there. Beginningless perfection.

That’s why Satori’s accompanied by laughter
and the Zenmaster rips up the Sutras in fury.
And the pain of this contrariety
The cycles of scream and laughter
faces and asses Christs and Buddhas
each with his own universe dragged
over the snowy mental poles
like a sack mad Santa Clauses
Worst pain in the dentist’s chair comes true
novacain also arrives in the cycle
every hap will have its chance
even God will come Once or Twice
Satan will be my personal enemy

Relax and die—
The process will repeat itself
Be Born! Be Born!
Back to the same old smiling
            dentist—

The Bloomfield police car
      with its idiot red light
      revolving on its head
      balefully at Eternity
          gone in an instant
          —simultaneous
          appearance of Bankrobbers
      at the Twentieth Century Bank
The fire engines screaming
      toward an old lady’s
      burned-in-her-bedroom
      today apocalypse
          tomorrow
      Mickey Mouse cartoons—

I’m disgusted! it’s Unbelievable!
What a funny horrible
      dirty joke!
The whole universe a shaggy dog story!
      with a weird ending that begins again
        till you get the point
‘It was a dark and gloomy night …’
      ‘in every direction in and
        out’
          ‘You take the high road
      and I’ll take the low’
                —everybody lost
in Scotlands of mind-consciousness—

          Adonoi Echad!
It is not One, but Two,
        not two but Infinite—
the universe be born and die
        in endless series in the mind!

Gary Snyder, Jack, Zen thinkers
        split open existence
        and laugh & Cry—
what’s shock? what’s measure?
        when the Mind’s an irrational
          traffic light in
            Gobi—
follow the blinking lights of contrariety!

What’s the use avoiding rats
and horror, hiding from Cops
        and dentists’ drills?
Somebody will invent
        a Buchenwald next door
– an ant’s dream’s
        funnier than
            ours
– he has more of them
        faster and seems
        to give less of
            a shit—

O waves of probable
        and improbable
Universes—
        Everybody’s right

I’ll finish this poem
        in my next life.

II

…. with eye opening
slowly to perceive
that I be coming out
        of a trance—
one look at the lipstick
        it’s a nurse
in a dentist’s office

        that first frog
thought leaping out of
        the void

            … a glimpse
out of which the whole
process unfolds this
universe & logically
and symmetrically next
unbuilds it in exact
reverse till you arrive
back at the Nothing
in which one chance
note was originally
struck …

            , the Czardas
of Creation, the first banal chord
establishing Music forever in
        its mechanical jukebox
          … and the whole
        structive unfolds
itself inevitably and
        folds back into
Nothing again …

        —the same man
crossing the street looking
both ways watch out for
the cars—

and each time, returning
with a jerk of the face
(’praps a dental touch)
dictated by the sinking
sensation, Oof! I’ve
been hoodwinked—

            again like
        someone in the Circus
defying death, got thrown
        into the orchestra—
          Note the music blaring
with an indifferent flourish of Triumph
          a nightmare Razz
        —as the acrobat leaps
out into the void—
        Me! I made that Last Chance
          jump off the wire
way high up in the Big Top
            long ago …
              it’s happening again!
        I wake up dazed …

        it being the dream
of someone in a dentist’s
chair in a Universe he
imagines—coming out
of gas—
        it’s only happening
in the closed universe of
        illusion

III

A nice day in the Universe on Broad Street—sun shines today as it never shone before and never will again—stillness in the blue sky—the church’s gold dome across the park sending and receiving flashes of light—I feel heart sick to destroy this all—

What hope have the children in their prams passing the white silent doors of the houses—only the Public Library knows.

Premonition in the dentist’s chair—mechanical voices over the radio singing Destination Moon—mysterious sorrow for the moon of this forgotten universe—humans, singing, singing—of the moon—for money?—except it’s the imbecilic canned voice of eternity rocking & rolling in Space making invisible announcements—

The Doc’s agreed to the experiment—novacain, my mouth’s begun to disappear first—like the Cheshire Cat.

BACK: Endless cycles of conflict happening in nothingness
make it impossible to grasp for the perfection
which does not exist
but is not necessary
so everything is final and occurs over & over again
till we will finally blank out as expected.

        The First Note of Creation:
the only one there could be if there
weren’t nothing but
an idea that there might
not be nothing—

Sherman Adams will resign
I’m holding my breath
the shiver run thru my belly
the nurse will be singing I love you
between breaths the Buddhists are right
a tear
siffle in the cheek
the possibility escape
the eye glare thru glasses
Nothing grasped at & ungrasped as its trance thought passes

I take my pen in hand
The same old way sings Sinatra
I’m writing to You give me understanding
I pray sings Sinatra
Can I never glimpse the round we have made?
Write me as soon as able sings
Sinatra O Lord burn me out of existence.

You’ve got a long body sings
Sinatra I refuse to breathe and return to form
I’ve seen every moment in advance before
I’ve turned my neck a million times
        & written this note
    & been greeted with fire and cheers
I refuse to stop
        —thinking—
What Perfection has escaped me?

An endless cycle of possibilities clashing in Nothing
with each mistake in the writing inevitable from the beginning
        of time
The doctor’s phone number is Pilgrim 1-0000
Are you calling me, Nothing?

The universe be smashed
to smithereens by the oncoming
atomic explosions with
Eisenhower as once President
of a place called U.S.
Gregory wrote the Bomb!
Russians dream of Mars &
when the cosmos goes and
all consciousness after the
final explosion of imagination
in the void it won’t have
made any difference that it
all both did and did not
happen, whatever it was once
thought to be so real—
it will be—gone.

O that I might die on the spot
I’ll have to go back
any prophecy might have been right
it’s all a great Exception
My bus will arrive as foretold
it’s the end of another September
war is on the radio ahead
we are all going to the inevitable beauty of doom
a firebox stands sentient before the library
it’s hot sun now I’m crazy scribbling
—It began abstract and mindless nowhere
planets of thought have passed
it’ll end where it began

I want to return to normal
—but there is no changelessness
but in Nirvana
            Or is there
Ever Rest, Lord?—and what sages
know and sit.
          I’m a spy
in Bloomfield on a park bench
      —frightened by buses—

What’s that bee doing hanging round my shoe? my borrowed and inevitable shoe?
A vast red truck moving with boxes of dead television sets in the back

American flag waving over the library

On the bus I sit by a negress

This is an explosion

IV

Back in the same old black hole
        where Possibility closes the
          last door
        and the Great void remains
          … a glass
in the dust reflecting the sun,
          fragment of a bottle
        that never knew it existed

            … under a tree
that sleeps all winter
        till it grows its eyes
            in May heat
and flowers upward with a thousand
          green sensations
dies, and forgets itself in Snow

        … Phantom in Phantom

If we didn’t exist, God
would have to create this
to leave no room for complaint
        by any of the birds & bees
who might have missed their
            chance (to be)

        Fate tells a big lie.

        … And the big kind Dreamer
is on the nod again
          God sleeps!
He’s in for a big surprise
one of his dreams is going to come true
        He’ll get the answer too
        He’ll get the answer too

Just a flash in the cosmic pan
—just an instant when there
          might have been a light
        had there been any pan
            to reflect it—

—we can lie on the bed and imagine
        ourselves away—

I’m afraid to stop breathing—
        first the pain in the
          body
        suffocation, then
          the Death.

V

The pain of gas flowing into the eye
the crooked tooth-drills hanging like gallows
          on a miniature Jupiter
Thru the open window, spring frozen
          in the young tree
the repeated bong of the doorbell
          opening elsewhere
I’ve come back to the same medicine
    cabinet in the universe—Bong,
I know I’m more real than the dentist!
a serious embarrassment, having grasped to one Self
though admittedly I’d seen it disappear
          over and over

TRACKLESS TRANSIT CORPORATION

runs a bus thru Bloomfield
        … blossoming
in the bottom of an unborn daisy
it will vanish into the Whist-not

History will keep repeating
itself forever like the woman
in the image on the Dutch Cleanser box

A way out of the mirror
        was found by the image
that realized its existence
        was only …
a stranger completely like myself

A way out for ever! has not been found
to enter the ground whence the images
        rise, and repeat themselves

The sadness is, that every leaf
              has fallen before—

At my feet an ant crawling
        in the broken asphalt—
and this exact white lollypop stick
            & twig of branch
lain next to that soggy match
        near those few grassblades …
and I’ve sat here and took this note
        before and tried to remember—
and now I do—remember what
I’m writing as I write it down
I know when I’m going to stop
I know when I’m forgetting and
know when I
        take a jump and change—
            Impossible
to do anything but right now in all
    the universe at once—
        which Art does, and
the Insight of Laughing Gas?

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha
and the monk laughs
at the moon—
and everybody 10 miles round
in all directions wonders
why—he’s just reminding
them—of what—of
the moon, the old dumb moon
of a million lives.

New York, Fall 1958