Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 35

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I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.

It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious.

Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.

It occurs to me that I am America.

I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.

I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.

I’d better consider my national resources.

My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.

I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.

I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.

My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.

America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe

America free Tom Mooney

America save the Spanish Loyalists

America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die

America I am the Scottsboro boys.

America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.

America you don’t really want to go to war.

America it’s them bad Russians.

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.

The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.

Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.

That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.

America this is quite serious.

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.

America is this correct?

I’d better get right down to the job.

It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.

America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Berkeley, January 17, 1956

Fragment 1956

Now to the come of the poem, let me be worthy

& sing holily the natural pathos of the human soul,

naked original skin beneath our dreams

& robes of thought, the perfect self identity

radiant with lusts and intellectual faces

Who carries the lines, the painful browed

contortions of the upper eyes, the whole body

breathing and sentient among flowers and buildings

open-eyed, self knowing, trembling with love—

Soul that I have, that Jack has, Huncke has

Bill has, Joan had, and has in me memory yet,

bum has in rags, madman underneath black clothes.

Soul identical each to each, as standing on

the streetcorner ten years ago I looked at Jack

and told him we were the same person—look

in my eyes and speak to yourself, that makes me

everybody’s lover, Hal mine against his will,

I had his soul in my own body already, while

he frowned—by the streetlamp 8th Avenue & 27th

Street 1947—I had just come back from Africa

with a gleam of the illumination actually

to come to me in time as come to all—Jack

the worst murderer, Allen the most cowardly

with a streak of yellow love running through

my poems, a fag in the city, Joe Army screaming

in anguish in Dannemora 1945 jailhouse,

breaking his own white knuckle against the bars

his dumb sad cellmate beaten by the guards

an iron floor below, Gregory weeping in Tombs,

Joan eyes narrow-lidded under benzedrine

harkening to the paranoia in the wall,

Huncke from Chicago dreaming in Arcades

of hellish Pokerino blue skinned Times Square light,

Bill King yelling pale faced in the subway window

final minute gape-death struggling to return,

Morphy himself, archsuicide, expiring in blood

on the Passaic, tragic & bewildered in

last tears, attaining death that moment

human, intellectual, bearded, who else

was he then but himself?

Berkeley, 1956

Afternoon Seattle

Busride along waterfront down Yessler under street bridge to the old red Wobbly Hall—

One Big Union, posters of the Great Mandala of Labor, bleareyed dusty cardplayers dreaming behind the counter … ‘but these young fellers can’t see ahead and we nothing to offer’—

After Snyder his little red beard and bristling Buddha mind I weeping crossed Skid Road to 10? beer.

Labyrinth wood stairways and Greek movies under Farmers Market secondhand city, Indian smoked salmon old overcoats and dry red shoes,

Green Parrot Theater, Maytime, and down to the harborside the ships, walked on Alaska silent together—ferryboat coming faraway in mist from Bremerton Island dreamlike small on the waters of Holland to me

—and entered my head the seagull, a shriek, sentinels standing over rusty harbor iron dockwork, rocks dripping under rotten wharves slime on the walls—

the seagull’s small cry—inhuman not of the city, lone sentinels of God, animal birds among us indifferent, their bleak lone cries representing our souls.

A rowboat docked and chained floating in the tide by a wharf. Basho’s frog. Someone left it there, it drifts.

Sailor’s curio shop hung with shells and skulls a whalebone mask, Indian seas. The cities rot from oldest parts. Little red mummy from Idaho

Frank H. Little your big hat high cheekbones crosseyes and song.

The cities rot from the center, the suburbs fall apart a slow apocalypse of rot the spectral trolleys fade

the cities rot the fire escapes hang and rust the brick turns black dust falls uncollected garbage heaps the wall

the birds invade with their cries the skid row alley creeps downtown the ancient jailhouse groans bums snore under the pavement a dark Turkish bath the cornice gapes at midnight

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