I walked into the cocktail party
room and found three or four queers
talking together in queertalk.
I tried to be friendly but heard
myself talking to one in hiptalk.
“I’m glad to see you,” he said, and
looked away. “Hmn,” I mused. The room
was small and had a double-decker
bed in it, and cooking apparatus:
icebox, cabinet, toasters, stove;
the hosts seemed to live with room
enough only for cooking and sleeping.
My remark on this score was understood
but not appreciated. I was
offered refreshments, which I accepted.
I ate a sandwich of pure meat; an
enormous sandwich of human flesh,
I noticed, while I was chewing on it,
it also included a dirty asshole.
More company came, including a
fluffy female who looked like
a princess. She glared at me and
said immediately: “I don’t like you,”
turned her head away, and refused
to be introduced. I said, “What!”
in outrage. “Why you shit-faced fool!”
This got everybody’s attention.
“Why you narcissistic bitch! How
can you decide when you don’t even
know me,” I continued in a violent
and messianic voice, inspired at
last, dominating the whole room
Dream New York-Denver, Spring 1947
Two bricklayers are setting the walls
of a cellar in a new dug out patch
of dirt behind an old house of wood
with brown gables grown over with ivy
on a shady street in Denver. It is noon
and one of them wanders off. The young
subordinate bricklayer sits idly for
a few minutes after eating a sandwich
and throwing away the paper bag. He
has on dungarees and is bare above
the waist; he has yellow hair and wears
a smudged but still bright red cap
on his head. He sits idly on top
of the wall on a ladder that is leaned
up between his spread thighs, his head
bent down, gazing uninterestedly at
the paper bag on the grass. He draws
his hand across his breast, and then
slowly rubs his knuckles across the
side of his chin, and rocks to and fro
on the wall. A small cat walks to him
along the top of the wall. He picks
it up, takes off his cap, and puts it
over the kitten’s body for a moment.
Meanwhile it is darkening as if to rain
and the wind on top of the trees in the
street comes through almost harshly.
Denver, Summer 1947
After Reading Kerouac’s Manuscript
The Town and the City
I
I dwelled in Hell on earth to write this rhyme,
I live in stillness now, in living flame;
I witness Heaven in unholy time,
I room in the renownèd city, am
Unknown. The fame I dwell in is not mine,
I would not have it. Angels in the air
Serenade my senses in delight.
Intelligence of poets, saints and fair
Characters converse with me all night.
But all the streets are burning everywhere.
The city is burning these multitudes that climb
Her buildings. Their inferno is the same
I scaled as a stupendous blazing stair.
They vanish as I look into the light.
II
Woe unto thee, Manhattan, woe to thee,
Woe unto all the cities of the world.
Repent, Chicagos, O repent; ah, me!
Los Angeles, now thou art gone so wild,
I think thou art still mighty, yet shall be,
As the earth shook, and San Francisco fell,
An angel in an agony of flame.
City of horrors, New York so much like Hell,
How soon thou shalt be city-without-name,
A tomb of souls, and a poor broken knell.
Fire and fire on London, Moscow shall die,
And Paris her livid atomies be rolled
Together into the Woe of the blazing bell—
All cities then shall toll for their great fame.
New York, Spring 1948
Rose of spirit, rose of light,
Flower whereof all will tell,
Is this black vision of my sight
The fashion of a prideful spell,
Mystic charm or magic bright,
O Judgement of fire and of fright?
What everlasting force confounded
In its being, like some human
Spirit shrunken in a bounded
Immortality, what Blossom
Gathers us inward, astounded?
Is this the sickness that is Doom?
East Harlem, June-July 1948
Many seek and never see,
anyone can tell them why.
O they weep and O they cry
and never take until they try
unless they try it in their sleep
and never some until they die.
I ask many, they ask me.
This is a great mystery.
East Harlem, June-July 1948
A very Dove will have her love
ere the Dove has died;
the spirit, vanity approve,
will even love in pride;
and cannot love, and yet can hate,
spirit to fulfill;
the spirit cannot watch and wait,
the Hawk must have his kill.
There is a Gull that rolls alone
over billows loud;
the Nightingale at night will moan
under her soft shroud.
East Harlem, July 1948
Dread spirit in me that I ever try
With written words to move,
Hear thou my plea, at last reply
To my impotent pen:
Should I endure, and never prove
Yourself and me in love,
Tell me, spirit, tell me, O what then?
And if not love, why, then, another passion
For me to pass in image:
Shadow, shadow, and blind vision.
Dumb roar of the white trance,
Ecstatic shadow out of rage,
Power out of passage.
Dance, dance, spirit, spirit, dance!
Is it my fancy that the world is still,
So gentle in her dream?
Outside, great Harlems of the will
Move under black sleep:
Yet in spiritual scream,
The saxophones the same
As me in madness call thee from the deep.
I shudder with intelligence and I
Wake in the deep light
And hear a vast machinery
Descending without sound,
Intolerable to me, too bright,
And shaken in the sight
The eye goes blind before the world goes round.
East Harlem, July 1948
My love has come to ride me home
To our room and bed.
I had walked the wide sea path,
For my love would roam
In absence long and glad
All through our land of wrath.
We wandered wondrously
I, still mild, true and sad,
But merry, mad and free
My love was. Look! yet come love hath.
Is this not great gentility?
I only remembered the ocean’s roll,
And islands that I passed,
And, in a vision of death and dread,
A city where my soul
Visited its vast
Passage of the dead.
My love’s eternity
I never entered, when, at last
“I blush with love for thee,”
My love, renewed in anger, said.
Is this not great gentility?
Over the road in an automobile
Rode I and my gentle love.
The traffic on our way was wild;
My love was at the wheel,
And in and out we drove.
My own eyes were mild.
How my love merrily
Dared the other cars to rove:
“But if they stop for me,
Why, then, I stop for them, my child.”
Is this not great gentility?
East Harlem, July 1948
I cannot sleep, I cannot sleep
until a victim is resigned;
a shadow holds me in his keep
and seeks the bones that he must find;
and hoveled in a shroudy heap
dead eyes see, and dead eyes weep,
dead men from the coffin creep,
nightmare of murder in the mind.
Murder has the ghost of shame
that lies abed with me in dirt
and mouths the matter of my fame.
With voice of rock, and rock engirt,
a shadow cries out in my name;
he struggles for my writhing frame;
my death and his were not the same,
what wounds have I that he is hurt?
This is such murder that my own
incorporeal blood is shed,
but shadow changes into bone,
and thoughts are doubled in my head;
for what he knows and I have known
is, like a crystal lost in stone,
hidden in skin and buried down,
blind as the vision of the dead.
Paterson, August 1948
The air is dark, the night is sad,
I lie sleepless and I groan.
Nobody cares when a man goes mad:
He is sorry, God is glad.
Shadow changes into bone.
Every shadow has a name;
When I think of mine I moan,
I hear rumors of such fame.
Not for pride, but only shame,
Shadow changes into bone.
When I blush I weep for joy,
And laughter drops from me like stone:
The aging laughter of the boy
To see the ageless dead so coy.
Shadow changes into bone.
Paterson, August 1948
Copyright © 1972 by May King Poetry Music Inc., Allen Ginsberg
When I died, love, when I died
my heart was broken in your care;
I never suffered love so fair
as now I suffer and abide
when I died, love, when I died.
When I died, love, when I died
I wearied in an endless maze
that men have walked for centuries,
as endless as the gate was wide
when I died, love, when I died.
When I died, love, when I died
there was a war in the upper air:
all that happens, happens there;
there was an angel at my side
when I died, love, when I died.
Paterson, August 1948
Today out of the window
the trees seemed like live
organisms on the moon.
Each bough extended upward
covered at the north end
with leaves, like a green
hairy protuberance. I saw
the scarlet-and-pink shoot-tips
of budding leaves wave
delicately in the sunlight,
blown by the breeze,
all the arms of the trees
bending and straining downward
at once when the wind
pushed them.
Paterson, August 1948
I was given my bedding, and a bunk
in an enormous ward,
surrounded by hundreds of weeping,
decaying men and women.
I sat on my bunk, three tiers up
next to the ceiling,
looking down the gray aisles.
Old, crippled, dumb people were
bent over sewing. A heavy girl
in a dirty dress
stared at me. I waited
for an official guide to come
and give me instructions.
After awhile, I wandered
off down empty corridors
in search of a toilet.
Dream, Paterson, Fall 1948
Go back to Egypt and the Greeks,
Where the Wizard understood
The spectre haunted where man seeks
And spoke to ghosts that stood in blood.
Go back, go back to the old legend;
The soul remembers, and is true:
What has been most and least imagined,
No other, there is nothing new.
The giant Phantom is ascending
Toward its coronation, gowned
With music unheard, but unending:
Follow the flower to the ground.
New York, January 1949
Take my love, it is not true,
So let it tempt no body new;
Take my lady, she will sigh
For my bed where’er I lie;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.
Take my raiment, now grown cold,
To give to some poor poet old;
Take the skin that hoods this truth
If his age would wear my youth;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.
Take the thoughts that like the wind
Blow my body out of mind;
Take this heart to go with that
And pass it on from rat to rat;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.
Take the art which I bemoan
In a poem’s crazy tone;
Grind me down, though I may groan,
To the starkest stick and stone;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.
Early 1949
These psalms are the workings of the vision haunted mind and not that reason which never changes.
I am flesh and blood, but my mind is the focus of much lightning.
I change with the weather, with the state of my finances, with the work I do, with my company.
But truly none of these is accountable for the majestic flaws of mind which have left my brain open to hallucination.
All work has been an imitation of the literary cackle in my head.
This gossip is an eccentric document to be lost in a library and rediscovered when the Dove descends.
New York, February 1949
I speak of love that comes to mind:
The moon is faithful, although blind;
She moves in thought she cannot speak.
Perfect care has made her bleak.
I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.
1945–1949
Sweet Levinsky in the night
Sweet Levinsky in the light
do you giggle out of spite,
or are you laughing in delight
sweet Levinsky, sweet Levinsky?
Sweet Levinsky, do you tremble
when the cock crows, and dissemble
as you amble to the gambol?
Why so humble when you stumble
sweet Levinsky, sweet Levinsky?
Sweet Levinsky, why so tearful,
sweet Levinsky don’t be fearful,
sweet Levinsky here’s your earful
of the angels chirping cheerfully
Levinsky, sweet Levinsky,
sweet Levinsky, sweet Levinsky.
New York, Spring 1949
Ah, still Lord, ah, sweet Divinity
Incarnate in our grave and holy substance,
Circumscribed in this hexed endless world
Of Time, that turns a triple face, from Hell,
Imprisoned joy’s incognizable thought,
To mounted earth, that shudders to conceive,
Toward angels, borne unseen out of this world,
Translate the speechless stanzas of the rose
Into my poem, and I vow to copy
Every petal on a page; perfume
My mind, ungardened, and in weedy earth;
Let these dark leaves be lit with images
That strike like lightning from eternal mind,
Truths that are not visible in any light
That changes and is Time, like flesh or theory,
Corruptible like any clock of meat
That sickens and runs down to die
With all those structures and machinery
Whose bones and bridges break and wash to sea
And are dissolved into green salt and coral.
A Bird of Paradise, the Nightingale
I cried for not so long ago, the poet’s
Phoenix, and the erotic Swan
Which descended and transfigured Time,
And all but destroyed it, in the Dove
I speak of now are here, I saw it here,
The Miracle, which no man knows entire,
Nor I myself. But shadow is my prophet,
I cast a shadow that surpasses me,
And I write, shadow changes into bone,
To say that still Word, the prophetic image
Beyond our present strength of flesh to bear,
Incarnate in the rain as in the sea,
Watches after us out of our eyes.
What a sweet dream! to be some incorruptible
Divinity, corporeal without a name,
Suffering metamorphosis of flesh.
Holy are the Visions of the soul
The visible mind seeks out for marriage,
As if the sleeping heart, agaze, in darkness,
Would dream her passions out as in the Heavens.
In flesh and flesh, imperfect spirits join
Vision upon vision, image upon image,
All physical and perishing, till spirit
Driven mad by Time, a ghost still haunted
By his mortal house, goes from the tomb
And drops his body back into the dirt.
I fear it till my soul remembers Heaven.
My name is Angel and my eyes are Fire!
O wonder, and more than wonder, in the world!
Now I have built my Love a sepulchre
Of whitened thoughts, and sat a year in ash,
Grieving for the lost entempled dead,
And Him who appeared to these dead eyes,
And Him my wakened beating mind remembered,
And Love that moved in substance clear as bone,
With beautiful music, at the fatal moment,
And clock stopped by its own, or hidden, hand.
These are the hollow echoes of His word.
Ah, but to have seen the Dove of still
Divinity come down in silken light of summer sun
In ignorance of the body and bone’s madness.
Light falls and I fail! My youth is ending,
All my youth, and Death and Beauty cry
Like horns and motors from a ship afar,
Half heard, an echo in the sea beneath,
And Death and Beauty beckon in the dawn,
A presage of the world of whitening shadows
As another pale memorial.
Ah! but to have seen the Dove, and then go blind.
I will grow old a grey and groaning man,
Hour after hour, with each hour a thought,
And with each thought the same denial. Am I to spend
My life in praise of the idea of God?
Time leaves no hope, and leaves us none of love;
We creep and wait, we wait and go alone.
When will the heart be weary of its own
Indignity? Or Time endured destroy
The last such thoughts as these, the thoughts of Dove?
Must ravenous reason not be self-consumed?
Our souls are purified of Time by Time,
And ignorance consumes itself like flesh.
Bigger and bigger gates, Thou givest, Lord,
And vaster deaths, and deaths not by my hand,
Till, in each season, as the garden dies,
I die with each, until I die no more
Time’s many deaths, and pass toward the last gates,
Till come, pure light, at last to pass through pearl.
Take me to thy mansion, for I house
In clay, in a sad dolor out of joy.
Behold thy myth incarnate in my flesh
Now made incarnate in Thy Psalm, O Lord.
New York, March 1949
Pull my daisy,
Tip my cup,
Cut my thoughts
For coconuts,
Bone my shadow,
Dove my soul,
Set a halo
On my skull,
Ark my darkness,
Rack my lacks,
Bleak my lurking,
Lark my looks,
Start my Arden,
Gate my shades,
Silk my garden,
Rose my days,
Whore my door,
Stone my dream,
Milk my mind
And make me cream,
Say my oops,
Ope my shell,
Roll my bones,
Ring my bell,
Pope my parts,
Pop my pot,
Poke my pap,
Pit my plum.
New York, Spring 1949
Pull my daisy
tip my cup
all my doors are open
Cut my thoughts
for coconuts
all my eggs are broken
Jack my Arden
gate my shades
woe my road is spoken
Silk my garden
rose my days
now my prayers awaken
Bone my shadow
dove my dream
start my halo bleeding
Milk my mind &
make me cream
drink me when you’re ready
Hop my heart on
harp my height
seraphs hold me steady
Hip my angel
hype my light
lay it on the needy
Heal the raindrop
sow the eye
bust my dust again
Woe the worm
work the wise
dig my spade the same
Stop the hoax
what’s the hex
where’s the wake
how’s the hicks
take my golden beam
Rob my locker
lick my rocks
leap my cock in school
Rack my lacks
lark my looks
jump right up my hole
Whore my door
beat my boor
eat my snake of fool
Craze my hair
bare my poor
asshole shorn of wool
Say my oops
ope my shell
bite my naked nut
Roll my bones
ring my bell
call my worm to sup
Pope my parts
pop my pot
raise my daisy up
Poke my pap
pit my plum
let my gap be shut
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac & Neal Cassady
New York, Spring-Fall 1949
Bare skin is my wrinkled sack
When hot Apollo humps my back
When Jack Frost grabs me in these rags
I wrap my legs with burlap bags
My flesh is cinder my face is snow
I walk the railroad to and fro
When city streets are black and dead
The railroad embankment is my bed
I sup my soup from old tin cans
And take my sweets from little hands
In Tiger Alley near the jail
I steal away from the garbage pail
In darkest night where none can see
Down in the bowels of the factory
I sneak barefoot upon stone
Come and hear the old man groan
I hide and wait like a naked child
Under the bridge my heart goes wild
I scream at a fire on the river bank
I give my body to an old gas tank
I dream that I have burning hair
Boiled arms that claw the air
The torso of an iron king
And on my back a broken wing
Who’ll go out whoring into the night
On the eyeless road in the skinny moonlight
Maid or dowd or athlete proud
May wanton with me in the shroud
Who’ll come lie down in the dark with me
Belly to belly and knee to knee
Who’ll look into my hooded eye
Who’ll lie down under my darkened thigh?
New York, 1949–1951
If money made the mind more sane,
Or money mellowed in the bowel
The hunger beyond hunger’s pain,
Or money choked the mortal growl
And made the groaner grin again,
Or did the laughing lamb embolden
To loll where has the lion lain,
I’d go make money and be golden.
Nor sex will salve the sickened soul,
Which has its holy goal an hour,
Holds to heart the golden pole,
But cannot save the silver shower,
Nor heal the sorry parts to whole.
Love is creeping under cover,
Where it hides its sleepy dole,
Else I were like any lover.
Many souls get lost at sea,
Others slave upon a stone:
Engines are not eyes to me,
Inside buildings I see bone.
Some from city to city flee,
Famous labors make them lie;
I cheat on that machinery,
Down in Arden I will die.
Art is short, nor style is sure:
Though words our virgin thoughts betray,
Time ravishes that thought most pure,
Which those who know, know anyway;
For if our daughter should endure,
When once we can no more complain,
Men take our beauty for a whore,
And like a whore, to entertain.
The city’s hipper slickers shine,
Up in the attic with the bats;
The higher Chinamen, supine,
Wear a dragon in their hats:
He who seeks a secret sign
In a daze or sicker doze
Blows the flower superfine;
Not a poppy is a rose.
If fame were not a fickle charm,
There were far more famous men:
May boys amaze the world to arm,
Yet their charms are changed again,
And fearful heroes turn to harm;
But the shambles is a sham.
A few angels on a farm
Fare more fancy with their lamb.
No more of this too pretty talk,
Dead glimpses of apocalypse:
The child pissing off the rock,
Or woman withered in the lips,
Contemplate the unseen Cock
That crows all beasts to ecstasy;
And so the Saints beyond the clock
Cry to men their dead eyes see.
Come, incomparable crown,
Love my love is lost to claim,
O hollow fame that makes me groan;
We are a king without a name:
Regain thine angel’s lost renown,
As, in the mind’s forgotten meadow,
Where brightest shades sleep under stone,
Man runs after his own shadow.
New York, March 1949
When I sit before a paper
writing my mind turns
in a kind of feminine
madness of chatter;
but to think to see, outside,
in a tenement the walls
of the universe itself
I wait: wait till the sky
appears as it is,
wait for a moment when
the poem itself
is my way of speaking out, not
declaiming of celebrating, yet,
but telling the truth.
New York, Early 1949
Sometime I’ll lay down my wrath,
As I lay my body down
Between the ache of breath and breath,
Golden slumber in the bone.
Thought’s a stone, though sweet or sorry,
Run-down from an uphill climb:
Money, money, work and worry,
And all the aimless toil of Time.
Sometime I look up in light
And see the weary sun go West;
Sometime I see the moon at night
Go hidden in her cloudy rest.
Sometime tears of death will blind
All that was worldly, wise or fair,
And visioned by the death of mind
My ghost will wander in the air,
And gaze upon a ghostly face,
Not knowing what was fair or lost,
Remembering not what flesh lay waste,
Or made him kind as ghost to ghost.
Brooklyn, April 24, 1949
Who is the shroudy stranger of the night,
Whose brow is mouldering green, whose reddened eye
Hides near the window trellis in dim light,
And gapes at old men, and makes children cry?
Who is the laughing walker of the street,
The alley mummy, stinking of the bone,
To dance unfixed, though bound in shadow feet,
Behind the child that creeps on legs of stone?
Who is the hungry mocker of the maze,
And haggard gate-ghost, hanging by the door,
The double mummer in whose hooded gaze
World has beckoned unto world once more?
Paterson, May 1949
Tonite all is well… What a
terrible future. I am twenty-three,
year of the iron birthday,
gate of darkness. I am ill,
I have become physically and
spiritually impotent in my madness this month.
I suddenly realized that my head
is severed from my body;
I realized it a few nights ago
by myself,
lying sleepless on the couch.
Paterson, Summer 1949
The death’s head of realism
and superhuman iron mask
that gapes out of The Possessed,
sometimes: Dostoievski.
My original version of D.
before I read him, as the dark
haunted-house man, wild, agèd,
spectral Russian. I call him
Dusty now but he is
Dostoyevsky What premonitions
I had as a child.
Paterson, June 1949
On a bare tree in a hollow place,
A blinded form’s unhaloed face;
Sight, where Heaven is destroyed,
The hanging visage of the void.
New York, Summer 1949
“The road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena.”
—Thos. Hardy
I attempted to concentrate
the total sun’s rays in
each poem as through a glass,
but such magnification
did not set the page afire.
New York, Summer 1949
This is the one and only
firmament; therefore
it is the absolute world.
There is no other world.
The circle is complete.
I am living in Eternity.
The ways of this world
are the ways of Heaven.
New York, Mid-1949
We know all about death that
we will ever know because
we have all experienced
the state before birth.
Life seems a passage between
two doors to the darkness.
Both are the same and truly
eternal, and perhaps it may
be said that we meet in
darkness. The nature of time
is illuminated by this
meeting of eternal ends.
It is amazing to think that
thought and personality
of man is perpetuated in
time after his passage
to eternity. And one time
is all Time if you look
at it out of the grave.
New York, Mid-1949
Art recalls the memory
of his true existence
to whoever has forgotten
that Being is the one thing
all the universe shouts.
Only return of thought to
its source will complete thought.
Only return of activity
to its source will complete
activity. Listen to that.
Mid-1949
No hyacinthine imagination can express this clock of meat bleakly pining for its sweet immaterial paradise which I have celebrated in one gone dithyramb after another and have elevated to that highest place in the mind’s angelical empyrean which shall in the course of hot centuries to come come to be known as the clock of light:
the very summa and dove of the unshrouding of finality’s joy whence cometh purely pearly streams of reves and honey-thoughts and all like dreamy essences our hearts therefrom so filled with such incomparable and crownly creaminess one never knew whence it came,
whether from those foul regions of the soul the ancients named Malebolge or the Dank or the icicle-like crystal roads of cloudless sky called Icecube or Avenue where the angels late fourteen there convened hang on and raptly gaze on us singing down
in mewing voices liturgies of milk and sweet cream sighing no longer for the strawberries of the world whence in pain and wit’s despair they had ascended stoops of light up the celestial fire escape no more to sit suffering as we do one and all on the thorn
nor more we shall when the final gate is opened and the Diamond Seraph armed with 3 forks of lightning 7 claps of thunder 11 bursts of laughter and a thousand tears rolling down his silken cheeks bares his radiant breast and asks us in the Name of the Lord to share that Love in Heaven which on Earth was so disinherited.
September 1949
The whole blear world
of smoke and twisted steel
around my head in a railroad
car, and my mind wandering
past the rust into futurity:
I saw the sun go down
in a carnal and primeval
world, leaving darkness
to cover my railroad train
because the other side of the
world was waiting for dawn.
New York-Paterson, November 1949
The Jersey Marshes in rain, November evening, seen from Susquehanna Railroad
The wrathful East of smoke and iron
Crowded in a broken crown;
The Archer of the Jersey mire
Naked in a rusty gown;
Railroad creeping toward the fire
Where the carnal sun goes down.
Apollo’s shining chariot’s shadow
Shudders in the mortal bourn;
Amber shores upon the meadow
Where Phaëthon falls forlorn
Fade in somber chiaroscuro,
Phantoms of the burning morn.
Westward to the world’s blind gaze,
In funeral of raining cloud,
The motionless cold Heavens blaze,
Born out of a dying crowd;
Daybreak in the end of days,
Bloody light beneath the shroud.
In vault dominion of the night
The hosts of prophecy convene,
Till, empire of the lark alight,
Their bodies waken as we dream,
And put our raiment on, and bright
Crown, still haloed though unseen.
Under the earth there is an eye
Open in a sightless cave,
And the skull in Eternity
Bares indifference to the grave:
Earth turns, and the day must die,
And the sea accepts the wave.
My bones are carried on the train
Westward where the sun has gone;
Night has darkened in the rain,
And the rainbow day is done;
Cities age upon the plain
And smoke rolls upward out of stone.
New York-Paterson, November 1949–1950
What do I want in these rooms papered with visions of money?
How much can I make by cutting my hair? If I put new heels on my shoes, bathe my body reeking of masturbation and sweat, layer upon layer of excrement
dried in employment bureaus, magazine hallways, statistical cubicles, factory stairways,
cloakrooms of the smiling gods of psychiatry;
if in antechambers I face the presumption of department store supervisory employees,
old clerks in their asylums of fat, the slobs and dumbbells of the ego with money and power
to hire and fire and make and break and fart and justify their reality of wrath and rumor of wrath to wrath-weary man,
what war I enter and for what a prize! the dead prick of commonplace obsession,
harridan vision of electricity at night and daylight misery of thumb-sucking rage.
I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins,
eyes and ears full of marijuana,
eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the border
or laying in a hotel room over the body of some suffering man or woman;
rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun;
rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati;
rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies;
rather, crowned with thorns in Galveston, nailed hand and foot in Los Angeles, raised up to die in Denver,
pierced in the side in Chicago, perished and tombed in New Orleans and resurrected in 1958 somewhere on Garret Mountain,
come down roaring in a blaze of hot cars and garbage,
streetcorner Evangel in front of City Hall, surrounded by statues of agonized lions,
with a mouthful of shit, and the hair rising on my scalp,
screaming and dancing in praise of Eternity annihilating the sidewalk, annihilating reality,
screaming and dancing against the orchestra in the destructible ballroom of the world,
blood streaming from my belly and shoulders
flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and highways
by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees.
New York, November 1949
When I think of death
I get a goofy feeling;
Then I catch my breath:
Zero is appealing,
Appearances are hazy.
Smart went crazy,
Smart went crazy.
*
A flower in my head
Has fallen through my eye;
Someday I’ll be dead:
I love the Lord on high,
I wish He’d pull my daisy.
Smart went crazy,
Smart went crazy.
*
I asked the lady what’s a rose,
She kicked me out of bed.
I asked the man, and so it goes,
He hit me on the head.
Nobody knows,
Nobody knows,
At least nobody’s said.
*
The time I went to China
To lead the boy scout troops,
They sank my ocean liner,
And all I said was “Oops!”
*
All the doctors think I’m crazy;
The truth is really that I’m lazy:
I made visions to beguile ’em
Till they put me in th’asylum
*
I’m a pot and God’s a potter,
And my head’s a piece of putty.
Ark my darkness,
Lark my looks,
I’m so lucky to be nutty.
New York, March-December 1949
I waked at midmost in the night,
Dim lamp shuddering in the bell,
House enwracked with natal light
That glowed as in a ghostly shell.
I rose and darked the hornlike flare,
And watched the shadows in the room
Crawl on walls and empty air
Through the window from the moon.
I stared in phantom-attic dark
At such radiant shapes of gloom,
I thought my fancy and mind’s lark
So cried for Death that He had come.
As sleepy-faced night walkers go,
Room to room, and down the stair,
Through the labyrinth to and fro,
So I paced sleepless in nightmare.
I walked out to the city tower,
Where, as in a stony cell,
Time lay prisoned, and twelfth hour
Complained upon the midnight bell.
I met a boy on the city street,
Fair was his hair, and fair his eyes,
Walking in his winding sheet,
As fair as was my own disguise.
He walked his way in a white shroud,
His cheek was whiter than his gown.
He looked at me, and spoke aloud,
And all his voice was but a groan:
“My love is dreaming of me now,
For I have dreamed him oft so well
That in my ghostly sleep I go
To find him by the midnight bell.
And so I walk and speak these lines
Which he will hear and understand.
If some poor wandering child of time
Finds me, let him take my hand,
And I will lead him to the stone,
And I will lead him through the grave,
But let him fear no light of bone,
And let him fear no dark of wave,
And we will walk the double door
That breaks upon the ageless night,
Where I have come, and must once more
Return, and so forsake the light.”
The darkness that is half disguised
In the Zodiac of my dream
Gazed on me in his bleak eyes,
And I became what now I seem.
Once my crown was silk and black;
I have dreamed, and I awake.
Now that time has wormed my cheek,
Horns and willows me bespeak.
Paterson, December 1949
Seven years’ words wasted
waiting on the spiderweb:
seven years’ thoughts
harkening the host,
seven years’ lost
sentience naming images,
narrowing down the name
to nothing,
seven years’:
fears
in a web of ancient measure;
the words dead
flies, a crop
of ghosts,
seven years’:
the spider is dead.
Paterson, Spring 1950
1
The Shroudy Stranger’s reft of realms.
Abhorred he sits upon the city dump.
His broken heart’s a bag of shit.
The vast rainfall, an empty mirror.
2
A Dream
He climbed over the rim
of the huge tower
looking down afraid,
descended the escarpment
over sheaves of rock,
crossed railyard gullies
and vast river-bridges
on the groundward slope
under an iron viaduct,
coming to rivulet
in a still meadow
by a small wood
where he stood trembling
in the naked flowers,
and walked under oak
to the house of folk.
3
I dreamed I was dreaming again
and decided to go down the years
looking for the Shrouded Stranger.
I knew the old bastard
was hanging around somewhere.
I couldn’t find him for a while;
went looking under beds,
pulling mattresses off,
and finally discovered him
hiding under the springs
crouched in the corner:
met him face to face at last.
I didn’t even recognize him.
“I’ll bet you didn’t think
it was me after all,” he said.
4
Fragmenta Monumenti
It was to have a structure, it
was going to tell a story;
it was to be a mass of images
moving on a page, with
a hollow voice at the center;
it was to have told of Time
and Eternity; to have begun
in the rainfall’s hood and moon,
and ended under the street light
of the world’s bare physical
appearance; begun among vultures
in the mountains of Mexico,
traveled through all America
and ended in garbage on River Street;
its first line was to be
“Be with me Shroud, now—”
and the last “—naked
on broken bottles
between the brick walls,”
being THE VISION OF THE SHROUDED STRANGER OF THE NIGHT.
Paterson-New York, 1949-September 1950
Oh dry old rose of God,
that with such bleak perfume
changed images to blood
and body to a tomb,
what fragrance you have lost,
and are now withered mere
crimson myth of dust
and recollection sere
of an unfading garden
whereof the myriad life
and all that flock in blossom,
none other met the knife.
Paterson, Early 1950
There is more to Fury
Than men imagine
Who drive a pallid jury
On a pale engine.
In a spinning plane,
A false machine,
The pilot drops in flame
From the unseen.
Paterson, Early 1950
a.
Reality is a question
of realizing how real
the world is already.
Time is Eternity
ultimate and immovable;
everyone’s an angel.
It’s Heaven’s mystery
of changing perfection:
absolutely Eternity
changes! Cars are always
going down the street,
lamps go off and on.
It’s a great flat plain;
we can see everything
on top of the table.
Clams open on the table,
lambs are eaten by worms
on the plain. The motion
of change is beautiful,
as well as form called
in and out of being.
b.
Next: to distinguish process
in its particularity with
an eye to the initiation
of gratifying new changes
desired in the real world.
Here we’re overwhelmed
with such unpleasant detail
we dream again of Heaven.
For the world is a mountain
of shit: if it’s going to
be moved at all, it’s got
to be taken by handfuls.
c.
Man lives like the unhappy
whore on River Street who
in her Eternity gets only
a couple of bucks and a lot
of snide remarks in return
for seeking physical love
the best way she knows how,
never really heard of a glad
job or joyous marriage or
a difference in the heart:
or thinks it isn’t for her,
which is her worst misery.
Paterson, Spring 1950
Last night I dreamed
of one I loved
for seven long years,
but I saw no face,
only the familiar
presence of the body:
sweat skin eyes
feces urine sperm
saliva all one
odor and mortal taste.
Paterson, Spring 1950
In the foreground we see time and life
swept in a race
toward the left hand side of the picture
where shore meets shore.
But that meeting place
isn’t represented;
it doesn’t occur on the canvas.
For the other side of the bay
is Heaven and Eternity,
with a bleak white haze over its mountains.
And the immense water of L’Estaque is a go-between
for minute rowboats.
Paterson, Summer 1950
Marlene Dietrich is singing a lament
for mechanical love.
She leans against a mortarboard tree
on a plateau by the seashore.
She’s a life-sized toy,
the doll of eternity;
her hair is shaped like an abstract hat
made out of white steel.
Her face is powdered, whitewashed and
immobile like a robot.
Jutting out of her temple, by an eye,
is a little white key.
She gazes through dull blue pupils
set in the whites of her eyes.
She closes them, and the key
turns by itself.
She opens her eyes, and they’re blank
like a statue’s in a museum.
Her machine begins to move, the key turns
again, her eyes change, she sings
—you’d think I would have thought a plan
to end the inner grind,
but not till I have found a man
to occupy my mind.
Dream, Paterson, Mid-1950
and ate so much the bill was five dollars,
but they had no idea
what they were getting themselves into,
so they shoveled
garbage into a truck in the alley
to make up for the food.
After about five minutes, wondering
how long they would have
to work off what it cost, they asked
the diner owner when
their penance or pay would be over.
He laughed.
Little did they realize—they were
so virginal—
that a grown worker works half a day
for money like that.
Paterson, Mid-1950
Now mind is clear
as a cloudless sky.
Time then to make a
home in wilderness.
What have I done but
wander with my eyes
in the trees? So I
will build: wife,
family, and seek
for neighbors.
Or I
perish of lonesomeness
or want of food or
lightning or the bear
(must tame the hart
and wear the bear).
And maybe make an image
of my wandering, a little
image—shrine by the
roadside to signify
to traveler that I live
here in the wilderness
awake and at home.
Paterson, Mid-1950
He cast off all his golden robes
and lay down sleeping in the night,
and in a dream he saw three fates
at a machine in a shroud of light.
He yelled “I wait the end of Time;
be with me, shroud, now, in my wrath!
There is a lantern in my grave,
who hath that lantern all light hath.”
Alas! The prophet of this dream
is sunken in the dumbing clime:
much is finished, much forgotten
in the wrack and wild love of time.
It’s death that makes man’s life a dream
and heaven’s splendor but a wave;
light that falls into the sea
is swallowed in a starving cave.
Skin may be visionary till the crystal
skull is coaled in aged shade,
but underground the lantern dies,
shroud must rot, and memory fade.
Who talks of Death and Angel now,
great angel darkened out of grace?
The shroud enfolds your radiant doom,
the silent Parcae change the race,
while the man of the apocalypse
shall with his wrath lie ever wed
until the sexless womb bear love,
and the grave be weary of the dead,
tragical master broken down
into a self-embodied tomb,
blinded by the sight of death,
and woven in the darkened loom.
Paterson, September 1950
Now I have become a man
and know no more than mankind can
and groan with nature’s every groan,
transcending child’s blind skeleton
and all childish divinity,
while loomed in consanguinity
the weaving of the shroud goes on.
No two things alike; and yet
first memory dies, then I forget
one carnal thought that made thought grim:
but that has sunk below time’s rim
and wonder ageing into woe
later dayes more fatal show:
Time gets thicker, light gets dim.
And I a second Time am blind,
all starlight dimmed out of the mind
that was first candle to the morn,
and candelabra turned to thorn.
All is dream till morn has rayed
the Rose of night back into shade,
Messiah firmament reborn.
Now I cannot go be wild
or harken back to shape of child
chrystal born into the aire
circled by the harte and bear
and agelesse in a greene arcade,
for he is down in Granite laid,
or standing on a Granite stair.
No return, where thought’s completed;
let that ghost’s last gaze go cheated:
I may waste my days no more
pining in spirituall warre.
Where am I in wilderness?
What creature bore my bones to this?
Here is no Eden: this is my store.
September 1950–1951
Chorus of Working Girls
There was this character come in
to pick up all the broken threads
and tie them back into the loom.
He thought that what he didn’t know
would do as well as well did, tying
threads together with real small knots.
So there he was shivering in his shoes,
showing his wish to be a god of all the knots
we tended after suffering to learn them up.
But years ago we were employed by Mr. Smith
to tie these knots which it took us all
of six months to perfect. However he showed
no sign of progress learning how after five
weeks of frigid circumstances of his own
making which we made sure he didn’t break
out of by freezing up on him. Obviously
he wasn’t a real man anyway but a goop.
New York, Late 1950
Joe Blow has decided
he will no longer
be a fairy.
He involves himself
in various snatches
and then hits
a nut named Mary.
He gets in bed with her
and performs
as what in his mind
would be his usual
okay job,
which should be solid
as a rock
but isn’t.
What goes wrong here?
he says
to himself. I want
to take her
but she doesn’t want
to take me.
I thought I was
giving her * * *
and she was giving
me a man’s
position in the world.
Now suddenly she lays
down the law.
I’m very tired, she says,
please go.
Is this it? he thinks.
I didn’t want it
to come to that but
I’ve got to get out
of this situation.
So the question
resolves itself: do
you settle for her
or go? I wouldn’t
give you a nickel,
you aren’t much of a doll
anyway. And he
picks up his pride
and puts on his pants
—glad enough
to have pants to wear—
and goes.
Why is it that versions
of this lack
of communication are
universal?
New York, Late 1950
Living in an apartment with a gelded cat
I found a maiden—and left her there.
I seek a better bargain; and that aunt,
that aunt of hers was an awful nuisance.
Seriously, between us, I think I did right
in all things by her. And I’ll see her again,
and we’ll become friendly (not lovers) because
I have to work with her in the shoestore.
She knows, too. And it will be interesting
tomorrow to see how she acts. If she’s
friendly (or even loving) I will resist:
albeit so politely she’ll think she has
been complimented. And one night
drunk maybe we’ll have a ball.
Paterson, December 1950
America is like Russia.
Acis and Galatea sit by the lake.
We have the proletariat too.
Acis and Galatea sit by the lake.
Versilov wore a hair shirt
and dreamed of classical pictures.
The alleys, the dye works,
Mill Street in the smoke,
melancholy of the bars,
the sadness of long highways,
negroes climbing around
the rusted iron by the river,
the bathing pool hidden
behind the silk factory
fed by its drainage pipes;
all the pictures we carry in our mind
images of the thirties,
depression and class consciousness
transfigured above politics
filled with fire
with the appearance of God.
Early 1951
Where O America are you
going in your glorious
automobile, careening
down the highway
toward what crash
in the deep canyon
of the Western Rockies,
or racing the sunset
over Golden Gate
toward what wild city
jumping with jazz
on the Pacific Ocean!
Spring 1951
How sick I am!
that thought
always comes to me
with horror.
Is it this strange
for everybody?
But such fugitive feelings
have always been
my métier.
Baudelaire—yet he had
great joyful moments
staring into space,
looking into the
middle distance,
contemplating his image
in Eternity.
They were his moments
of identity.
It is solitude that
produces these thoughts.
It is December
almost, they are singing
Christmas carols
in front of the department
stores down the block on
Fourteenth Street.
New York, November 1951
The first time I went
to the country to New Hampshire
when I was about eight
there was a girl
I always used to paddle with a plywood stick.
We were in love,
so the last night there
we undressed in the moonlight
and showed each other our bodies,
then we ran singing back to the house.
December 10, 1951
over knowledge of death.
(See also Hemingway’s
preoccupation.) My
dreamworld and realworld
become more and more
distinct and apart.
I see now that what
I sought in X seven years
ago was mastery or
victimage played out
naked in the bed.
Renewal of nostalgia
for lost flair of those days,
lost passions …
Trouble with
me now, no active life
in realworld. And Time,
as realworld, appearing vile,
as Shakespeare says:
ruinous, vile, dirty Time.
As to knowledge of death:
and life itself as without
consummation foreseeable
in ideal joy or passion
(have I exaggerated the
terror of catastrophe?
reality can be joy or terror—
and have I exaggerated the joy?):
life as vile, as painful,
as wretched (this pessimism
which was X’s jewel),
as grim, not merely bleak:
the grimness of chance. Or as
Carl wrote, after bughouse,
“How often have I
had occasion to see
existence display
the affectations
of a bloodthirsty
negro homosexual.”
December 1951
reaching my own block
I saw the Port Authority
Building hovering over
the old ghetto side
of the street I tenement
in company with obscure
Bartlebys and Judes,
cadaverous men,
shrouded men, soft white
fleshed failures creeping
in and out of rooms like
myself. Remembering
my attic, I reached
my hands to my head and hissed,
“Oh, God how horrible!”
New York, December 1951
I learned a world from each
one whom I loved;
so many worlds without
a Zodiac.
New York, December 1951
I made love to myself
in the mirror, kissing my own lips,
saying, “I love myself,
I love you more than anybody.”
New York, December 30, 1951
Elements on my table—
the clock.
All life reduced to this—
its tick.
Dusty’s modern lamp,
all shape, space and curve.
Last attempts at speech.
And the carved
serpentine knife of Mexico,
with the childish
eagle head on the handle.
New York, December 30, 1951
I feel as if I am at a dead
end and so I am finished.
All spiritual facts I realize
are true but I never escape
the feeling of being closed in
and the sordidness of self,
the futility of all that I
have seen and done and said.
Maybe if I continued things
would please me more but now
I have no hope and I am tired.
New York, Early 1952
—Long enough to remember the girl
who proposed love to me in the neon
light of the Park Avenue Drugstore
(while her girl friends walked
giggling in the night) who had
such eerie mental insight into my
coldness, coupled with what seemed
to me an untrustworthy character,
and who died a few months later,
perhaps a month after I ceased
thinking of her, of an unforeseen
brain malignancy. By hindsight,
I should have known that only such
a state of deathliness could bare
in a local girl such a luminous
candor. I wish I had been kinder.
This hindsight is the opposite,
after all, of believing that even
in the face of death man can be
no more than ordinary man.
New York, January 1952
I came home from the movies with nothing on my mind,
Trudging up 8th Avenue to 15th almost blind,
Waiting for a passenger ship to go to sea.
I live in a roominghouse attic near the Port Authority,
An enormous City warehouse slowly turning brown
Across from which old brownstones’ fire escapes hang down
On a street which should be Russia outside the Golden gates
Or back in the middle ages not in United States.
I thought of my home in the suburbs, my father who wanted me home,
My aunts in the asylum myself in Nome or Rome.
I opened the door downstairs & Creaked up the first flight.
A Puerto Rican in the front room was laughing in the night.
I saw from the second stairway the homosexual pair
That lived in different cubicles playing solitaire,
And I stopped on the third landing and said hello to Ned,
A crooked old man like Father Time who drank all night in bed.
I made it up to the attic room I paid $4.50 for.
There was a solitary cockroach on my door.
It passed me by. I entered. Nothing of much worth
Was hung up under the skylight. I saw what I had on earth.
Bare elements of Solitude: table, chair & clock;
Two books on top of the bedspread, Jack Woodford and Paul de Kock.
I sat down at the table & read a holy book
About a super City whereon I cannot look.
What misery to be guided to an eternal clime
When I yearn for sixty minutes of actual time.
I turned on the Radio voices strong and clear
described the high fidelity of a set without a peer.
Then I heard great musicians playing the Mahogany Hall
Up to the last high chorus. My neighbor beat on the wall.
I looked up at the Calendar it had a picture there
Showing two pairs of lovers and all had golden hair.
I looked into the mirror to check my worst fears.
My face is dark but handsome It has not loved for years.
I lay down with the paper to see what Time had wrought:
Peace was beyond vision, war too much for thought.
Only the suffering shadow of Dream Driven Boy, 16
Looked in my eyes from the Centerfold after murdering High School Queen.
I stripped, my head on the pillow eyes on the cracked blue wall.
The same cockroach or another continued its upward crawl.
From what faint words, what whispers did I lie alone apart?
What wanted consummation? What sweetening of the heart?
I wished that I were married to a sensual thoughtful girl.
I would have made a wedded workmanlike tender churl.
I wished that I were working for $10,000 a year.
I looked all right in business suits but my heart was weak with fear.
I wished I owned an apartment uptown on the East Side,
So that my gentle breeding nurtured, had not died.
I wished I had an Aesthetic worth its weight in gold.
The myth is still unwritten. I am getting old.
I closed my eyes and drifted back in helpless shame
To jobs & loves wasted Disillusion itself was lame.
I closed my eyes and drifted the shortening years ahead,
Walk home from the movies lone long nights in bed,
Books, plays, music, spring afternoons in bars,
The smell of old Countries, the smoke of dark cigars.
February 1952
[According to biographer Bill Morgan, the actual address where this poem was written was 346 West 15th Street.—The Allen Ginsberg Trust, May 2006]
A faithful youth
with artificial legs
drove his jalopy
through the towns of Texas.
He got sent out
of the Free Hospital
of Galveston, madtown
on the Gulf of Mexico
after he recovered.
They gave him a car
and a black mongrel;
name was Weakness.
He was a thin kid
with golden hair
and a frail body
on wire thighs,
who never traveled
and drove northward
timid on the highway
going about twenty.
I hitched a hike
and showed him the road.
I got off at Small Town
and stole his dog.
He tried to drive away,
but lost control,
rode on the pavement
near a garage,
and smashed his doors
and fenders on trees
and parked cars,
and came to a halt.
The Marshal came,
stopping everything
pulled him out
of the wreck cursing.
I watched it all
from the lunch cart,
holding the dog
with a frayed rope.
“I’m on my own
from the crazyhouse.
Has anybody
seen my Weakness?”
What are they saying?
“Call up the FBI.
Crazy, ha? What
is he a fairy?
He must do funny
things with women,
we bet he * * *
them in the * * *.”
Poor child meanwhile
collapsed on the ground
with innocent expression
is trying to get up.
Along came a Justice
of the Supreme Court,
barreling through town
in a blue limousine.
He stopped by the crowd
to find out the story,
got out on his pegleg
with an angry smile.
“Don’t you see
he has no legs?
That’s you fools
what crazy means.”
He picked the boy
up off the ground.
The dog ran to them
from the lunch cart.
He put them both in
the back seat of his car
and stood in the square
hymning at the crowd:
“Rock rock rock
for the tension
of the people
of this country
rock rock rock
for the craziness
of the people
of America
tension is a rock
and god will
rock our rock
craziness is a rock
and god will
rock our rock
Lord we shall all
be sweet again.”
He showed his wooden leg
to the boy, saying:
“I promise to drive you
home through America.”
Paterson, April 1952
Blandly mother
takes him strolling
by railroad and by river
—he’s the son of the absconded
hot rod angel—
and he imagines cars
and rides them in his dreams,
so lonely growing up among
the imaginary automobiles
and dead souls of Tarrytown
to create
out of his own imagination
the beauty of his wild
forebears—a mythology
he cannot inherit.
Will he later hallucinate
his gods? Waking
among mysteries with
an insane gleam
of recollection?
The recognition—
something so rare
in his soul,
met only in dreams
—nostalgias
of another life.
A question of the soul.
And the injured
losing their injury
in their innocence
—a cock, a cross,
an excellence of love.
And the father grieves
in flophouse
complexities of memory
a thousand miles
away, unknowing
of the unexpected
youthful stranger
bumming toward his door.
New York, April 13, 1952