I’m happy, Kerouac, your madman Allen’s
finally made it: discovered a new young cat,
and my imagination of an eternal boy
walks on the streets of San Francisco,
handsome, and meets me in cafeterias
and loves me. Ah don’t think I’m sickening.
You’re angry at me. For all of my lovers?
It’s hard to eat shit, without having visions;
when they have eyes for me it’s like Heaven.
San Francisco, 1955
A drunken night in my house with a
boy, San Francisco: I lay asleep:
darkness:
I went back to Mexico City
and saw Joan Burroughs leaning
forward in a garden chair, arms
on her knees. She studied me with
clear eyes and downcast smile, her
face restored to a fine beauty
tequila and salt had made strange
before the bullet in her brow.
We talked of the life since then.
Well, what’s Burroughs doing now?
Bill on earth, he’s in North Africa.
Oh, and Kerouac? Jack still jumps
with the same beat genius as before,
notebooks filled with Buddha.
I hope he makes it, she laughed.
Is Huncke still in the can? No,
last time I saw him on Times Square.
And how is Kenney? Married, drunk
and golden in the East. You? New
loves in the West—
Then I knew
she was a dream: and questioned her
—Joan, what kind of knowledge have
the dead? can you still love
your mortal acquaintances?
What do you remember of us?
She
faded in front of me— The next instant
I saw her rain-stained tombstone
rear an illegible epitaph
under the gnarled branch of a small
tree in the wild grass
of an unvisited garden in Mexico.
for their descent,
dancing round my desk,
crowning my balding head
with Laurel.
1955
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion &the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jail-house and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
III
Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland where you’re madder than I am
I’m with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange
I’m with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother
I’m with you in Rockland where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries
I’m with you in Rockland where you laugh at this invisible humor
I’m with you in Rockland where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I’m with you in Rockland where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I’m with you in Rockland where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I’m with you in Rockland where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I’m with you in Rockland where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I’m with you in Rockland where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I’m with you in Rockland where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I’m with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I’m with you in Rockland where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I’m with you in Rockland where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I’m with you in Rockland where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I’m with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep
I’m with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
San Francisco, 1955–1956
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!
The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!
Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels!
Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas!
Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes & drums!
Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!
Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!
Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul!
Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!
Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss!
Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!
Berkeley, 1955
All afternoon cutting bramble blackberries off a tottering brown fence
under a low branch with its rotten old apricots miscellaneous under the leaves,
fixing the drip in the intricate gut machinery of a new toilet;
found a good coffeepot in the vines by the porch, rolled a big tire out of the scarlet bushes, hid my marijuana;
wet the flowers, playing the sunlit water each to each, returning for godly extra drops for the stringbeans and daisies;
three times walked round the grass and sighed absently:
my reward, when the garden fed me its plums from the form of a small tree in the corner,
an angel thoughtful of my stomach, and my dry and lovelorn tongue.
1955
Block print by Robert LaVigne
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! —and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
Berkeley, 1955
Looking over my shoulder
my behind was covered
with cherry blossoms.
Lying on my side
in the void:
the breath in my nose.
I didn’t know the names
of the flowers—now
my garden is gone.
On the porch
in my shorts—
auto lights in the rain.
Berkeley, Fall 1955
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the river-bank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust—
—I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past—
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye—
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man’s grime but death and human locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—modern—all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown—
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these
entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul too, and anyone who’ll listen,
—We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.
Berkeley, 1955
The flower in the glass peanut bottle formerly in the kitchen crooked to take a place in the light,
the closet door opened, because I used it before, it kindly stayed open waiting for me, its owner.
I began to feel my misery in pallet on floor, listening to music, my misery, that’s why I want to sing.
The room closed down on me, I expected the presence of the Creator, I saw my gray painted walls and ceiling, they contained my room, they contained me
as the sky contained my garden,
I opened my door
The rambler vine climbed up the cottage post, the leaves in the night still where the day had placed them, the animal heads of the flowers where they had arisen
to think at the sun
Can I bring back the words? Will thought of transcription haze my mental open eye?
The kindly search for growth, the gracious desire to exist of the flowers, my near ecstasy at existing among them
The privilege to witness my existence—you too must seek the sun …
My books piled up before me for my use
waiting in space where I placed them, they haven’t disappeared, time’s left its remnants and qualities for me to use—my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.
I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.
Saw the red blossoms in the night light, sun’s gone, they had all grown, in a moment, and were waiting stopped in time for the day sun to come and give them …
Flowers which as in a dream at sunset I watered faithfully not knowing how much I loved them.
I am so lonely in my glory—except they too out there—I looked up —those red bush blossoms beckoning and peering in the window waiting in blind love, their leaves too have hope and are upturned top flat to the sky to receive—all creation open to receive—the flat earth itself.
The music descends, as does the tall bending stalk of the heavy blossom, because it has to, to stay alive, to continue to the last drop of joy.
The world knows the love that’s in its breast as in the flower, the suffering lonely world.
The Father is merciful.
The light socket is crudely attached to the ceiling, after the house was built, to receive a plug which sticks in it allright, and serves my phonograph now…
The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.
The kitchen has no door, the hole there will admit me should I wish to enter the kitchen.
I remember when I first got laid, H.P. graciously took my cherry, I sat on the docks of Provincetown, age 23, joyful, elevated in hope with the Father, the door to the womb was open to admit me if I wished to enter.
There are unused electricity plugs all over my house if I ever need them.
The kitchen window is open, to admit air …
The telephone—sad to relate—sits on the floor—I haven’t the money to get it connected—
I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the Creator.
And the Creator gave me a shot of his presence to gratify my wish, so as not to cheat me of my yearning for him.
Berkeley, September 8, 1955
Why do I deny manna to another?
Because I deny it to myself.
Why have I denied myself?
What other has rejected me?
Now I believe you are lovely, my soul, soul of Allen, Allen—
and you so beloved, so sweetened, so recalled to your true loveliness,
your original nude breathing Allen
will you ever deny another again?
Dear Walter, thanks for the message
I forbid you not to touch me, man to man, True American.
The bombers jet through the sky in unison of twelve,
the pilots are sweating and nervous at the controls in the hot cabins.
Over what souls will they loose their loveless bombs?
The Campanile pokes its white granite (?) innocent head into the clouds for me to look at.
A cripple lady explains French grammar with a loud sweet voice: Regarder is to look—
the whole French language looks on the trees on the campus.
The girls’ haunted voices make quiet dates for 2 o’clock—yet one of them waves farewell and smiles at last—her red skirt swinging shows how she loves herself.
Another encased in flashy Scotch clothes clomps up the concrete in a hurry—into the door—poor dear!—who will receive you in love’s offices?
How many beautiful boys have I seen on this spot?
The trees seem on the verge of moving—ah! they do move in the breeze.
Roar again of airplanes in the sky—everyone looks up.
And do you know that all these rubbings of the eyes & painful gestures to the brow
of suited scholars entering Dwinelle (Hall) are Holy Signs?—anxiety and fear?
How many years have I got to float on this sweetened scene of trees & humans clomping above ground—
O I must be mad to sit here lonely in the void & glee & build up thoughts of love!
But what do I have to doubt but my own shiny eyes, what to lose but life which is a vision today this afternoon.
My stomach is light, I relax, new sentences spring forth out of the scene to describe spontaneous forms of Time—trees, sleeping dogs, airplanes wandering thru the air, negroes with their lunch books of anxiety, apples and sandwiches, lunchtime, icecream, Timeless—
And even the ugliest will seek beauty—‘What are you doing Friday night?’ asks the sailor in white school training cap & gilt buttons & blue coat,
and the little ape in a green jacket and baggy pants and overloaded school-book satchel says ‘Quartets.’
Every Friday nite, beautiful quartets to celebrate and please my soul with all its hair—Music!
and then strides off, snapping pieces chocolate off a bar wrapped in Hershey brown paper and tinfoil,
eating chocolate rose.
& how can those other boys be them happy selves in their brown army study uniforms?
Now cripple girl swings down walk with loping fuck gestures of her hips askew—
let her roll her eyes in abandon & camp angelic through the campus bouncing her body about in joy—
someone will dig that pelvic energy for sure.
Those white stripes down your chocolate cupcake, Lady (held in front of your nose finishing sentence preparatory to chomp),
they were painted there to delight you by some spanish industrial artistic hand in bakery factory faraway,
expert hand in simple-minded messages of white stripes on millions of message cupcakes.
I have a message for you all—I will denote one particularity of each!
And there goes Professor Hart striding enlightened by the years through the doorway and arcade he built (in his mind) and knows—he too saw the ruins of Yucatán once—
followed by a lonely janitor in dovegray italian fruitpeddler Chico Marx hat pushing his rolypoly belly thru the trees.
N sees all girls
as visions of
their inner cunts,
yes, it’s true!
and all men walking
along thinking
of their spirit cocks.
So look at that poor dread boy
with two-day black hair
all over his dirty face,
how he must hate his cock
—Chinamen stop shuddering
and now to bring this to an end with a rise and an ellipse—
The boys are now all talking to the girls ‘If I was a girl I’d love all boys’ & girls giggling the opposite, all pretty everywhichway
and even I have my secret beds and lovers under another moonlight, be you sure
& any minute I expect to see a baby carriage pushed on to the scene
and everyone turn in attention like the airplanes and laughter, like a Greek Campus
and the big brown shaggy silent dog lazing openeyed in the shade
lift up his head & sniff & lower his head on his golden paws & let his belly rumble away unconcerned.
… the lion’s ruddy eyes
Shall flow with tears of gold.
Now the silence is broken, students pour onto the square, the doors are crowded, the dog gets up and walks away,
the cripple swings out of Dwinelle, a nun even, I wonder about her, an old lady distinguished by a cane,
we all look up, silence moves, huge changes upon the ground, and in the air thoughts fly all over, filling space.
My grief at Peter’s not loving me was grief at not loving myself.
Huge Karmas of broken minds in beautiful bodies unable to receive love because not knowing the self as lovely—
Fathers and Teachers!
Seeing in people the visible evidence of inner self thought by their treatment of me: who loves himself loves me who love myself.
Berkeley, September 1955
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
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
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
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
Seattle!—department stores full of fur coats and camping equipment, mad noontime businessmen in gabardine coats talking on streetcorners to keep up the structure, I float past, birds cry,
Salvation Army offers soup on rotting block, six thousand beggars groan at a meal of hopeful beans.
February 2, 1956
I’m crying all the time now.
I cried all over the street when I left the Seattle Wobbly Hall.
I cried listening to Bach.
I cried looking at the happy flowers in my backyard, I cried at the sadness of the middle-aged trees.
Happiness exists I feel it.
I cried for my soul, I cried for the world’s soul.
The world has a beautiful soul.
God appearing to be seen and cried over. Overflowing heart of Paterson.
Seattle, February 2, 1956
Rexroth’s face reflecting human
tired bliss
White haired, wing browed
gas mustache,
flowers jet out of
his sad head,
listening to Edith Piaf street song
as she walks the universe
with all life gone
and cities disappeared
only the God of Love
left smiling.
Berkeley, March 1956
I
In the depths of the Greyhound Terminal
sitting dumbly on a baggage truck looking at the sky waiting for the Los Angeles Express to depart
worrying about eternity over the Post Office roof in the night-time red downtown heaven,
staring through my eyeglasses I realized shuddering these thoughts were not eternity, nor the poverty of our lives, irritable baggage clerks,
nor the millions of weeping relatives surrounding the buses waving goodbye,
nor other millions of the poor rushing around from city to city to see their loved ones,
nor an indian dead with fright talking to a huge cop by the Coke machine,
nor this trembling old lady with a cane taking the last trip of her life,
nor the red-capped cynical porter collecting his quarters and smiling over the smashed baggage,
nor me looking around at the horrible dream,
nor mustached negro Operating Clerk named Spade, dealing out with his marvelous long hand the fate of thousands of express packages,
nor fairy Sam in the basement limping from leaden trunk to trunk,
nor Joe at the counter with his nervous breakdown smiling cowardly at the customers,
nor the grayish-green whale’s stomach interior loft where we keep the baggage in hideous racks,
hundreds of suitcases full of tragedy rocking back and forth waiting to be opened,
nor the baggage that’s lost, nor damaged handles, nameplates vanished, busted wires & broken ropes, whole trunks exploding on the concrete floor,
nor seabags emptied into the night in the final warehouse.
II
Yet Spade reminded me of Angel, unloading a bus,
dressed in blue overalls black face official Angel’s workman cap,
pushing with his belly a huge tin horse piled high with black baggage,
looking up as he passed the yellow light bulb of the loft
and holding high on his arm an iron shepherd’s crook.
It was the racks, I realized, sitting myself on top of them now as is my wont at lunchtime to rest my tired foot,
it was the racks, great wooden shelves and stanchions posts and beams assembled floor to roof jumbled with baggage,
—the Japanese white metal postwar trunk gaudily flowered & headed for Fort Bragg,
one Mexican green paper package in purple rope adorned with names for Nogales,
hundreds of radiators all at once for Eureka,
crates of Hawaiian underwear,
rolls of posters scattered over the Peninsula, nuts to Sacramento,
one human eye for Napa,
an aluminum box of human blood for Stockton
and a little red package of teeth for Calistoga—
it was the racks and these on the racks I saw naked in electric light the night before I quit,
the racks were created to hang our possessions, to keep us together, a temporary shift in space,
God’s only way of building the rickety structure of Time, to hold the bags to send on the roads, to carry our luggage from place to place looking for a bus to ride us back home to Eternity where the heart was left and farewell tears began.
IV
A swarm of baggage sitting by the counter as the transcontinental bus pulls in.
The clock registering 12:15 A.M., May 9, 1956, the second hand moving forward, red.
Getting ready to load my last bus.—Farewell, Walnut Creek Richmond Vallejo Portland Pacific Highway
Fleet-footed Quicksilver, god of transience.
One last package sits lone at midnight sticking up out of the Coast rack high as the dusty fluorescent light.
The wage they pay us is too low to live on. Tragedy reduced to numbers.
This for the poor shepherds. I am a communist.
Farewell ye Greyhound where I suffered so much, hurt my knee and scraped my hand and built my pectoral muscles big as vagina.
May 9, 1956
To God: to illuminate all men. Beginning with Skid Road.
Let Occidental and Washington be transformed into a higher place, the plaza of eternity.
Illuminate the welders in shipyards with the brilliance of their torches.
Let the crane operator lift up his arm for joy.
Let elevators creak and speak, ascending and descending in awe.
Let the mercy of the flower’s direction beckon in the eye.
Let the straight flower bespeak its purpose in straightness—to seek the light.
Let the crooked flower bespeak its purpose in crookedness—to seek the light.
Let the crookedness and straightness bespeak the light.
Let Puget Sound be a blast of light.
I feed on your Name like a cockroach on a crumb—this cockroach is holy.
Seattle, June, 1956
“Resolved to sing no songs henceforth but those of manly attachment”
—Walt Whitman
Neal Cassady was my animal: he brought me to my knees
and taught me the love of his cock and the secrets of his mind
And we met and conversed, went walking in the evening by the park
Up to Harlem, recollecting Denver, and Dan Budd, a hero
And we made shift to sack out in Harlem, after a long evening,
Jack and host in a large double bed, I volunteered for the cot, and Neal
Volunteered for the cot with me, we stripped and lay down.
I wore my underwear, my shorts, and he his briefs—
lights out on the narrow bed I turned to my side, with my back to his Irish boy’s torso,
and huddled and balanced on the edge, and kept distance—
and hung my head over and kept my arm over the side, withdrawn
And he seeing my fear stretched out his arm, and put it around my breast
Saying “Draw near me” and gathered me in upon him:
I lay there trembling, and felt his great arm like a king’s
And his breasts, his heart slow thudding against my back,
and his middle torso, narrow and made of iron, soft at my back,
his fiery firm belly warming me while I trembled—
His belly of fists and starvation, his belly a thousand girls kissed in Colorado
his belly of rocks thrown over Denver roofs, prowess of jumping and fists, his stomach of solitudes,
His belly of burning iron and jails affectionate to my side:
I began to tremble, he pulled me in closer with his arm, and hugged me long and close
my soul melted, secrecy departed, I became
Thenceforth open to his nature as a flower in the shining sun.
And below his belly, in white underwear, tight between my buttocks,
His own loins against me soft, nestling in comradeship, put forth & pressed into me, open to my awareness,
slowly began to grow, signal me further and deeper affection, sexual tenderness.
So gentle the man, so sweet the moment, so kind the thighs that nuzzled against me smooth-skinned powerful, warm by my legs
That my body shudders and trembles with happiness, remembering—
His hand opened up on my belly, his palms and fingers flat against my skin
I fell to him, and turned, shifting, put my face on his arm resting,
my chest against his, he helped me to turn, and held me closer
his arm at my back beneath my head, and arm at my buttocks tender holding me in,
our bellies together nestling, loins touched together, pressing and knowledgeable each other’s hardness, and mine stuck out of my underwear.
Then I pressed in closer and drew my leg up between his, and he lay half on me with his thighs and bedded me down close, caressing
and moved together pressing his cock to my thigh and mine to his
slowly, and slowly began a love match that continues in my imagination to this day a full decade.
Thus I met Neal & thus we felt each other’s flesh and owned each other bodies and souls.
So then as I lay on his breast with my arms clasped around his neck and his cheek against mine,
I put my hand down to feel his great back for the first time, jaws and pectorals of steel at my fingers,
closer and stiller, down the silken iron back to his waist, the whole of his torso now open
my hand at his waist trembling, waited delaying and under the elastic of his briefs,
I first touched the smooth mount of his rock buttocks, silken in power, rounded in animal fucking and bodily nights over nurses and schoolgirls,
O ass of long solitudes in stolen cars, and solitudes on curbs, musing fist in cheek,
Ass of a thousand farewells, ass of youth, youth’s lovers,
Ass of a thousand lonely craps in gas stations ass of great painful secrecies of the years
O ass of mystery and night! ass of gymnasiums and muscular pants
ass of high schools and masturbation ass of lone delight, ass of mankind, so beautiful and hollow, dowry of Mind and Angels,
Ass of hero, Neal Cassady, I had at my hand: my fingers traced the curve to the bottom of his thighs.
I raised my thighs and stripped down my shorts to my knees, and bent to push them off
and he raised me up from his chest, and pulled down his pants the same,
humble and meek and obedient to his mood our silence,
and naked at long last with angel & greek & athlete & hero and brother and boy of my dreams
I lay with my hair intermixed with his, he asking me “What shall we do now?”
—And confessed, years later, he thinking I was not a queer at first to please me & serve me, to blow me and make me come, maybe or if I were queer, that’s what I’d likely want of a dumb bastard like him.
But I made my first mistake, and made him then and there my master, and bowed my head, and holding his buttock
Took up his hard-on and held it, feeling it throb and pressing my own at his knee & breathing showed him I needed him, cock, for my dreams of insatiety & lone love.
—And I lie here naked in the dark, dreaming
Arctic, August 10, 1956
To Mexico! To Mexico! Down the dovegray highway, past Atomic City police, past the fiery border to dream cantinas!
Standing on the sunny metropolitan plateau, stranger prince on the street, dollars in my pocket, alone, free—genitals and thighs and buttocks under skin and leather.
Music! Taxis! Marijuana in the slums! Ancient sexy parks! Continental boulevards in America! Modern downtown for a dollar! Dungarees in Les Ambassadeurs! And here’s a hard brown cock for a quarter!
Drunkenness! and the long night walks down brown streets, eyes, windows, buses, interior charnels behind the Cathedral, lost squares and hungry tacos, a calf’s head cooked and picked apart for meat,
and the blackened inner roofs and tents of the Thieves’ Market, street crisscrossed on street, a naked hipster labyrinth, stealing, pausing, loitering, noticing drums, purchasing nothing
but a broken aluminum coffeepot with a doll’s arm sticking up out of the mouth.
Haha! what do I want? Change of solitude, spectre of drunkenness in paranoiac taxicabs, fear and gaiety of unknown lovers
coming around the empty streetcorner dark-eyed and watching me make it there alone under the new hip moon.
San Francisco, October 1956