X
PLUTONIAN ODE
(1977–1980)

What’s Dead?

Clouds’ silent shadows passing across the Sun above Teton’s mountaintop I saw on LSD

Movies dead shadows

ocean 40% dead said expert J. Cousteau A.D. 1968

Shakespeare the magician, Rimbaud visionary dead

silent vamp Alla Nazimova’s corpse-lip black dust

Walt Disney of Mickey Mouse, Buck Rogers in the Twenty-fifth Century, Hollywood lost in shade

Tragedian Sophocles passed this shore with Charon thru Styx

Ex-Emperor Napoleon obituaried in 1821

Queen Liliuokalani giv’n to her reward

Chief Joseph buried on a brown hill in Washington State

General Douglas MacArthur urged atombombs to blow up China

Eisenhower & Xerxes led armies to the grave

The Skeleton Man in 1930 Barnum & Bailey Circus’ Freakshow bony in’s coffin

The mother Cat I played with in the basement Paterson New Jersey when I was ten

with the Lindbergh baby kidnapped found in a swamp of laundry

My father’s grave writ “Answer a riddle with a stone” wet with rain in Newark

Jesus Christ & Mary for all their Assumption, dust in this world

Buddha relieved of his body, empty vehicle parked noiseless

Allah the Word in a book, or muezzin cry on a Tower

Not even Moses reached Promised Land, went down to Sheol.

Tickertape for heroes, clods of dirt for forgotten grandpas—

Television ghosts still haunt living room & bed chamber

Crooner Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley rock’n’roll Star, Groucho Marx a mustached joker, Einstein invented the universe, Naomi Ginsberg Communist Muse, Isadora Duncan dancing in diaphanous scarves

Jack Kerouac noble Poet, Jimmy Dean mystic actor, Boris Karloff the old Frankenstein,

Celebrities & Nonentities set apart, absent from their paths shadows left behind, breathing no more—

These were the musings of Buddhist student Allen Ginsberg.

Hawaii, October 16, 1977

Grim Skeleton

Grim skeleton come back & put me out of Action

looking thru the rainy window at the Church wall

yellow vapor lamped, 9 P.M. Cars hissing in street water

—woken dizzy from nicotine sleep—papers piled on my desk

myself lost in manila files of yellow faded newspaper Clippings

at last after twenty five years tapes wound thru my brain

Library of my own deeds of music tongue & oratoric yell—

Is it my heart, a cold & phlegm in my skull or radiator

Comfort cowardice that I slumber awake wrapped in Mexican

Blanket, wallet & keys on the white chair by my head.

Is it the guru of music or guru of meditation whose harsh force

I bear, makes my eyelid heavy mid afternoons, is’t Death

stealing in my breast makes me nauseous mornings, work undone

on a typewriter set like a green skull by the window

When I wake unwilling to rise & take the narcotic Times

above a soft Boiled egg and toasted English muffin daily noon?

Beauty, Truth, Revolution, what skeleton in my closet

makes me listen dumb my own skull thoughts lethargic

Gossip of Poets silenced by drunken Mussolinis every Country on Earth?

My own yatter of meditation, while I work and scream in frenzy

at my wooden desk held up by iron filedrawers stuffed w/press paper

& prophetic fake manuscripts, ears itching & scabbed w/anger

at ghost Rockefeller Brothers pay-off of CIA, am I myself the CIA

bought with acid meat & alcohol in Washington, silenced in meditation

on my own duplicity, stuck in anger at puerto rican wounded

beerdrunk fathers walking East 12th street and their thieving kids

violent screaming under my window 4 A.M.? Some Fantasy of Fame

I dreamt in adolescence Came true last week over Television,

Now homunculus I made’s out there in American streets

talking with my voice, accounted ledgered opinionated

Interviewed & Codified in Poems, books & manuscripts, whole library

shelves stacked with ambitious egohood’s thousand pages imaged

forth smart selft over half a lifetime! Who’m I now, Frankenstein

hypocrite of good Cheer whose sick-stomached Discretion’s grown

fifty years overweight—while others I hate practice sainthood in Himalayas

or run the petrochemical atomic lamplit machines, by whose power

I slumber cook my meat & write these verses captive of N.Y.C.

What’s my sickness, flu virus or Selfhood infected swollen sore

confronting the loath’d work of poetic flattery: Gurus, Rock stars

Penthoused millionaires, White House alrightniks crowding my brain

Ballade of Poisons

With oil that streaks streets a magic color,
With soot that falls on city vegetables
With basement sulfurs & coal black odor
With smog that purples suburbs’ sunset hills
With Junk that feebles black & white men’s wills
With plastic bubbles aeons will dissolve
With new plutoniums that only resolve
Their poison heat in quarter million years,
With pesticides that round food Chains revolve
May your soul make home, may your eyes weep tears.

With freak hormones in chicken & soft egg
With panic red dye in cow meat burger
With mummy med’cines, nitrate in sliced pig
With sugar’d cereal kids scream for murder,
With Chemic additives that cause Cancer
With bladder and mouth in your salami,
With Strontium Ninety in milks of Mommy,
With sex voices that spill beer thru your ears
With Cups of Nicotine till you vomit
May your soul make home, may your eyes weep tears.

With microwave toaster television
With Cadmium lead in leaves of fruit trees
With Trade Center’s nocturnal emission
With Coney Island’s shore plopped with Faeces
While blue Whales sing in high infrequent seas
With Amazon worlds with fish in ocean
Washed in Rockefellers greasy Potion
With oily toil fueled with atomic fears
With CIA tainting World emotion
May your soul make home, may your eyes weep tears.

          Envoi

President, ’spite cockroach devotion,
Folk poisoned with radioactive lotion,
’Spite soulless bionic energy queers
May your world move to healthy emotion,
Make your soul at home, let your eyes weep tears.

January 12, 1978

Lack Love

Love wears down to bare truth
My heart hurt me much in youth
Now I hear my real heart beat
Strong and hollow thump of meat

I felt my heart wrong as an ache
Sore in dreams and raw awake
I’d kiss each new love on the chest
Trembling hug him breast to breast

Kiss his belly, kiss his eye
Kiss his ruddy boyish thigh
Kiss his feet kiss his pink cheek
Kiss behind him naked meek

Now I lie alone, and a youth
Stalks my house, he won’t in truth
Come to bed with me, instead
Loves the thoughts inside my head

He knows how much I think of him
Holds my heart his painful whim
Looks thru me with mocking eyes
Steals my feelings, drinks & lies

Till I see Love’s empty Truth
Think back on heart broken youth
Hear my heart beat red in bed
Thick and living, love rejected.

New York, February 8, 1978, 3 A.M.

Father Guru

Father Guru     unforlorn
Heart beat Guru whom I scorn
Empty Guru Never Born
Sitting Guru every morn
Friendly Guru chewing corn
Angry Guru Faking Porn
Guru Guru Freely torn
Garment Guru neatly worn
Guru Head short hair shorn
Absent Guru Eyes I mourn
Guru of Duncan Guru of Dorn
Ginsberg Guru like a thorn
Goofy Guru Lion Horn
Lonely Guru Unicorn
O Guru whose slave I’m sworn
Save me Guru Om Ah Hum

Austin, February 14, 1978

Manhattan May Day Midnight

I walked out on the lamp shadowed concrete at midnight May Day passing a dark’d barfront,

police found corpses under the floor last year, call-girls & Cadillacs lurked there on First Avenue

around the block from my apartment, I’d come downstairs for tonight’s newspapers—

refrigerator repair shop’s window grate padlocked, fluorescent blue

light on a pile of newspapers, pages shifting in the chill Spring wind

’round battered cans & plastic refuse bags leaned together at the pavement edge—

Wind wind and old news sailed thru the air, old Times whirled above the garbage.

At the Corner of 11th under dim Street-light in a hole in the ground

a man wrapped in work-Cloth and wool Cap pulled down his bullet skull

stood & bent with a rod & flashlight turning round in his pit halfway sunk in earth

Peering down at his feet, up to his chest in the asphalt by a granite Curb

where his work mate poked a flexible tube in a tiny hole, a youth in gloves

who answered my question “Smell of gas—Someone must’ve reported in”—

Yes the body stink of City bowels, rotting tubes six feet under

Could explode any minute sparked by Con Ed’s breathing Puttering truck

I noticed parked, as I passed by hurriedly Thinking Ancient Rome, Ur

Were they like this, the same shadowy surveyors & passers-by

scribing records of decaying pipes & Garbage piles on Marble, Cuneiform,

ordinary midnight citizen out on the street looking for Empire News,

rumor, gossip, workmen police in uniform, walking silent sunk in thought

under windows of sleepers coupled with Monster squids & Other-Planet eyeballs in their sheets

in the same night six thousand years old where Cities rise & fall & turn to dream?

May 1, 1978, 6 A.M.

ADAPTED FROM Neruda’s
“Que dispierte el leñador”

V
Let the Railsplitter Awake!
Let Lincoln come with his ax
and with his wooden plate
to eat with the farmworkers.
May his craggy head,
his eyes we see in constellations,
in the wrinkles of the live oak,
come back to look at the world
rising up over the foliage
higher than Sequoias.
Let him go shop in pharmacies,
let him take the bus to Tampa
let him nibble a yellow apple,
let him go to the movies, and
talk to everybody there.

Let the Railsplitter awake!

Let Abraham come back, let his old yeast
rise in green and gold earth of Illinois,
and lift the ax in his city
against the new slavemakers
against their slave whips
against the venom of the print houses
against all the bloodsoaked
merchandise they want to sell.
Let the young white boy and young black
march singing and smiling
against walls of gold,
against manufacturers of hatred,
against the seller of his own blood,
singing, smiling and winning at last.

Let the Railsplitter awake!

VI
Peace for all twilights to come,
peace for the bridge, peace for the wine,
peace for the letters that look for me
and pump in my blood tangled
with earth and love’s old chant,
peace for the city in the morning
when bread wakes up,
peace for Mississippi, the river of roots,
peace for my brother’s shirt,
peace in the book like an airmail stamp,
peace for the great Kolkhoz of Kiev,
peace for the ashes of these dead
and those other dead, peace for the black
iron of Brooklyn, peace for the lettercarrier
going from house to house like the day,
peace for the choreographer shrieking
thru a funnel of honeysuckle vines,
peace to my right hand
that only wants to write Rosario,
peace for the Bolivian, secret as a lump of tin,
peace for you to get married, peace
for all the sawmills of Bio-Bio,
peace to Revolutionary Spain’s torn heart
peace to the little museum of Wyoming
in which the sweetest thing
was a pillowcase embroidered with a heart,
peace to the baker and his loaves,
and peace to all the flour: peace
for all the wheat still to be born,
peace for all the love that wants to flower,
peace for all those who live: peace
to all the lands and waters.

And here I say farewell, I return
to my house, in my dreams
I go back to Patagonia where
the wind beats at barns
and the Ocean spits ice.
I’m nothing more than a poet:
I want love for you all,
I go wander the world I love:
in my country they jail the miners
and soldiers give orders to judges.
But down to its very roots
I love my little cold country.
If I had to die a thousand times
that’s where I’d want to die:
if I had to be born a thousand times
that’s where I’d want to be born,
near the Araucanian wilds’
sea-whirled south winds,
bells just brought from the bellmaker.
Don’t let anybody think about me.
Let’s think about the whole world,
banging on the table with love.
I don’t want blood to come back
and soak the bread, the beans
the music: I want the miner
to come with me, the little girl,
the lawyer, the sailor, the dollmaker,
let’s all go to the movies and come
out and drink the reddest wine.

Nagasaki Days

I A Pleasant Afternoon

for Michael Brownstein & Dick Gallup

One day 3 poets & 60 ears sat under a green-striped Chautauqua tent in Aurora

listening to Black spirituals, tapping their feet, appreciating words singing by in mountain winds

on a pleasant sunny day of rest—the wild wind blew thru blue Heavens

filled with fluffy clouds stretched from Central City to Rocky Flats, Plutonium sizzled in its secret bed,

hot dogs sizzled in the Lions Club lunchwagon microwave mouth, orangeade bubbled over in waxen cups

Traffic moved along Colefax, meditators silent in the Diamond Castle shrine-room at Boulder followed the breath going out of their nostrils,

Nobody could remember anything, spirits flew out of mouths & noses, out of the sky, across Colorado plains & the tent flapped happily open spacious & didn’t fall down.

June 18, 1978

II Peace Protest

Cumulus clouds float across blue sky
     over the white-walled Rockwell Corporation factory
                         —am I going to stop that?

*

Rocky Mountains rising behind us
     Denver shining in morning light
—Led away from the crowd by police and photographers

*

Middleaged Ginsberg & Ellsberg taken down the road
     to the grayhaired Sheriff’s van—
But what about Einstein? What about Einstein? Hey, Einstein Come back!

III Golden Courthouse

VI Numbers in Red Notebook

Plutonian Ode

I

1  What new element before us unborn in nature? Is there a new thing under the Sun?

At last inquisitive Whitman a modern epic, detonative, Scientific theme

First penned unmindful by Doctor Seaborg with poisonous hand, named for Death’s planet through the sea beyond Uranus

whose chthonic ore fathers this magma-teared Lord of Hades, Sire of avenging Furies, billionaire Hell-King worshipped once

5  with black sheep throats cut, priest’s face averted from underground mysteries in a single temple at Eleusis,

Spring-green Persephone nuptialed to his inevitable Shade, Demeter mother of asphodel weeping dew,

her daughter stored in salty caverns under white snow, black hail, gray winter rain or Polar ice, immemorable seasons before

Fish flew in Heaven, before a Ram died by the starry bush, before the Bull stamped sky and earth

or Twins inscribed their memories in cuneiform clay or Crab’d flood

10  washed memory from the skull, or Lion sniffed the lilac breeze in Eden—

Before the Great Year began turning its twelve signs, ere constellations wheeled for twenty-four thousand sunny years

slowly round their axis in Sagittarius, one hundred sixty-seven thousand times returning to this night

Radioactive Nemesis were you there at the beginning black Dumb tongueless unsmelling blast of Disillusion?

I manifest your Baptismal Word after four billion years

15  I guess your birthday in Earthling Night, I salute your dreadful presence lasting majestic as the Gods,

Sabaot, Jehova, Astapheus, Adonaeus, Elohim, Iao, Ialdabaoth, Aeon from Aeon born ignorant in an Abyss of Light,

Sophia’s reflections glittering thoughtful galaxies, whirlpools of star-spume silver-thin as hairs of Einstein!

Father Whitman I celebrate a matter that renders Self oblivion!

Grand Subject that annihilates inky hands & pages’ prayers, old orators’ inspired Immortalities,

20  I begin your chant, openmouthed exhaling into spacious sky over silent mills at Hanford, Savannah River, Rocky Flats, Pantex, Burlington, Albuquerque

I yell thru Washington, South Carolina, Colorado, Texas, Iowa, New Mexico,

40  I enter with spirit out loud into your fuel rod drums underground on soundless thrones and beds of lead

III

July 14, 1978

Old Pond

The old pond—a frog jumps in, kerplunk!
Hard road! I walked till both feet stunk—
Ma!Ma! Whatcha doing down on that bed?
Pa!Pa! what hole you hide your head?

Left home got work down town today
Sold coke, got busted looking gay
Day dream, I acted like a clunk
Th’old pond—a frog jumps in, kerplunk!

Got hitched, I bought a frying pan
Fried eggs, my wife eats like a man
Won’t cook, her oatmeal tastes like funk
Th’old pond—a frog jumps in, kerplunk!

Eat shit exactly what she said
Drink wine, it goes right down my head
Fucked up, they all yelled I was drunk
Th’old pond—a frog jumps in, kerplunk!

Saw God at six o’clock tonight
Flop house, I think I’ll start a fight
Head ache like both my eyeballs shrunk
Th’old pond—a frog jumps in, kerplunk!

Hot dog! I love my mustard hot
Hey Rube! I think I just got shot
Drop dead She said you want some junk?
Th’old pond—a frog jumps in, kerplunk!

Oh ho your dirty needle stinks
No no I don’t shoot up with finks
Speed greed I stood there with the punk
Th’old pond—a frog jumps in, kerplunk!

Yeh yeh gimme a breath of fresh air
Guess who I am well you don’t care
No name call up the mocking Monk
Th’old pond—a frog jumps in, kerplunk!

No echo, make a lot of noise
Come home you owe it to the boys
Can’t hear you scream your fish’s sunk
Th’old pond—a frog jumps in, kerplunk!

Blame the Thought, Cling to the Bummer

I am Fake Saint

magazine Saint Ram Das

Who’s not a Fake Saint consciousness, Nobody!

The 12th Trungpa, Karmapa 16, Dudjom lineage of Padmasambhava, Pope Jean-Paul, Queen of England crowned with dignity’s brilliant empty Diamonds Sapphires Emeralds, Amber, Rubies—

The sky is Fake Saint, emptyhearted blue

The Sacramento Valley floor fields no saints either, tractors in green corn higher than the T-shirted jogger.

This Volkswagen Fake Saint, license-plate-light wires smoking shorted in the rear-engine door.

Filter cigarette butt still smoking in the ashtray

No saints longhaired boys at the busdriver’s wheel

Hard workers no Fake Saints laborers everywhere behind desks in Plutonium offices

swatting flies under plastic flower-power signs

Driving Ponderosa & Spruce roads to the poet’s shrine at Kitkitdizze

Bedrock Mortar hermitage—Shobo-An temple’s copper roof on a black-oak groved hillside—

Discontinuous, the thought—empty—no harm—

To blame the thought would cling to the Bummer—

Unborn Evil, the Self & its systems

Transitory intermittent gapped in Grass Valley stopping for gas

Plutonium blameless, apocalyptic gift of Furies

Insentient space filled with green bushes—clouds over Ranger Station signs

Uncertain as incense.

Nevada City, September 7, 1978

“Don’t Grow Old”

     I

Twenty-eight years before on the living room couch he’d stared at me, I said

“I want to see a psychiatrist—I have sexual difficulties—homosexuality”

I’d come home from troubled years as a student. This was the weekend I would talk with him.

A look startled his face, “You mean you like to take men’s penises in your mouth?”

Equally startled, “No, no,” I lied, “that isn’t what it means.”

Now he lay naked in the bath, hot water draining beneath his shanks.

Strong shouldered Peter, once ambulance attendant, raised him up

in the tiled room. We toweled him dry, arms under his, bathrobe over his shoulder—

he tottered thru the door to his carpeted bedroom

sat on the soft mattress edge, exhausted, and coughed up watery phlegm.

We lifted his swollen feet talcum’d white, put them thru pajama legs,

tied the cord round his waist, and held the nightshirt sleeve open for his hand, slow.

Mouth drawn in, his false teeth in a dish, he turned his head round

looking up at Peter to smile ruefully, “Don’t ever grow old.”

     II

At my urging, my eldest nephew came

to keep his grandfather company, maybe sleep overnight in the apartment.

He had no job, and was homeless anyway.

All afternoon he read the papers and looked at old movies.

Later dusk, television silent, we sat on a soft-pillowed couch,

Louis sat in his easy-chair that swiveled and could lean back—

“So what kind of job are you looking for?”

“Dishwashing, but someone told me it makes your hands’ skin scaly red.”

“And what about officeboy?” His grandson finished highschool with marks too poor for college.

“It’s unhealthy inside airconditioned buildings under fluorescent light.”

The dying man looked at him, nodding at the specimen.

He began his advice. “You might be a taxidriver, but what if a car crashed into you? They say you can get mugged too.

Or you could get a job as a sailor, but the ship could sink, you could get drowned.

Maybe you should try a career in the grocery business, but a box of bananas could slip from the shelf,

Love Returned

Love returned with smiles
three thousand miles
to keep a year’s promise
Anonymous, honest
studious, beauteous
learned and childlike
earnest and mild like
a student of truth,
a serious youth.

Whatever our ends
young and old we were friends
on the coast a few weeks
In New York now he seeks
scholarly manuscripts
old writs, haunted notes
Antique anecdotes,
rare libraries lain
back of the brain.

Now we are in bed
he kisses my head
his hand on my arm
holds my side warm
He presses my leg
I don’t have to beg
his sweet penis heat
enlarged at my hip,
kiss his neck with my lip.

Small as a kid
his ass is not hid
I can touch, I can play
with his thighs any way
My cheek to his chest
my body’s his guest
he offers his breast
his belly, the rest
hug and kiss to my bliss

Come twice at last
he offers his ass
first time for him
to be entered at whim
of my bare used cock—
his cheeks do unlock
tongue & hand at soft gland
Alas for my dreams
my part’s feeble it seems

December 31, 1978

Shining Diamonds & Sequins glitter
     Grand Ballroom Waldorf
     Astoria on the TV Screen
radiant shifting goodbye to
     Times Square Phantoms
     waving
massed eyeglasses & umbrellas’
     rainy hands over
     heads
Celebrating China
     diplomatic relations
     Disco in Peking
Congressional black & tan faces
     on the news-dots sober Committee Report
     Concludes Conspiracy Killing
     Kennedy & Martin Luther King
President & Peacemaker last
     Decade departed
mysteriously gloomy miasma
     mind of NY Times Vietnam
     nuclear Warren Commission
     exploded, lies & confusion
popping firecrackers Razz-ma-Tazz
     in mylar hats under klieg lights
     dancing to Guy Lombardo
Hitchy Kitchy Koo in eyeglasses
     & bowties
with tinkling Pianos, Trombones
     & tubas above the round white
     champagne tables
Old Folks smiling into camera one
     last time
appreciating the Royal Canadian
     Nostalgia
among sweepstake kitchen
     sinks & refrigerators
advertised before the deodorized
     stickup by Count Dracula
     with popping eyeballs.
How enthusiastic the soap ads
     while masses honk paper
     horns
between December’s canyon’d building
walls straight-sided up
     thru red misted sky
     above Gotham
Broadway Oomp-pa-pa-ing its
     regards to Heaven the
     umpteenth time,
tin Trumpets waiting to
     announce the year’s
     midnight,
Big teeth having a good time,
     Puerto Ricans smiling
under 44th Street marquees
     greeting the camera’s
     million-eyed blank
     Hope the itching’s gone—
Live from New York! thousands
     scream delight
roaring the clock along simultaneous
     congratulations Network Chairman
     Wm. S. Paley—
Forgiveness! Time! the ball’s
     falling down, drums
     roll loud
across America’s speaker
     systems to
Balloons! Happy New Year!
     Trumpets & Bubbles wave
     thru the brain!
Raise yr hat & shake yr bracelet
     Telephone Edie! Blow yr Trumpet
     Ganymede with a mustache
Ring yr brazen horns ye
     Fire engines of Soho!
Bark ye dogges in lofts, explode
     yr honking halos ye
     weightless Angels of
     Television!
It’s gonna be a delightful
     time, thank god nothing’s
     happening muchachos
Tonite but parties & car crashes,
     births & ambulance sirens,
Confetti falling over
     heartbroken partygoers
     doing the Lindy Hop at the
     back window of the loft
years ago when Abstract-Expressionist
     painters & poets had a party
     celebrating U.S. Eternity
     on New Year’s Eve before the War.

Brooklyn College Brain

You used to wear dungarees & blue workshirt,
sneakers or cloth-top shoes, & ride alone
on subways, young & elegant unofficial
bastard of nature, sneaking sweetness into Brooklyn.
Now tweed jacket & yr father’s tie on yr breast,
salmon-pink cotton shirt & Swedish bookbag
you’re half bald, palsied lip & lower eyelid
continually tearing, gone back to college.
Goodbye Professor Ginsberg, get your identity
card next week from the front office so you can
get to class without being humiliated dumped on the
sidewalk by the black guard at the Student Union door.

Hello Professor Ginsberg have some coffee,
have some students, have some office hours
Tuesdays & Thursdays, have a couple subway tokens
in advance, have a box in the English Department,
have a look at Miss Sylvia Blitzer behind the typewriter
Have some poems er maybe they’re not so bad have a
good time workshopping Bodhicitta in the Bird Room.

March 27, 1979

Garden State

It used to be, farms,
stone houses on green lawns
a wooded hill to play Jungle Camp
asphalt roads thru Lincoln Park.

The communists picnicked
amid spring’s yellow forsythia
magnolia trees & apple blossoms, pale buds
breezy May, blue June.

Then came the mafia, alcohol
highways, garbage dumped in marshes, real
estate, World War II, money
flowed thru Nutley, bulldozers.

Einstein invented atom bombs
in Princeton, television antennae
sprung over West Orange—lobotomies
performed in Greystone State Hospital.

Old graveyards behind churches
on grassy knolls, Erie Railroad
bridges’ Checkerboard underpass
signs, paint fading, remain.

Reminds me of a time pond’s pure
water was green, drink or swim.
Traprock quarries embedded
with amethyst, quiet on Sunday.

I was afraid to talk to anyone
in Paterson, lest my sensitivity
to sex, music, the universe, be discovered &
I be laughed at, hit by colored boys.

“Mr. Professor” said the Dutchman
on Haledon Ave. “Stinky Jew” said
my friend black Joe, kinky haired.
Oldsmobiles past by in front of my eyeglasses.

Greenhouses stood by the Passaic in the sun,
little cottages in Belmar by the sea.
I heard Hitler’s voice on the radio.
I used to live on that hill up there.

Spring Fashions

Full moon over the shopping mall—
     in a display window’s silent light
the naked mannequin observes her fingernails

Boulder, 1979

Las Vegas: Verses Improvised for El Dorado H.S. Newspaper

Aztec sandstone waterholes known by Moapa’ve
dried out under the baccarat pits
of M.G.M.’s Grand Hotel.

If Robert Maheu knew
          who killed Kennedy
would he tell Santos Trafficante?

If Frank Sinatra had to grow his own
          food, would he learn
how to grind piñon nuts?

If Sammy Davis had to find original water
would he lead a million old ladies laughing
     round Mt. Charleston to the Sheepshead Mountains
               in migratory cycle?

Does Englebert know the name of
the mountains he sings in?

When gas and water dry up
will wild mustangs
     inhabit the Hilton Arcade?

Will the 130-billion-dollared-Pentagon guard
     the radioactive waste dump at Beatty
          for the whole Platonic Year?

Tell all the generals and Maitre D’s
to read the bronze inscriptions
          under the astronomical flagpole at Hoover Dam.

Will Franklin Delano Roosevelt
     Bugsy Siegel and Buddha
all lose their shirts at Las Vegas?

Yeah! because they don’t know how to gamble
     like mustangs and desert lizards.

September 23, 1979

To the Punks of Dawlish

Your electric hair’s beautiful gold as Blake’s Glad Day boy,

you raise your arms for industrial crucifixion

You get 45 Pounds a week on the Production line

and 15 goes to taxes, Mrs. Thatcher’s nuclear womb swells

The Iron Lady devours your powers & hours your pounds and pride &

scatters radioactive urine on your mushroom dotted sheep fields.

“Against the Bourgeois!” you raise your lip & dandy costume

Against the Money Establishment you pogo to garage bands

After humorous slavery in th’ electronic factory

put silver pins in your nose, gold rings in your ears

talk to the Professor on the Plymouth train, asking

“Marijuana rots your brain like it says in the papers, insists on the telly?”

Cursed tragic kids rocking in a rail car on the Cornwall Coastline, Luck to your dancing revolution!

With bodies beautiful as the gold blond lads’ of Oxford—

Your rage is more elegant than most purse-lipped considerations of Cambridge,

your mouths more full of slang & kisses than tea-sipping wits of Eton whispering over scones & clotted cream

conspiring to govern your music tax your body labor & chasten your impudent speech with an Official Secrets Act.

Cornwall, November 18, 1979

Some Love

After 53 years
I still cry tears
I still fall in love
I still improve

My art with a kiss
My heart with bliss
My hands massage
Kids from the garage

Kids from the grave
Kids who slave
At study or labor
Still show me favor

How can I complain
When love like rain
Falls all over the land
On my head on my hand

On my breast on my shoes
Kisses arrive like foreign news
Mouths suck my cock
Boys wish me good luck

How long can I last
Such love gone past
So much to come
Till I get dumb

Rarer and rarer
Boys give me favor
Older and older
Love grows bolder

Sweeter and sweeter
Wrinkled like water
My skin still trembles
My fingers nimble

Siegen, December 12, 1979

Maybe Love

Maybe love will come
cause I am not so dumb
Tonight it fills my heart
heavy sad apart
from one or two I fancy
now I’m an old fairy.

This is hard to say
I’ve come to be this way
thru many loves of youth
that taught me most heart truth
Now I come by myself
in my hand a potbellied elf

It’s not the most romantic
dream to be so frantic
for young men’s bodies,
a fine sugar daddy
blest respected known
but left to bed alone.

How come love came to end
flaccid, how pretend
desires I have used
Four decades as I cruised
from bed to bar to book
Shamefaced like a crook

Stealing here & there
pricks & buttocks bare
by accident, by circumstance
Naiveté or horny chance
stray truth or famous lie,
How come I came to die?

Love dies, body dies, the mind
keeps groping blind
half hearted full of lust
to wet the silken dust
of men that hold me dear
but won’t sleep with me near.

I stole up from my bed
to that of a well-bred
young friend who shared my purse
and noted my tender verse,
I held him by the ass
waiting for sweat to pass

Ruhr-Gebiet

Too much industry
too much eats
too much beer
too much cigarettes

Too much philosophy
too many thought forms
not enough rooms—
not enough trees

Too much Police
too much computers
too much hi fi
too much Pork

Too much coffee
too much smoking
under gray slate roofs
Too much obedience

Too many bellies
Too many business suits
Too much paperwork
too many magazines

Too much industry
No fish in the Rhine
Lorelei poisoned
Too much embarrassment

Too many fatigued
workers on the train
Ghost Jews scream
on the streetcorner

Too much old murder
too much white torture
Too much one Stammheim
too many happy Nazis

Too many crazy students
Not enough farms
not enough Appletrees
Not enough nut trees

Love Forgiven

Tübingen-Hamburg Schlafwagen

     I
Why am I so angry at Kissinger?
     Kent State? Terrorism began in 1968!
“Berlin Student Protesting Shah Shot by Police.”

     II
Building lights above black water!
     passing over a big river, railroad bridge & tower.
Mmm Fairyland! Must be Frankfurt!

December 1979

Love Forgiven

     Straight and slender
     Youthful tender
Love shows the way
     And never says nay

     Light & gentle-
     Hearted mental
Tones sing & play
     Guitar in bright day

     Voicing always
     Melodies, please
Sing sad, & say
     Whatever you may

     Righteous honest
     Heart’s forgiveness
Drives woes away,
     Gives Love to cold clay

Tübingen, December 16, 1979

Verses Written for Student Antidraft Registration Rally 1980

The Warrior is afraid

the warrior has a big trembling heart

the warrior sees bright explosions over Utah, a giant bomber moves over Cheyenne Mountain at Colorado Springs

the warrior laughs at its shadow, his thought flows out with his breath and dissolves in afternoon light

The warrior never goes to War

War runs away from the warrior’s mouth

War falls apart in the warrior’s mind

The Conquered go to War, drafted into shadow armies, navy’d on shadow oceans, flying in shadow fire

only helpless Draftees fight afraid, big meaty negroes trying not to die—

The Warrior knows his own sad & tender heart, which is not the heart of most newspapers

Which is not the heart of most Television—This kind of sadness doesn’t sell popcorn

This kind of sadness never goes to war, never spends $100 Billion on MX Missile systems, never fights shadows in Utah,

never hides inside a hollow mountain near Colorado Springs with North American Aerospace Defense Command

waiting orders that he press the Secret button to Blow up the Great Cities of Earth

Shambhala, Colorado, March 15, 1980

Homework

If I were doing my Laundry I’d wash my dirty Iran

I’d throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in the jungle,

I’d wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,

Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska,

Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly Cesium out of Love Canal

Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain the Sludge out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again,

Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little Clouds so snow return white as snow,

Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie

Then I’d throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood & Agent Orange,

Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state,

& put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an Aeon till it came out clean.

Boulder, April 26, 1980

After Whitman & Reznikoff

1
What Relief

If my pen hand were snapped by a Broadway truck
—What relief from writing letters to the Nation
disputing tyrants, war gossip, FBI—
My poems’ll gather dust in Kansas libraries,
adolescent farmboys opening book covers with ruddy hands.

2
Lower East Side

That round faced woman, she owns the street with her three big dogs,
screeches at me, waddling with her shopping bag across Avenue B
Grabbing my crotch, “Why don’t you talk to me?”
baring her teeth in a smile, voice loud like a taxi horn,
“Big Jerk … you think you’re famous?”—reminds me of my mother.

April 29, 1980

Reflections at Lake Louise

     I
At midnight the teacher lectures on his throne
Gongs, bells, wooden fish, tingling brass
Transcendent Doctrines, non-meditation, old dog barks
Past present future burn in Candleflame
incense fills intellects—
Mornings I wake, forgetting my dreams,
dreary hearted, lift my body out of bed
shave, wash, sit, bow down to the ground for hours.

     II
Which country is real, mine or the teacher’s?
Going back & forth I cross the Canada border, unguarded,
     guilty, smuggling 10,000 thoughts.

III
Sometimes my guru seems a Hell King, sometimes a King in Eternity,
     sometimes a newspaper story, sometimes familiar eyed
          father, lonely mother, hard working—
Poor man! to give me birth who may never grow up
     and earn my own living.

May 7, 1980

     IV

Now the sky’s clearer, clouds lifted, a patch of blue

shows above Mt. Victoria. I should go walking to the Plain of the Six Glaciers

but I have to eat Oryoki style, prostrate hours in the basement, study for Vajrayana Exams—

If I had a heart attack on the path around the lake would I be ready to face my mother?

Noon

     V
Scandal in the Buddhafields
     The lake’s covered with soft ice inches thick.
Naked, he insulted me under the glacier!
     He raped my mind on the wet granite cliffs!
He misquoted me in the white mists all over the Nation.
Hurrah! the Clouds drift apart!
     Big chunks of blue sky fall down!
Mount Victoria stands with a mouth full of snow.

τεθνάκην δ’ όλίγω ’πιδενης ϕαίόμ’ άλαία

Red cheeked boyfriends tenderly kiss me sweet mouthed
under Boulder coverlets winter springtime
hug me naked laughing & telling girl friends
          gossip till autumn

Aging love escapes with his Childish body
Monday one man visited sleeping big cocked
older mustached crooked-mouthed not the same teenager
          I sucked off

This kid comes on Thursdays with happy hard ons
long nights talking heart to heart reading verses
fucking hours he comes in me happy but I
          can’t get it in him

Cherub, thin-legged Southern boy once slept over
singing blues and drinking till he got horny
Wednesday night he gave me his ass I screwed him
good luck he was drunk

Blond curl’d clear eyed gardener passing thru town
teaching digging earth in the ancient One Straw
method lay back stomach bare that night blew me
          I blew him and came

Winter dance Naropa a barefoot wild kid
jumped up grabbed me laughed at me took my hand and
ran out saying Meet you at midnight your house
          Woke me up naked

Midnight crawled in bed with me breathed in my ear
kissed my eyelids mouth on his cock it was soft
“Doesn’t do nothing for me,” turned on belly
          Came in behind him

Future youth I never may touch any more
Hark these Sapphics lipped by my hollow spirit
everlasting tenderness breathed in these vowels
          sighing for love still

Song your cadence formed while on May night’s full moon
yellow onions tulips in fresh rain pale grass
iris pea pods radishes grew as this verse
          blossomed in dawn light

Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters

Pigeons shake their wings on the copper church roof
out my window across the street, a bird perched on the cross
surveys the city’s blue-gray clouds. Larry Rivers
’ll come at 10 A.M. and take my picture. I’m taking
your picture, pigeons. I’m writing you down, Dawn.
I’m immortalizing your exhaust, Avenue A bus.
O Thought, now you’ll have to think the same thing forever!

New York, June 7, 1980, 6:48 A.M.

Ode to Failure

Birdbrain!

Birdbrain runs the World!

Birdbrain is the ultimate product of Capitalism

Birdbrain chief bureaucrat of Russia, yawning

Birdbrain ran FBI 30 years appointed by F. D. Roosevelt and never chased Cosa Nostra!

Birdbrain apportions wheat to be burned, keep prices up on the world market!

Birdbrain lends money to Developing Nation police-states thru the International Monetary Fund!

Birdbrain never gets laid on his own he depends on his office to pimp for him

Birdbrain offers brain transplants in Switzerland

Birdbrain wakes up in middle of night and arranges his sheets

I am Birdbrain!

I rule Russia Yugoslavia England Poland Argentina United States El Salvador

Birdbrain multiplies in China!

Birdbrain inhabits Stalin’s corpse inside the Kremlin wall

Birdbrain dictates petrochemical agriculture in Afric desert regions!

Birdbrain lowers North California’s water table sucking it up for Orange County Agribusiness Banks

Birdbrain harpoons whales and chews blubber in the tropics

Birdbrain clubs baby harp seals and wears their coats to Paris

Birdbrain runs the Pentagon his brother runs the CIA, Fatass Bucks!

Birdbrain writes and edits Time Newsweek Wall Street Journal Pravda Izvestia

Birdbrain is Pope, Premier, President, Commissar, Chairman, Senator!

Birdbrain voted Reagan President of the United States!

Birdbrain prepares Wonder Bread with refined white flour!

Birdbrain sold slaves, sugar, tobacco, alcohol

Birdbrain conquered the New World and murdered mushroom god Xochopili on Popocatepetl!

Birdbrain was President when a thousand mysterious students were machinegunned at Tlatelulco

Birdbrain sent 20,000,000 intellectuals and Jews to Siberia, 15,000,000 never got back to the Stray Dog Café

Birdbrain wore a mustache & ran Germany on Amphetamines the last year of World War II

Birdbrain conceived the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem in Europe

Birdbrain carried it out in Gas Chambers

Birdbrain borrowed Lucky Luciano the Mafia from jail to secure Sicily for U.S. Birdbrain against the Reds

Eroica

White marble pillars in the Rector’s courtyard

at the end of a marble-white street in the walled city of Dubrovnik—

All the fleet sunk, Empire foundered, Doges all skeletons & Turks vanished to dust

World Wars passed by with cannonfire mustard gas & amphetamine-wired Führers—

Beethoven’s drum roll beats again in the stone household

White jackets and Black ties the makers of Dissonant thunderbolts concentrate on music sheets

Bowing low, the Timpanist bends ear to his Copper Kettledrums’ heroic vibration—

Bassists with hornrim glasses and beards, young and old pluck ensemble with middle fingers at thin animal strings—

Bassoonists press lips to wooden hollow wands,

The Violinists fiddle up and down excitedly—First Violin

with a stubborn beard (at his music stand with a young girl in black evening dress) waits patiently the orchestra tuning and tweedling to a C—

The Conductor moves his baton & elbows to get the Beethoven bounce jumping

Sweating in the cool Adriatic air at 10:15 white collar round his neck, black longtailed jacket & celluloid cuffs, high heeled black shoes—he turns the glossy page of the First Movement—

The brasses ring out, trumpets puffing, French horns blaring for Napoleon!

Conductor whips it to a Bam Bam Bamb.

But Beethoven got disgusted with Napoleon & scratched his hero name off the Dedication page—

Now the Funeral March! I used to listen to this over the radio in Paterson during the Spanish Civil War—

At last I know it’s the bassoons Carry the wails of high elegy

at last I see the cellos in their chairs, violinists swaying forward, bassmen standing looking sad

as all bow together the mournful lament & dead march for Europe,

The end of the liberty of Dubrovnik, the idiot cry March on Moscow!

Dubrovnik’s musicians take revenge on Napoleon,

by playing Beethoven’s heroic chords in a Castle by the sea at Night—

Electric Globes on wrought iron stands light the year 1980 (Emperor Napoleon & Emperor Beethoven alike snoring skulls)

in the Rector’s house reconstructed a Concert Hall for Tourists

Enough to make you cry in the middle of the Rector’s Palace, thinking of Einstein’s

“Defending the Faith”

Stopping on the bus from Novi Pazar in the rain
I took a leak by Maglic Castle walls
and talked with the dogs on Ivar River Bank
They showed me their teeth & barked a long long time.

October 20, 1980

Capitol Air

I don’t like the government where I live
I don’t like dictatorship of the Rich
I don’t like bureaucrats telling me what to eat
I don’t like Police dogs sniffing round my feet

I don’t like Communist Censorship of my books
I don’t like Marxists complaining about my looks
I don’t like Castro insulting members of my sex
Leftists insisting we got the mystic Fix

I don’t like Capitalists selling me gasoline Coke
Multinationals burning Amazon trees to smoke
Big Corporation takeover media mind
I don’t like the Top-bananas that’re robbing Guatemala banks blind

I don’t like K.G.B. Gulag concentration camps
I don’t like the Maoists’ Cambodian Death Dance
15 Million were killed by Stalin Secretary of Terror
He has killed our old Red Revolution for ever

I don’t like Anarchists screaming Love Is Free
I don’t like the C.I.A. they killed John Kennedy
Paranoiac tanks sit in Prague and Hungary
But I don’t like counterrevolution paid for by the C.I.A.

Tyranny in Turkey or Korea Nineteen Eighty
I don’t like Right Wing Death Squad Democracy
Police State Iran Nicaragua yesterday
Laissez-faire please Government keep your secret police offa me

I don’t like Nationalist Supremacy White or Black
I don’t like Narcs & Mafia marketing Smack
The General bullying Congress in his tweed vest
The President building up his Armies in the East & West

I don’t like Argentine police Jail torture Truths
Government Terrorist takeover Salvador news
I don’t like Zionists acting Nazi Storm Troop
Palestine Liberation cooking Israel into Moslem soup

Capital Air

I don’t like the Crown’s Official Secrets Act
You can get away with murder in the Government that’s a fact
Security cops teargassing radical kids
In Switzerland or Czechoslovakia God Forbids

Truth may be hard to find but Falsehood’s easy
Read between the lines our Imperialism is sleazy
But if you think the People’s State is your Heart’s Desire
Jump right back in the frying pan from the fire