Collected Poems 1947-1997

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Collected Poems 1947-1997 Page 50

by Allen Ginsberg


  —“Shut up or we’ll murder you”—“Om Ah Hu? take it easy”

  Lying on the floor shall I shout more loud?—the metal door closed on blackness

  one boy felt my broken healed ankle, looking for hundred dollar bills behind my stocking weren’t even there—a third boy untied my Seiko Hong Kong watch rough from right wrist leaving a clasp-prick skin tiny bruise

  “Shut up and we’ll get out of here”—and so they left,

  as I rose from the cardboard mattress thinking Om Ah Hu? didn’t stop em enough,

  the tone of voice too loud—my shoulder bag with 10,000 dollars full of poetry left on the broken floor—

  November 2, 1974

  II

  Went out the door dim eyed, bent down & picked up my glasses from step edge I placed them while dragged in the store—looked out—

  Whole street a bombed-out face, building rows’ eyes & teeth missing

  burned apartments half the long block, gutted cellars, hallways’ charred beams

  hanging over trash plaster mounded entrances, couches & bedsprings rusty after sunset

  Nobody home, but scattered stoopfuls of scared kids frozen in black hair

  chatted giggling at house doors in black shoes, families cooked For Rent some six story houses mid the street’s wreckage

  Nextdoor Bodega, a phone, the police? “I just got mugged” I said

  to the man’s face under fluorescent grocery light tin ceiling—

  puffy, eyes blank & watery, sickness of beer kidney and language tongue

  thick lips stunned as my own eyes, poor drunken Uncle minding the store!

  O hopeless city of idiots empty eyed staring afraid, red beam top’d car at street curb arrived—

  “Hey maybe my wallet’s still on the ground got a flashlight?”

  Back into the burnt-doored cave, & the policeman’s gray flashlight broken no eyebeam—

  “My partner all he wants is sit in the car never gets out Hey Joe bring your flashlight—”

  a tiny throwaway beam, dim as a match in the criminal dark

  “No I can’t see anything here” … “Fill out this form”

  Neighborhood street crowd behind a car “We didn’t see nothing”

  Stoop young girls, kids laughing “Listen man last time I messed with them see this—”

  rolled up his skinny arm shirt, a white knife scar on his brown shoulder

  “Besides we help you the cops come don’t know anybody we all get arrested

  go to jail I never help no more mind my business everytime”

  “Agh!” upstreet think “Gee I don’t know anybody here ten years lived half block crost Avenue C

  and who knows who?”—passing empty apartments, old lady with frayed paper bags

  sitting in the tin-boarded doorframe of a dead house.

  December 10, 1974

  Who Runs America?

  Oil brown smog over Denver

  Oil red dung colored smoke

  level to level across the horizon

  blue tainted sky above

  Oil car smog gasoline

  hazing red Denver’s day

  December bare trees

  sticking up from housetop streets

  Plane lands rumbling, planes rise over

  radar wheels, black smoke

  drifts wobbly from tailfins

  Oil millions of cars speeding the cracked plains

  Oil from Texas, Bahrain, Venezuela Mexico

  Oil that turns General Motors

  revs up Ford

  lights up General Electric, oil that crackles

  thru International Business Machine computers,

  charges dynamos for ITT

  sparks Western Electric

  runs thru Amer Telephone & Telegraph wires

  Oil that flows thru Exxon New Jersey hoses,

  rings in Mobil gas tank cranks, rumbles

  Chrysler engines

  shoots thru Texaco pipelines,

  blackens ocean from broken Gulf tankers

  spills onto Santa Barbara beaches from

  Standard of California derricks offshore.

  Braniff Air, Denver-Dallas, December 3, 1974

  Thoughts on a Breath

  Cars slide minute down asphalt lanes in front of

  Dallas Hilton Inn

  Trees brown bare in December’s smog-mist roll up

  to the city’s squared towers

  beneath electric wire grids trestled toward country water tanks

  distanced under cloud streak crossed with fading

  vapor trails.

  Majestic in a skirt of human fog, building blocks

  rise at sky edge,

  Branches and house roofs march to horizon.

  I sat again to complete the cycle, eyes open seeing

  dust motes in the eye screen

  like birds over telephone wires, curve of the eyeball

  where Dallas and I meet—

  white motel wall of the senses—ear roar

  oil exhaust, snuffle and bone growl

  motors rolling North Central freeway

  Energy playing over Concrete, energy

  hymning itself in emptiness—

  What’ve I learned since I sat here four years ago?

  In the halls of the head or out thru the halls of the senses,

  same space

  Trucks rolling toward Dallas skyscrapers

  or mind thoughts floating thru my head

  vanish on a breath—What was it I began

  my meditation on?

  Police state, Students, Poetry open tongue,

  anger and fear of Cops,

  oil Cops, Rockefeller Cops, Oswald Cops,

  Johnson Cops Nixon Cops

  president Cops

  SMU Cops Trustee Cops CIA Cops

  FBI Cops Goon Squads of Dope

  Cops busted Stony Burns and sent him to

  Jail 10 years and a day

  for less than a joint of Grass, a Citizen

  under republic, under Constitution, of Texas?

  We sit here in police state and sigh, knowing

  we’re trapped in our bodies,

  our fear of No meat, no oil, no money, airplanes

  sex love kisses jobs no

  work

  Massive metal bars about, monster machines

  eat us, Controlled by army

  Cops, the Secret Police, our own thoughts!

  Punishment! Punish me! Punish me! we scream

  in our hearts, cocks spurting alone

  in our fists!

  What thoughts more flowed thru our hearts alone

  in Dallas? Flowed thru our hearts like oil

  thru Hilton’s faucets?

  Where shall we house our minds, pay

  rent for Selves, how

  protect our bodies

  from inflation, starvation, old age, smoking

  Cancer, Coughing Death?

  Where get money to buy off the

  skeleton? If we work with Kissinger

  Can we buy time, get off on parole? Does

  Rockefeller want Underground

  Newspapers printing his subsconscious mind’s

  nuclear oil wars?

  Will 92nd Armored Division be sent to seize

  Arabia oilfields

  as threatened December’s US News &

  World Report?

  What’d we remember that destroyed these armies

  with a breath?

  How pay rent & stay in our bodies

  if we don’t sell our minds to Samsara?

  If we don’t join the illusion—that Gas is life—

  How can we in Dallas SMU

  look forward to our futures?

  work with our hands

  like niggers growing Crops in the field,

  & plow and harvest our own corny

  fate?

  Oh Walt Whitman salutations you knew the laborer,

  the sexual intelligent horny handed

 
; man who lived in Dirt

  and fixed the axles of Capitalism, dumbed and laughing at hallucinated Secretaries

  Of State!

  Oh intellect of body back & Cock whose red neck

  supports the S&M freaks of Government

  police & Fascist Monopolies—

  Kissinger bare assed & big buttocked

  with a whip, in leather boots

  scrawling on a memo to Chile “No more

  civics lectures please”

  When the ambassador complained about Torture

  methods used in the Detention Stadium!

  And I ride the planes that Rockefeller gassed

  when he paid off Kissinger!

  Stony Burns sits in jail, in a stone cell in

  Huntsville

  and breathes his news to solitude.

  Homage

  to the Gurus, Guru om! Thanks to the teachers

  who taught us to breathe,

  to watch our minds revolve in emptiness,

  to follow the rise & fall of thoughts,

  Illusions big as empires flowering &

  Vanishing on a breath!

  Thanks to aged teachers whose wrinkles

  read our minds’ newspapers &

  taught us not to Cling to yesterday’s

  thoughts,

  nor thoughts split seconds ago, but

  let cities vanish on a breath—

  Thanks to teachers who showed us behold

  Dust motes in our own eye,

  anger our own hearts,

  emptiness of Dallases where we

  sit thinking knitted brows—

  Sentient beings are numberless I vow

  to liberate all

  Passions unfathomable I vow to

  release them all

  Thought forms limitless I vow to

  master all

  Awakened space is endless I vow to

  enter it forever.

  Dallas, December 4, 1974

  We Rise on Sun Beams and Fall in the Night

  Dawn’s orb orange-raw shining over Palisades

  bare crowded branches bush up from marshes—

  New Jersey with my father riding automobile

  highway to Newark Airport—Empire State’s

  spire, horned buildingtops, Manhattan

  rising as in W. C. Williams’ eyes between wire trestles—

  trucks sixwheeled steady rolling overpass

  beside New York—I am here

  tiny under sun rising in vast white sky,

  staring thru skeleton new buildings,

  with pen in hand awake …

  December 11, 1974

  Written on Hotel Napkin: Chicago Futures

  Wind mills churn on Windy City’s

  rooftops Antennae

  collecting electric

  above thick-loamed gardens

  on Playboy Tower

  Merchandise Mart’s compost

  privies

  supply nightsoil for Near North Side’s

  back Gardens

  Cabbages, celery & cucumbers

  sprout in Mayor Daley’s

  frontyard

  rich with human waste—

  Bathtub beer like old days

  Backyard Mary Jane like

  old days,

  Sun reflectors gather heat

  in rockpile collectors

  under apartment walls

  Horses graze in Parks &

  streets covered with grass

  Mafia Dons shovel earth

  & bury Cauliflower

  leaves

  Old gangsters & their sons

  tending grapevines

  Mid-March 1975

  Hospital Window

  At gauzy dusk, thin haze like cigarette smoke

  ribbons past Chrysler Building’s silver fins

  tapering delicately needletopped, Empire State’s

  taller antenna filmed milky lit amid blocks

  black and white apartmenting veil’d sky over Manhattan,

  offices new built dark glassed in bluish heaven—The East

  50s & 60s covered with castles & watertowers, seven storied

  tar-topped house-banks over York Avenue, late may-green trees

  surrounding Rockefellers’ blue domed medical arbor—

  Geodesic science at the waters edge—Cars running up

  East River Drive, & parked at N.Y. Hospital’s oval door

  where perfect tulips flower the health of a thousand sick souls

  trembling inside hospital rooms. Triboro bridge steel-spiked

  raftertops stand stone-piered over mansard

  penthouse orange roofs, sunset tinges the river and in a few

  Bronx windows, some magnesium vapor brilliances’re

  spotted five floors above E 59th St under gray painted bridge

  trestles. Way downtown along the river, as Monet saw Thames

  100 years ago, Con Edison smokestacks 14th street,

  & Brooklyn Bridge’s skeined dim in modern mists—

  Pipes sticking up to sky nine smokestacks huge visible—

  U.N. Building hangs under an orange crane, & red lights on

  vertical avenues below the trees turn green at the nod

  of a skull with a mild nerve ache. Dim dharma, I return

  to this spectacle after weeks of poisoned lassitude, my thighs

  belly chest & arms covered with poxied welts,

  head pains fading back of the neck, right eyebrow cheek

  mouth paralyzed—from taking the wrong medicine, sweated

  too much in the forehead helpless, covered my rage from

  gorge to prostate with grinding jaw and tightened anus

  not released the weeping scream of horror at robot Mayaguez

  World self ton billions metal grief unloaded

  Phnom Penh to Nakhon Thanom, Santiago & Tehran.

  Fresh warm breeze in the window, day’s release

  from pain, cars float downside the bridge trestle

  and uncounted building-wall windows multiplied a mile

  deep into ash-delicate sky beguile

  my empty mind. A seagull passes alone wings

  spread silent over roofs.

  May 20, 1975 (Mayaguez Crisis)

  Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox

  Hadda be flashing like the Daily Double

  Hadda be playing on Tee Vee

  Hadda be loudmouthed on the Comedy Hour

  Hadda be announced over Loud Speakers

  CIA & Mafia are in Cahoots

  Hadda be said in old ladies’ language

  Hadda be said in American Headlines

  Kennedy stretched & smiled & got doublecrossed by low life goons & Agents

  Rich bankers with Criminal Connections

  Dope pushers in CIA working with dope pushers from Cuba

  working with Big Time syndicate Tampa Florida

  Hadda be said with big mouth

  Hadda be moaned over Factory foghorns

  Hadda be chattered on Car Radio News Broadcast

  Hadda be screamed in the kitchen

  Hadda be yelled in the basement where uncles were fighting

  Hadda be Howled on the streets by Newsboys to bus conductors

  Hadda be foghorned into N.Y. Harbor

  Hadda echo under hard hats

  Hadda turn up the Volume in University ballrooms

  Hadda be written in library books, footnoted

  Hadda be in headlines of the Times & Le Monde

  Hadda be barked over TV

  Hadda be heard in side alleys thru bar room doors

  Hadda be played on Wire Services

  Hadda be bells ringing, Comedians stopt dead in the middle of a joke in Las Vegas,

  Hadda be FBI chief J. E. Hoover & Frank Costello syndicate mouthpiece meeting in Central Park N.Y. together weekends reported posthumously Time magazine

  Hadda be the Mafia & CIA together

  started War on Cuba Bay of Pigs & Poison
assassination headlines

  Hadda be the Dope Cops & the Mafia

  sold all that Heroin in America

  Hadda be FBI & Organized Crime working together in Cahoots “against the Commies”

  let Lucky Luciano out of Jail take over Sicily Mediterranean drug trade

  Hadda be Corsican goons in Office Strategic Services’ Pay busted 1948 dock strikes in Marseilles, sixties port transshipment Indochina heroin,

  Hadda be ringing on Multinational Cashregisters

  world-wide laundry for organized Criminal money

  Hadda be CIA & Mafia & FBI together

  bigger than Nixon, bigger than War.

  Hadda be a gorged throat full of murder

  Hadda be mouth and ass a solid mass of rage

  a Red hot head, a scream in the back of the throat

  Hadda be in Kissinger’s brain

  Hadda be in Rockefeller’s mouth

  Hadda be Central Intelligence The Family “Our Thing” the Agency Mafia Organized Crime FBI Dope Cops & Multinational Corporations

  one big set of Criminal gangs working together in Cahoots

  Hit Men murderers everywhere outraged, on the make

  Secret drunk Brutal Dirty Rich

  on top of a Slag heap of prisons, Industrial Cancer, plutonium smog, garbaged cities, grandmas’ bedsores, Fathers’ resentments

  Hadda be the Rulers wanted Law & Order they got rich on

  wanted Protection status quo, wanted Junkies wanted Attica Wanted Kent State Wanted War in Indochina

  Hadda be CIA & the Mafia & the FBI

  Multinational Capitalists’ Strong arms squads, “Private detective Agencies for the very rich”

  And their Armies, Navies and Air Force bombing Planes.

  Hadda be Capitalism the Vortex of this rage, this

  competition man to man, horses’ heads in the Capo’s bed, Cuban turf & rumbles, hit men, gang wars across oceans,

  bombing Cambodia settled the score when Soviet Pilots manned Egyptian fighter planes

  Chile’s red democracy bumped off with White House pots & pans a warning to Mediterranean governments

  Secret Police embraced for decades, NKVD & CIA keep eachother’s secrets, OGPU & DIA never hit their own, KGB & FBI one mind—brute force

  world-wide, and full of money

  Hadda be rich, hadda be powerful, hadda hire technology from Harvard

  Hadda murder in Indonesia 500,000

  Hadda murder in Indochina 2,000,000

  Hadda murder in Czechoslovakia

  Hadda murder in Chile

  Hadda murder in Russia

  Hadda murder in America

  New York, May 30, 1975, 3 A.M.

 

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