Reality Sandwiches: 1953-1960
Page 3
But then, Kiss Me Again
in the dim brick lounge,
muted modern music.
Where shall I fly
not to be sad, my dear?
The other businessmen
bend heavily over armchairs
introducing women to cocktails
in fluorescent shadow --
gaiety of tables,
gaiety of fat necks,
gaiety of departures,
gaiety of national business,
hands waving away jokes.
I'm getting maudlin
on the soft rug watching,
mixed rye before me
on the little black table
whereon lieth my briefcase
containing market research
notes and blank paper --
that airplane ride to come
-- or a barefaced pilgrimage
acrost imaginary plains
I never made afoot
into Kansas hallucination
and supernatural deliverance.
Later: Hawthorne mystic
waiting on the bench
composing his sermon also
with white bony fingers
bitten, with hometown gold
ring, in a blue serge suit
and barely visible blond
mustache on mental face,
blank-eyed: pitiful thin body
-- what body may he love? --
My god! the soft beauty in
comparison -- that football boy
in sunny yellow lovesuit
puzzling out his Xmas trip
death insurance by machine.
A virginal feeling again,
I'd be willing to die aloft now.
Can't see outside in the dark,
real dreary strangers about,
and I'm unhappy flying away.
All this facility of travel
too superficial for the heart
I have for solitude.
Nakedness
must come again -- not sex,
but some naked isolation.
And down there's Hollywood,
the starry world below
-- expressing nakedness --
that craving, that glory
that applause -- leisure, mind,
appetite for dreams, bodies,
travels: appetite for the real,
created by the mind
and kissed in coitus --
that craving, that melting!
Not even the human
imagination satisfies
the endless emptiness of the soul.
The West Coast behind me
for five days while I return
to ancient New York --
ah drunkenness!
I'll see your eyes again.
Hopeless comedown!
Travelling thru the dark void
over Kansas yet moving nowhere
in the dark void of the soul.
Angel woke me to see
-- past my own reflection,
bald businessman with hornrims
sleepy in round window view --
spectral skeleton of electricity
illuminated nervous system
floating on the void out
of central brainplant powerhouse
running into heaven's starlight
overhead. 'Twas over Hutchinson.
Engine passed over lights,
view gone.
Georgeous George on my plane.
And Chicago, the first time,
smoking winter city
-- shivering in my tweed jacket
walking by the airport
around the block on Cicero
under the fogged flat
supersky of heaven --
another project for the heart,
six months for here someday
to make Chicago natural,
pick up a few strange images.
Far off red signs
on the orphan highway
glimmer at the trucks of home.
Who rides that lone road now?
What heart? Who smokes and loves
in Kansas auto now?
Who's talking magic
under the night? Who walks
downtown and drinks black beer
in his eternity? Whose eyes
Collect the streets and mountain tops
for storage in his memory?
What sage in the darkness?
Someone who should collect
my insurance!
Better I make
a thornful pilgrimage on theory
feet to suffer the total
isolation of the bum,
than this hipster
business family journey
-- crossing U.S. at night --
in a sudden glimpse
me being no one in the air
nothing but clouds in the moonlight
with humans fucking
underneath. . . .
SF-NY December 1954
MALEST CORNIFICI TUO CATULLO
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.
SF 1955
DREAM RECORD: JUNE 8, 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.
Blessed be the Muses
for their descent,
dancing round my desk,
crowning my balding head
with Laurel.
FRAGMENT 1956
Now to the come of the poem, let me be worthy
& sing holily the natural pathos of the human soul,
naked original skin beneath our dreams
& robes of thought, the perfect self identity
radiant with lusts and intellectual faces
Who carries the lines, the painful browed
contortions of the upper eyes, the whole body
breathing and sentient among flowers and buildings
open-eyed, self knowing, trembling with love --
Soul that I have, that Jack has, Huncke
has
Bill has, Joan had, and has in me memory yet,
bum has in rags, madman underneath black clothes.
Soul identical each to each, as standing on
the streetcorner ten years ago I looked at Jack
and told him we were the same person -- look
in my eyes and speak to yourself, that makes me
everybody's lover, Hal mine against his will,
I had his soul in my own body already, while
he frowned -- by the streetlamp 8th Avenue & 27th
Street 1947 -- I had just come back from Africa
with a gleam of the illumination actually
to come to me in time as come to all -- Jack
the worst murderer, Allen the most cowardly
with a streak of yellow love running through
my poems, a fag in the city, Joe Army screaming
in anguish in Dannemora 1945 jailhouse,
breaking his own white knuckle against the bars
his dumb sad cellmate beaten by the guards
an iron floor below, Gregory weeping in Tombs,
Joan lidded under eyes of 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, arch suicide, 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?
A STRANGE NEW COTTAGE IN BERKELEY
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.
1956
SATHER GATE ILLUMINATION
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 shiney 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 schoolbook 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 Yucatan once --
followed by a lonely janitor in dovegrey italian fruitpeddlar Chico Marx hat pushing his rollypoly 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 b
y 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.
1956
SCRIBBLE
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.
AFTERNOON SEATTLE
Busride along waterfront down Yessler under street bridge to the old red Wobbly Hall --
One Big Union, posters of the Great Mandala of Labor, bleareyed dusty cardplayers dreaming behind the counter . . . 'but these young fellers can't see ahead and we nothing to offer' --
After Snyder his little red beard and bristling Buddha mind I weeping crossed Skid Road to 10c. beer.
Labyrinth wood stairways and Greek movies under Farmers Market second hand 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 clockwork, 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