Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems

by Allen Ginsberg

  Rigaut with a letter of introduction to Death

  and Gide praised the telephone and other remarkable inventions

  we agreed in principle though he gossiped of lavender underwear

  but for all that he drank deeply of the grass of Whitman and was intrigued by all lovers named Colorado

  princes of America arriving with their armfuls of shrapnel and baseball

  Oh Guillaume the world so easy to fight seemed so easy

  did you know the great political classicists would invade Montparnasse

  with not one sprig of prophetic laurel to green their foreheads

  not one pulse of green in their pillows no leaf left from their wars—Mayakovsky arrived and revolted

  III

  Came back sat on a tomb and stared at your rough menhir

  a piece of thin granite like an unfinished phallus

  a cross fading into the rock 2 poems on the stone one Coeur Renversée

  other Habituez-vous comme moi A ces prodiges que j’annonce Guillaume Apollinaire de Kostrowitsky

  someone placed a jam bottle filled with daisies and a 5&10¢ surrealist typist ceramic rose

  happy little tomb with flowers and overturned heart

  under a fine mossy tree beneath which I sat snaky trunk

  summer boughs and leaves umbrella over the menhir and nobody there

  Et quelle voix sinistre ulule Guillaume qu’es-tu devenu

  his nextdoor neighbor is a tree

  there underneath the crossed bones heaped and yellow cranium perhaps

  and the printed poems Alcools in my pocket his voice in the museum

  Now middleage footsteps walk the gravel

  a man stares at the name and moves toward the crematory building

  same sky rolls over thru clouds as Mediterranean days on the Riviera during war

  drinking Apollo in love eating occasional opium he’d taken the light

  One must have felt the shock in St. Germain when he went out Jacob & Picasso coughing in the dark

  a bandage unrolled and the skull left still on a bed outstretched pudgy fingers the mystery and ego gone

  a bell tolls in the steeple down the street birds warble in the chestnut trees

  Famille Bremont sleeps nearby Christ hangs big chested and sexy in their tomb

  my cigarette smokes in my lap and fills the page with smoke and flames

  an ant runs over my corduroy sleeve the tree I lean on grows slowly

  bushes and branches upstarting through the tombs one silky spiderweb gleaming on granite

  I am buried here and sit by my grave beneath a tree

  Paris, Winter – Spring 1958

  The Lion for Real

  ‘Soyez muette pour moi, Idole contemplative …’

  I came home and found a lion in my living room

  Rushed out on the fire-escape screaming Lion! Lion!

  Two stenographers pulled their brunette hair and banged the window shut

  I hurried home to Paterson and stayed two days.

  Called up my old Reichian analyst

  who’d kicked me out of therapy for smoking marijuana

  ‘It’s happened’ I panted ‘There’s a Lion in my room’

  ‘I’m afraid any discussion would have no value’ he hung up.

  I went to my old boyfriend we got drunk with his girlfriend

  I kissed him and announced I had a lion with a mad gleam in my eye

  We wound up fighting on the floor I bit his eyebrow & he kicked me out

  I ended masturbating in his jeep parked in the street moaning ‘Lion.’

  Found Joey my novelist friend and roared at him ‘Lion!’

  He looked at me interested and read me his spontaneous ignu high poetries

  I listened for lions all I heard was Elephant Tiglon Hippogryph Unicorn Ants

  But figured he really understood me when we made it in Ignaz Wisdom’s bathroom.

  But next day he sent me a leaf from his Smokey Mountain retreat

  ‘I love you little Bo-Bo with your delicate golden lions

  But there being no Self and No Bars therefore the Zoo of your dear Father hath no Lion

  You said your mother was mad don’t expect me to produce the Monster for your Bridegroom.’

  Confused dazed and exalted bethought me of real lion starved in his stink in Harlem

  Opened the door the room was filled with the bomb blast of his anger

  He roaring hungrily at the plaster walls but nobody could hear him outside thru the window

  My eye caught the edge of the red neighbor apartment building standing in deafening stillness

  We gazed at each other his implacable yellow eye in the red halo of fur

  Waxed rheumy on my own but he stopped roaring and bared a fang greeting.

  I turned my back and cooked broccoli for supper on an iron gas stove

  boilt water and took a hot bath in the old tub under the sink board.

  He didn’t eat me, tho I regretted him starving in my presence.

  Next week he wasted away a sick rug full of bones wheaten hair falling out

  enraged and reddening eye as he lay aching huge hairy head on his paws

  by the egg-crate bookcase filled up with thin volumes of Plato, & Buddha.

  Sat by his side every night averting my eyes from his hungry motheaten face

  stopped eating myself he got weaker and roared at night while I had nightmares

  Eaten by lion in bookstore on Cosmic Campus, a lion myself starved by Professor Kandisky, dying in a lion’s flophouse circus,

  I woke up mornings the lion still added dying on the floor—‘Terrible Presence!’ I cried ‘Eat me or die!’

  It got up that afternoon—walked to the door with its paw on the wall to steady its trembling body

  Let out a soul rending creak from the bottomless roof of his mouth

  thundering from my floor to heaven heavier than a volcano at night in Mexico

  Pushed the door open and said in a gravelly voice ‘Not this time Baby—but I will be back again.’

  Lion that eats my mind now for a decade knowing only your hunger

  Not the bliss of your satisfaction O roar of the Universe how am I chosen

  In this life I have heard your promise I am ready to die I have served

  Your starved and ancient Presence O Lord I wait in my room at your Mercy.

  Paris, March 1958

  Ignu

  On top of that if you know me I pronounce you an ignu

  Ignu knows nothing of the world

  a great ignoramus in factories though he may own or inspire them or even be production manager

  Ignu has knowledge of the angel indeed ignu is angel in comical form

  W. C. Fields Harpo Marx ignus Whitman an ignu

  Rimbaud a natural ignu in his boy pants

  The ignu may be queer though like not kind ignu blows archangels for the strange thrill

  a gnostic women love him Christ overflowed with trembling semen for many a dead aunt

  He’s a great cocksman most beautiful girls are worshipped by ignu

  Hollywood dolls or lone Marys of Idaho long-legged publicity women and secret housewives

  have known ignu in another lifetime and remember their lover

  Husbands also are secretly tender to ignu their buddy

  oldtime friendship can do anything cuckold bugger drunk trembling and happy

  Ignu lives only once and eternally and knows it

  he sleeps in everybody’s bed everyone’s lonesome for ignu ignu knew solitude early

  So ignu’s a primitive of cock and mind

  equally the ignu has written liverish tomes personal metaphysics abstract

  images that scratch the moon ‘lightningflash-flintspark’ naked lunch fried shoes adios king

  The shadow of the angel is waving in the opposite direction

  dawn of intelligence turns the telephones into strange animals

  he attacks the ros
e garden with his mystical shears snip snip snip

  Ignu has painted Park Avenue with his own long melancholy

  and ignu giggles in a hard chair over tea in Paris bald in his decaying room a black hotel

  Ignu with his wild mop walks by Colosseum weeping

  he plucks a clover from Keats’ grave & Shelley’s a blade of grass

  knew Coleridge they had slow hung-up talks at midnight over tables of mahogany in London

  sidestreet rooms in wintertime rain outside fog the cabman blows his hand

  Charles Dickens is born ignu hears the wail of the babe

  Ignu goofs nights under bridges and laughs at battleships

  ignu is a battleship without guns in the North Sea lost O the flowerness of the moment

  he knows geography he was there before he’ll get out and die already

  reborn a bearded humming Jew of Arabian mournful jokes

  man with a star on his forehead and halo over his cranium

  listening to music musing happy at the fall of a leaf the moonlight of immortality in his hair

  table-hopping most elegant comrade of all most delicate mannered in the Sufi court

  he wasn’t even there at all

  wearing zodiacal blue sleeves and the long peaked conehat of a magician

  harkening to the silence of a well at midnight under a red star

  in the lobby of Rockefeller Center attentive courteous bare-eyed enthusiastic with or without pants

  he listens to jazz as if he were a negro afflicted with jewish melancholy and white divinity

  Ignu’s a natural you can see it when he pays the cabfare abstracted

  pulling off the money from an impossible saintly roll

  or counting his disappearing pennies to give to the strange bus-driver whom he admires

  Ignu has sought you out he’s the seeker of God

  and God breaks down the world for him every ten years

  he sees lightning flash in empty daylight when the sky is blue

  he hears Blake’s disembodied Voice recite the Sunflower in a room in Harlem

  No woe on him surrounded by 700 thousand mad scholars moths fly out of his sleeve

  He wants to die give up go mad break through into Eternity

  live on and teach an aged saint or break down to an eyebrow clown

  All ignus know each other in a moment’s talk and measure each other up at once

  as lifetime friends romantic winks and giggles across continents

  sad moment paying the cab goodby and speeding away uptown

  One or two grim ignus in the pack

  one laughing monk in dungarees

  one delighted by cracking his eggs in an egg cup

  one chews gum to music all night long rock and roll

  one anthropologist cookoo in the Petén Rainforest

  one sits in jail all year and bets karmaic racetrack

  one chases girls down East Broadway into the horror movie

  one pulls out withered grapes and rotten onions from his pants

  one has a nannygoat under his bed to amuse visitors plasters the wall with his crap

  collects scorpions whiskies skies etc. would steal the moon if he could find it

  That would set fire to America but none of these make ignu

  it’s the soul that makes the style the tender firecracker of his thought

  the amity of letters from strange cities to old friends

  and the new radiance of morning on a foreign bed

  A comedy of personal being his grubby divinity

  Eliot probably an ignu one of the few who’s funny when he eats

  Williams of Paterson a dying American ignu

  Burroughs a purest ignu his haircut is a cream his left finger

  pinkey chopped off for early ignu reasons metaphysical spells love spells with psychoanalysts

  his very junkhood an accomplishment beyond a million dollars

  Céline himself an old ignu over prose

  I saw him in Paris dirty old gentleman of ratty talk

  with longhaired cough three wormy sweaters round his neck

  brown mould under historic fingernails

  pure genius his giving morphine all night to 1400 passengers on a sinking ship

  ‘because they were all getting emotional’

  Who’s amazing you is ignu communicate with me

  by mail post telegraph phone street accusation or scratching at my window

  and send me a true sign I’ll reply special delivery

  DEATH IS A LETTER THAT WAS NEVER SENT

  Knowledge born of stamps words coins pricks jails seasons sweet ambition laughing gas

  history with a gold halo photographs of the sea painting a celestial din in the bright window

  one eye in a black cloud

  and the lone vulture on a sand plain seen from the window of a Turkish bus

  It must be a trick. Two diamonds in the hand one Poetry one Charity

  proves we have dreamed and the long sword of intelligence

  over which I constantly stumble like my pants at the age six— embarrassed.

  New York, November, 1958

  Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!

  POET is Priest

  Money has reckoned the soul of America

  Congress broken thru to the precipice of Eternity

  the President built a War machine which will vomit and rear up Russia out of Kansas

  The American Century betrayed by a mad Senate which no longer sleeps with its wife

  Franco has murdered Lorca the fairy son of Whitman

  just as Mayakovsky committed suicide to avoid Russia

  Hart Crane distinguished Platonist committed suicide to cave in the wrong America

  just as millions of tons of human wheat were burned in secret caverns under the White House

  while India starved and screamed and ate mad dogs full of rain

  and mountains of eggs were reduced to white powder in the halls of Congress

  no godfearing man will walk there again because of the stink of the rotten eggs of America

  and the Indians of Chiapas continue to gnaw their vitaminless tortillas

  aborigines of Australia perhaps gibber in the eggless wilderness

  and I rarely have an egg for breakfast tho my work requires infinite eggs to come to birth in Eternity

  eggs should be eaten or given to their mothers

  and the grief of the countless chickens of America is expressed

  in the screaming of her comedians over the radio

  Detroit has built a million automobiles of rubber trees and phantoms

  but I walk, I walk, and the Orient walks with me, and all Africa walks

  and sooner or later North America will walk

  for as we have driven the Chinese Angel from our door he will drive us from the Golden Door of the future

  we have not cherished pity on Tanganyika

  Einstein alive was mocked for his heavenly politics

  Bertrand Russell driven from New York for getting laid

  immortal Chaplin driven from our shores with the rose in his teeth

  a secret conspiracy by Catholic Church in the lavatories of Congress has denied contraceptives to the unceasing masses of India.

  Nobody publishes a word that is not the cowardly robot ravings of a depraved mentality

  the day of the publication of the true literature of the American body will be day of Revolution

  the revolution of the sexy lamb

  the only bloodless revolution that gives away corn

  poor Genet will illuminate the harvesters of Ohio

  Marijuana is a benevolent narcotic but J. Edgar Hoover prefers his deathly scotch

  And the heroin of Lao-Tze & the Sixth Patriarch is punished by the electric chair

  but the poor sick junkies have nowhere to lay their heads

  fiends in our government have invented a cold-turkey cure for addiction as obsolete as the Defense Early Warning Rad
ar System.

  I am the defense early warning radar system

  I see nothing but bombs

  I am not interested in preventing Asia from being Asia

  and the governments of Russia and Asia will rise and fall but Asia and Russia will not fall

  the government of America also will fall but how can America fall

  I doubt if anyone will ever fall anymore except governments

  fortunately all the governments will fall

  the only ones which won’t fall are the good ones

  and the good ones don’t yet exist

  But they have to begin existing they exist in my poems

  they exist in the death of the Russian and American governments

  they exist in the death of Hart Crane & Mayakovsky

  Now is the time for prophecy without death as a consequence

  the universe will ultimately disappear

  Hollywood will rot on the windmills of Eternity

  Hollywood whose movies stick in the throat of God

  Yes Hollywood will get what it deserves

  Time

  Seepage of nerve-gas over the radio

  History will make this poem prophetic and its awful silliness a hideous spiritual music

  I have the moan of doves and the feather of ecstasy

  Man cannot long endure the hunger of the cannibal abstract

  War is abstract

  the world will be destroyed

  but I will die only for poetry, that will save the world

  Monument to Sacco & Vanzetti not yet financed to ennoble Boston

  natives of Kenya tormented by idiot con-men from England

  South Africa in the grip of the white fool

  Vachel Lindsay Secretary of the Interior

  Poe Secretary of Imagination

  Pound Secty. Economics

  and Kra belongs to Kra, and Pukti to Pukti

  crossfertilization of Blok and Artaud

  Van Gogh’s Ear on the currency

  no more propaganda for monsters

  and poets should stay out of politics or become monsters

  I have become monsterous with politics

  the Russian poet undoubtedly monsterous in his secret notebook

  Tibet should be left alone

  These are obvious prophecies

  America will be destroyed

  Russian poets will struggle with Russia

  Whitman warned against this ‘fabled Damned of nations’