Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems

by Allen Ginsberg

  Where was Theodore Roosevelt when he sent out ultimatums from his castle in Camden

  Where was the House of Representatives when Crane read aloud from his prophetic books

  What was Wall Street scheming when Lindsay announced the doom of Money

  Were they listening to my ravings in the locker rooms of Bick-fords Employment Offices?

  Did they bend their ears to the moans of my soul when I struggled with market research statistics in the Forum at Rome?

  No they were fighting in fiery offices, on carpets of heartfailure, screaming and bargaining with Destiny

  fighting the Skeleton with sabres, muskets, buck teeth, indigestion, bombs of larceny, whoredom, rockets, pederasty,

  back to the wall to build up their wives and apartments, lawns, suburbs, fairydoms,

  Puerto Ricans crowded for massacre on 114th St. for the sake of an imitation Chinese-Moderne refrigerator

  Elephants of mercy murdered for the sake of an Elizabethan birdcage

  millions of agitated fanatics in the bughouse for the sake of the screaming soprano of industry

  Money-chant of soapers—toothpaste apes in television sets— deodorizers on hypnotic chairs—

  petroleum mongers in Texas—jet plane streaks among the clouds—

  sky writers liars in the face of Divinity—fanged butchers of hats and shoes, all Owners! Owners! Owners! with obsession on property and vanishing Selfhood!

  and their long editorials on the fence of the screaming negro attacked by ants crawled out of the front page!

  Machinery of a mass electrical dream! A war-creating Whore of Babylon bellowing over Capitols and Academies!

  Money! Money! Money! shrieking mad celestial money of illusion! Money made of nothing, starvation, suicide! Money of failure! Money of death!

  Money against Eternity! and eternity’s strong mills grind out vast paper of Illusion!

  Paris, December 1957

  Laughing Gas

  To Gary Snyder

  The red tin begging cup you gave me,

  I lost it but its contents are undisturbed.

  I

  High on Laughing Gas

  I’ve been here before

  the odd vibration of

  the same old universe

  the nasal whine of the dentist’s drill

  singing against the nostalgic

  piano Muzak in the wall

  insistent, familiar, penetrating

  the teeth, where’ve I heard that

  asshole jazz before?

  The universe is a void

  in which there is a dreamhole

  The dream disappears

  the hold closes

  It’s the instant of going

  into or coming out of

  existence that is

  important—to catch on

  to the secret of the magic

  box

  Stepping outside the universe

  by means of Nitrous Oxide

  anesthetizing mind-consciousness

  the chiliasm was an impersonal dream—

  one of many, being mere dreams.

  the sadness of birth

  and death, the sadness of

  changing from dream to dream,

  the constant farewell

  of forms …

  saying ungoodby to what

  didn’t exist

  The many worlds that don’t exist

  all which seem real

  all joke

  all lost cartoon

  At that moment the whole goofy-spooky of the Universe WHAT?! Joke Being slips into Nothing like the tail of a lizard disappearing into a crack in the Wall with the final receding eyehole ending Loony Tunes accompanied by Woody Woodpecker’s hindoo maniac laughter in the skull. Nobody gets hurt. They all disappear. They were never there. Beginningless perfection.

  That’s why Satori’s accompanied by laughter

  and the Zenmaster rips up the Sutras in fury.

  And the pain of this contrariety

  The cycles of scream and laughter

  faces and asses Christs and Buddhas

  each with his own universe dragged

  over the snowy mental poles

  like a sack mad Santa Clauses

  Worst pain in the dentist’s chair comes true

  novacain also arrives in the cycle

  every hap will have its chance

  even God will come Once or Twice

  Satan will be my personal enemy

  Relax and die—

  The process will repeat itself

  Be Born! Be Born!

  Back to the same old smiling

  dentist—

  The Bloomfield police car

  with its idiot red light

  revolving on its head

  balefully at Eternity

  gone in an instant

  —simultaneous

  appearance of Bankrobbers

  at the Twentieth Century Bank

  The fire engines screaming

  toward an old lady’s

  burned-in-her-bedroom

  today apocalypse

  tomorrow

  Mickey Mouse cartoons—

  I’m disgusted! it’s Unbelievable!

  What a funny horrible

  dirty joke!

  The whole universe a shaggy dog story!

  with a weird ending that begins again

  till you get the point

  ‘It was a dark and gloomy night …’

  ‘in every direction in and

  out’

  ‘You take the high road

  and I’ll take the low’

  —everybody lost

  in Scotlands of mind-consciousness—

  Adonoi Echad!

  It is not One, but Two,

  not two but Infinite—

  the universe be born and die

  in endless series in the mind!

  Gary Snyder, Jack, Zen thinkers

  split open existence

  and laugh & Cry—

  what’s shock? what’s measure?

  when the Mind’s an irrational

  traffic light in

  Gobi—

  follow the blinking lights of contrariety!

  What’s the use avoiding rats

  and horror, hiding from Cops

  and dentists’ drills?

  Somebody will invent

  a Buchenwald next door

  – an ant’s dream’s

  funnier than

  ours

  – he has more of them

  faster and seems

  to give less of

  a shit—

  O waves of probable

  and improbable

  Universes—

  Everybody’s right

  I’ll finish this poem

  in my next life.

  II

  …. with eye opening

  slowly to perceive

  that I be coming out

  of a trance—

  one look at the lipstick

  it’s a nurse

  in a dentist’s office

  that first frog

  thought leaping out of

  the void

  … a glimpse

  out of which the whole

  process unfolds this

  universe & logically

  and symmetrically next

  unbuilds it in exact

  reverse till you arrive

  back at the Nothing

  in which one chance

  note was originally

  struck …

  , the Czardas

  of Creation, the first banal chord

  establishing Music forever in

  its mechanical jukebox

  … and the whole

  structive unfolds

  itself inevitably and

  folds back into

  Nothing again …

  —the same man

  crossing the street looking

  both ways watc
h out for

  the cars—

  and each time, returning

  with a jerk of the face

  (’praps a dental touch)

  dictated by the sinking

  sensation, Oof! I’ve

  been hoodwinked—

  again like

  someone in the Circus

  defying death, got thrown

  into the orchestra—

  Note the music blaring

  with an indifferent flourish of Triumph

  a nightmare Razz

  —as the acrobat leaps

  out into the void—

  Me! I made that Last Chance

  jump off the wire

  way high up in the Big Top

  long ago …

  it’s happening again!

  I wake up dazed …

  it being the dream

  of someone in a dentist’s

  chair in a Universe he

  imagines—coming out

  of gas—

  it’s only happening

  in the closed universe of

  illusion

  III

  A nice day in the Universe on Broad Street—sun shines today as it never shone before and never will again—stillness in the blue sky—the church’s gold dome across the park sending and receiving flashes of light—I feel heart sick to destroy this all—

  What hope have the children in their prams passing the white silent doors of the houses—only the Public Library knows.

  Premonition in the dentist’s chair—mechanical voices over the radio singing Destination Moon—mysterious sorrow for the moon of this forgotten universe—humans, singing, singing—of the moon—for money?—except it’s the imbecilic canned voice of eternity rocking & rolling in Space making invisible announcements—

  The Doc’s agreed to the experiment—novacain, my mouth’s begun to disappear first—like the Cheshire Cat.

  BACK: Endless cycles of conflict happening in nothingness

  make it impossible to grasp for the perfection

  which does not exist

  but is not necessary

  so everything is final and occurs over & over again

  till we will finally blank out as expected.

  The First Note of Creation:

  the only one there could be if there

  weren’t nothing but

  an idea that there might

  not be nothing—

  Sherman Adams will resign

  I’m holding my breath

  the shiver run thru my belly

  the nurse will be singing I love you

  between breaths the Buddhists are right

  a tear

  siffle in the cheek

  the possibility escape

  the eye glare thru glasses

  Nothing grasped at & ungrasped as its trance thought passes

  I take my pen in hand

  The same old way sings Sinatra

  I’m writing to You give me understanding

  I pray sings Sinatra

  Can I never glimpse the round we have made?

  Write me as soon as able sings

  Sinatra O Lord burn me out of existence.

  You’ve got a long body sings

  Sinatra I refuse to breathe and return to form

  I’ve seen every moment in advance before

  I’ve turned my neck a million times

  & written this note

  & been greeted with fire and cheers

  I refuse to stop

  —thinking—

  What Perfection has escaped me?

  An endless cycle of possibilities clashing in Nothing

  with each mistake in the writing inevitable from the beginning

  of time

  The doctor’s phone number is Pilgrim 1-0000

  Are you calling me, Nothing?

  The universe be smashed

  to smithereens by the oncoming

  atomic explosions with

  Eisenhower as once President

  of a place called U.S.

  Gregory wrote the Bomb!

  Russians dream of Mars &

  when the cosmos goes and

  all consciousness after the

  final explosion of imagination

  in the void it won’t have

  made any difference that it

  all both did and did not

  happen, whatever it was once

  thought to be so real—

  it will be—gone.

  O that I might die on the spot

  I’ll have to go back

  any prophecy might have been right

  it’s all a great Exception

  My bus will arrive as foretold

  it’s the end of another September

  war is on the radio ahead

  we are all going to the inevitable beauty of doom

  a firebox stands sentient before the library

  it’s hot sun now I’m crazy scribbling

  —It began abstract and mindless nowhere

  planets of thought have passed

  it’ll end where it began

  I want to return to normal

  —but there is no changelessness

  but in Nirvana

  Or is there

  Ever Rest, Lord?—and what sages

  know and sit.

  I’m a spy

  in Bloomfield on a park bench

  —frightened by buses—

  What’s that bee doing hanging round my shoe? my borrowed and inevitable shoe?

  A vast red truck moving with boxes of dead television sets in the back

  American flag waving over the library

  On the bus I sit by a negress

  This is an explosion

  IV

  Back in the same old black hole

  where Possibility closes the

  last door

  and the Great void remains

  … a glass

  in the dust reflecting the sun,

  fragment of a bottle

  that never knew it existed

  … under a tree

  that sleeps all winter

  till it grows its eyes

  in May heat

  and flowers upward with a thousand

  green sensations

  dies, and forgets itself in Snow

  … Phantom in Phantom

  If we didn’t exist, God

  would have to create this

  to leave no room for complaint

  by any of the birds & bees

  who might have missed their

  chance (to be)

  Fate tells a big lie.

  … And the big kind Dreamer

  is on the nod again

  God sleeps!

  He’s in for a big surprise

  one of his dreams is going to come true

  He’ll get the answer too

  He’ll get the answer too

  Just a flash in the cosmic pan

  —just an instant when there

  might have been a light

  had there been any pan

  to reflect it—

  —we can lie on the bed and imagine

  ourselves away—

  I’m afraid to stop breathing—

  first the pain in the

  body

  suffocation, then

  the Death.

  V

  The pain of gas flowing into the eye

  the crooked tooth-drills hanging like gallows

  on a miniature Jupiter

  Thru the open window, spring frozen

  in the young tree

  the repeated bong of the doorbell

  opening elsewhere

  I’ve come back to the same medicine

  cabinet in the universe—Bong,

  I know I’m more real than the dentist!

  a serious embarrassment, having grasped to one Self

  though admittedly I’d seen it disappear

  over and over

  TRACKLESS
TRANSIT CORPORATION

  runs a bus thru Bloomfield

  … blossoming

  in the bottom of an unborn daisy

  it will vanish into the Whist-not

  History will keep repeating

  itself forever like the woman

  in the image on the Dutch Cleanser box

  A way out of the mirror

  was found by the image

  that realized its existence

  was only …

  a stranger completely like myself

  A way out for ever! has not been found

  to enter the ground whence the images

  rise, and repeat themselves

  The sadness is, that every leaf

  has fallen before—

  At my feet an ant crawling

  in the broken asphalt—

  and this exact white lollypop stick

  & twig of branch

  lain next to that soggy match

  near those few grassblades …

  and I’ve sat here and took this note

  before and tried to remember—

  and now I do—remember what

  I’m writing as I write it down

  I know when I’m going to stop

  I know when I’m forgetting and

  know when I

  take a jump and change—

  Impossible

  to do anything but right now in all

  the universe at once—

  which Art does, and

  the Insight of Laughing Gas?

  Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha

  and the monk laughs

  at the moon—

  and everybody 10 miles round

  in all directions wonders

  why—he’s just reminding

  them—of what—of

  the moon, the old dumb moon

  of a million lives.

  New York, Fall 1958

  Mescaline

  Rotting Ginsberg, I stared in the mirror naked today

  I noticed the old skull, I’m getting balder

  my pate gleams in the kitchen light under thin hair

  like the skull of some monk in old catacombs lighted by

  a guard with flashlight

  followed by a mob of tourists

  so there is death

  my kitten mews, and looks into the closet

  Boito sings on the phonograph tonight his ancient song of angels

  Antinoüs bust in brown photograph still gazing down from my wall

  a light burst from God’s delicate hand sends down a wooden dove to the calm virgin

  Beato Angelico’s universe

  the cat’s gone mad and scraowls around the floor

  What happens when the death gong hits rotting ginsberg on the head

  what universe do I enter

  death death death death death the cat’s at rest

  are we ever free of—rotting ginsberg