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object:Allen Ginsberg
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Irwin Allen Ginsberg (3 June 1926 5 April 1997) was an American Beat poet born in Newark, New Jersey. He was a central figure among Beat Generation writers. Ginsberg is best known for "Howl", a long poem about consumer society's negative human values.

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Kerouac, Jack. (1922-1969). American novelist influenced by Buddhism. Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, to a working-class Quebecois family. His first language was the Quebecois French dialect; he learned English from nuns at the local parish school. An outstanding student and athlete in high school, he accepted an athletic scholarship to Columbia University in 1940 and became a star football player, before a broken leg ended his career. Kerouac left the university and enlisted in the Navy but was discharged. He served as a merchant seaman before returning to Columbia in 1944, where he met ALLEN GINSBERG and began to gather a group of companions that Kerouac would later dub the "Beat Generation." His friend Neal Cassady's enthusiasm for the psychic Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) prompted Kerouac to want to learn something about Asian religions. Finding DWIGHT GODDARD's A Buddhist Bible in the public library in San Jose, California, he studied the book carefully and memorized sections of it. Although Kerouac considered himself to be a Roman Catholic throughout his life, his interest in Buddhism grew, in part due to the influence of the poet GARY SNYDER, whom he met in San Francisco. At Snyder's urging, Kerouac wrote a Buddhist scripture, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, as well as a life of the Buddha. His best-known works, however, are On the Road (1957) and The Dharma Bums (1958). Kerouac died in his mother's home in Florida at the age of forty-seven of complications resulting from alcoholism.

Snyder, Gary. (1930-). American poet and prominent figure in Zen Buddhism in America. Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco and raised on a farm outside Seattle, Washington. He attended Reed College in Oregon, where he studied literature and anthropology. Inspired by DAISETZ TEITARO SUZUKI's Essays in Zen Buddhism, he taught himself to meditate, and devoted himself to the practice of Zen meditation while working as a fire lookout in Washington state. In 1952, he enrolled in the Department of Oriental Languages at the University of California, Berkeley, to study Chinese and Japanese. He met ALLEN GINSBERG and JACK KEROUAC in San Francisco and participated in the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955, where Ginsberg first read Howl. Snyder traveled to Japan in 1956, returning again in 1958 to spend seven years practicing Zen meditation at the monastery of DAITOKUJI. He returned to San Francisco in 1966. His work and his poetry have remained committed both to the exploration of Buddhist, especially Zen, practice and to the protection of the environment. Snyder served on the California Arts Council from 1974 to 1980 and taught at the University of California, Davis, where he helped found the Nature and Culture curriculum. He founded the Ring of Bone Zendo at his mountain farm in the northern Sierra Nevada range in California.



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   2 Allen Ginsberg

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

  213 Allen Ginsberg
   3 Anne Waldman
   3 Ai Weiwei
   2 Patti Smith
   2 Ken Kesey
   2 Jack Kerouac
   2 Garth Risk Hallberg
   2 Eric Drooker

1:Poets are damned... but see with the eyes of angels. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
2:Death & Fame

When I die

I don't care what happens to my body throw ashes in the air, scatter 'em in East River bury an urn in Elizabeth New Jersey, B'nai Israel Cemetery

But I want a big funeral St. Patrick's Cathedral, St. Mark's Church, the largest synagogue in Manhattan

First, there's family, brother, nephews, spry aged Edith stepmother 96, Aunt Honey from old Newark,

Doctor Joel, cousin Mindy, brother Gene one eyed one ear'd, sister-in-law blonde Connie, five nephews, stepbrothers & sisters their grandchildren, companion Peter Orlovsky, caretakers Rosenthal & Hale, Bill Morgan--

Next, teacher Trungpa Vajracharya's ghost mind, Gelek Rinpoche, there Sakyong Mipham, Dalai Lama alert, chance visiting America, Satchitananda Swami Shivananda, Dehorahava Baba, Karmapa XVI, Dudjom Rinpoche, Katagiri & Suzuki Roshi's phantoms Baker, Whalen, Daido Loorie, Qwong, Frail White-haired Kapleau Roshis, Lama Tarchen --

Then, most important, lovers over half-century Dozens, a hundred, more, older fellows bald & rich young boys met naked recently in bed, crowds surprised to see each other, innumerable, intimate, exchanging memories

"He taught me to meditate, now I'm an old veteran of the thousandday retreat --"

"I played music on subway platforms, I'm straight but loved him he loved me"

"I felt more love from him at 19 than ever from anyone"

"We'd lie under covers gossip, read my poetry, hug & kiss belly to belly arms round each other"

"I'd always get into his bed with underwear on & by morning my skivvies would be on the floor"

"Japanese, always wanted take it up my bum with a master"

"We'd talk all night about Kerouac & Cassady sit Buddhalike then sleep in his captain's bed."

"He seemed to need so much affection, a shame not to make him happy"

"I was lonely never in bed nude with anyone before, he was so gentle my stomach shuddered when he traced his finger along my abdomen nipple to hips-- "

"All I did was lay back eyes closed, he'd bring me to come with mouth & fingers along my waist"

"He gave great head"

So there be gossip from loves of 1948, ghost of Neal Cassady commin-gling with flesh and youthful blood of 1997 and surprise -- "You too? But I thought you were straight!"

"I am but Ginsberg an exception, for some reason he pleased me."

"I forgot whether I was straight gay queer or funny, was myself, tender and affectionate to be kissed on the top of my head, my forehead throat heart & solar plexus, mid-belly. on my prick, tickled with his tongue my behind"

"I loved the way he'd recite 'But at my back allways hear/ time's winged chariot hurrying near,' heads together, eye to eye, on a pillow --"

Among lovers one handsome youth straggling the rear

"I studied his poetry class, 17 year-old kid, ran some errands to his walk-up flat, seduced me didn't want to, made me come, went home, never saw him again never wanted to... "

"He couldn't get it up but loved me," "A clean old man." "He made sure I came first"

This the crowd most surprised proud at ceremonial place of honor--

Then poets & musicians -- college boys' grunge bands -- age-old rock star Beatles, faithful guitar accompanists, gay classical con-ductors, unknown high Jazz music composers, funky trum-peters, bowed bass & french horn black geniuses, folksinger fiddlers with dobro tamborine harmonica mandolin auto-harp pennywhistles & kazoos

Next, artist Italian romantic realists schooled in mystic 60's India, Late fauve Tuscan painter-poets, Classic draftsman Massa-chusets surreal jackanapes with continental wives, poverty sketchbook gesso oil watercolor masters from American provinces

Then highschool teachers, lonely Irish librarians, delicate biblio-philes, sex liberation troops nay armies, ladies of either sex

"I met him dozens of times he never remembered my name I loved him anyway, true artist"

"Nervous breakdown after menopause, his poetry humor saved me from suicide hospitals"

"Charmant, genius with modest manners, washed sink, dishes my studio guest a week in Budapest"

Thousands of readers, "Howl changed my life in Libertyville Illinois"

"I saw him read Montclair State Teachers College decided be a poet-- "

"He turned me on, I started with garage rock sang my songs in Kansas City"

"Kaddish made me weep for myself & father alive in Nevada City"

"Father Death comforted me when my sister died Boston l982"

"I read what he said in a newsmagazine, blew my mind, realized others like me out there"

Deaf & Dumb bards with hand signing quick brilliant gestures

Then Journalists, editors's secretaries, agents, portraitists & photo-graphy aficionados, rock critics, cultured laborors, cultural historians come to witness the historic funeral Super-fans, poetasters, aging Beatnicks & Deadheads, autograph-hunters, distinguished paparazzi, intelligent gawkers

Everyone knew they were part of 'History" except the deceased who never knew exactly what was happening even when I was alive
February 22, 1997
~ Allen Ginsberg,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Candor disarms paranoia. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
2:You too must seek the sun. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
3:Everybody's serious but me. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
4:First thought, best thought. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
5:Sanity - a trick of agreement ~ Allen Ginsberg,
6:Scientist alone is true poet. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
7:I know too much and not enough ~ Allen Ginsberg,
8:What is obscenity? And to whom? ~ Allen Ginsberg,
9:Mind is shapely, Art is shapely. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
10:You can't photograph everything. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
11:First thoughts are the strongest. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
12:Things are symbols of themselves. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
13:Inside skull vast as outside skull ~ Allen Ginsberg,
14:Subject is known by what she sees. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
15:we're all golden sunflowers inside. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
16:War is good business Invest your son ~ Allen Ginsberg,
17:What came is gone forever every time ~ Allen Ginsberg,
18:I smoke marijuana every chance I get. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
19:You are what you think about all day. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
20:All these books are published in Heaven. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
21:It's never to late to do nothing at all. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
22:What if someone gave a war and Nobody came? ~ Allen Ginsberg,
23:America, why are your libraries full of tears? ~ Allen Ginsberg,
24:I learned a world from each / one whom I loved ~ Allen Ginsberg,
25:We are all exposed to the flash bulb of death. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
26:Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God! ~ Allen Ginsberg,
27:America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
28:Others can measure their visions by what we see. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
29:Bob Dylan is out of the mentorship of Allen Ginsberg. ~ Peter Fonda,
30:Our heads are round so thought can change direction ~ Allen Ginsberg,
31:Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
32:Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
33:We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter ~ Allen Ginsberg,
34:I never saw [Allen Ginsberg] as some kind of crazy figure. ~ Ai Weiwei,
35:Poets are damned... but see with the eyes of angels. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
36:Naked in solitary prison cell he looks down at a hard-on. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
37:Truth is dissent, where all power resides in the Big Lie. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
38:When it snows in your nose, you catch cold in your brain. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
39:America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? ~ Allen Ginsberg,
40:Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa! ~ Allen Ginsberg,
41:The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
42:Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
43:The censorship of language is the censorship of consciousness. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
44:I didn't know the names of the flowers - now my garden is gone. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
45:I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
46:To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
47:Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns? ~ Allen Ginsberg,
48:My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg. ~ Patti Smith,
49:America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
50:Allen Ginsberg was a remarkable guy. He was himself. He was an original. ~ Nat Hentoff,
51:Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul! ~ Allen Ginsberg,
52:The Jews always complained, kvetching about false gods, and erected the ~ Allen Ginsberg,
53:Who can live with this Consciousness and not wake frightened at sunrise? ~ Allen Ginsberg,
54:The best thing about being famous is that it makes it easier to get laid. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
55:None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
56:I never really read Allen Ginsberg poetry, even though I have a book he gave me. ~ Ai Weiwei,
57:he threw up his hands and wrote the Universe dont exist and died to prove it ~ Allen Ginsberg,
58:Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then! ~ Allen Ginsberg,
59:When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
60:A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
61:I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
62:I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
63:Tell your secrets. [In reply to the question "How does one become a prophet?"] ~ Allen Ginsberg,
64:It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
65:Let the straight flower bespeak its purpose in straightness - to seek the light. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
66:Now I have enough money to travel wherever I want, but I haven't got the health. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
67:There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
68:There should be no distinction between what we write down, and what we really know. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
69:Let go of the spirit of the departed, and continue the celebration of your own life. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
70:Presumably, if you see spirit at the moment it gained access, then it'll be dropped. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
71:The soul is innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
72:I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
73:I want to be a saint, a real saint while I am young, for there is so much work to do. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
74:I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
75:I know I'm not God, are you? Don't be silly. God? God? Everybody's God? Don't be silly. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
76:Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He's a warrior first and a poet second. ~ Ken Kesey,
77:who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism ~ Allen Ginsberg,
78:My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
79:Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
80:It's time we did something to assert ourselves. After all, we do comprise 10% of the population. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
81:The suffering itself is not so bad; it's the resentment against suffering that is the real pain. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
82:I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
83:The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy! ~ Allen Ginsberg,
84:The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
85:what sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination ~ Allen Ginsberg,
86:The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
87:I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? ~ Allen Ginsberg,
88:Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
89:Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel! ~ Allen Ginsberg,
90:I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
91:Recent history is the record of one vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
92:I've got enough money to live where I want, but I don't want to move.Go out and have sexual adventures in Burma. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
93:A naked lunch is natural to us We eat reality sandwiches. But allegories are so much lettuce. Don't hide the madness. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
94:The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene ~ Allen Ginsberg,
95:To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
96:Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon he promises the stars he'll make us a new universe if it comes to that. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
97:Sometime I’ll lay down my wrath, As I lay my body down Between the ache of breath and breath, Golden slumber in the bone. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
98:Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
99:Between the whiskers scraggling down his neck and the now-crooked glasses, he could have been the Black Allen Ginsberg. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg,
100:I have lots of things that aren't so old that I value, such as a copy of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," which he signed for me. ~ Stephen Greenblatt,
101:I still had to correct Allen Ginsberg at times when he called women girls. I'd say. Allen please, it's not politically correct. ~ Anne Waldman,
102:Breathe when you breathe. Walk where you walk. Talk when you talk. Cry when you cry. Die when you die. Let go when you let go. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
103:Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
104:To get on screen with the Talking Asshole, quite a feat. And it's certainly going to be a cult film that people will be seeing. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
105:If you want to make order, put your own heart in order, and, having put one's heart in order, one can regulate the family order. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
106:I am learning by the week, but my poesy is still not my own. New rhyme, new me me me in words. I am not all this carven rhetoric. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
107:I've listened to and know Allen Ginsberg music and met him a couple of times, but I don't have any strong statements to make. ~ William S Burroughs,
108:I never dreamed the sea so deep, The earth so dark; so long my sleep, I have become another child. I wake to see the world go wild. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
109:The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
110:in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night ~ Allen Ginsberg,
111:I saw [Allen Ginsberg] more as an old man who liked poetry and who had a lot of physical and emotional problems. We liked our time together. ~ Ai Weiwei,
112:Night is the wonderful opportunity to take rest, to forgive, to smile, to get ready for all the battles that you have to fight tomorrow. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
113:…we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re all blessed by our own seed & golden hairy naked accomplishment (Sunflower Sutra) ~ Allen Ginsberg,
114:Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics. ~ David Amram,
115:Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine. Jiggling your knees blankeyed in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
116:Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
117:Who’ll come lie down in the dark with me Belly to belly and knee to knee Who’ll look into my hooded eye Who’ll lie down under my darkened thigh? ~ Allen Ginsberg,
118:Writing and rewriting are the same thing to me. I don't believe what Allen Ginsberg said that "first thought, then - " I just don't believe that. ~ Lynne Tillman,
119:The desire to have power dissolves. The desire to dominate people for love dissolves. On the other hand, it's a relief to realize you can let go. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
120:Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university. ~ Patti Smith,
121:How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
122:If I had a soul I sold it for pretty words If I had a body I used it up spurting my essence Allen Ginsberg warns you dont follow my path to extinction ~ Allen Ginsberg,
123:The actual materials are important. A book at the nightstand is important - a light you can get at - or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman's latern. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
124:The poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred ~ Allen Ginsberg,
125:Affection is the most important thing. And the quality of affection - with your friends, your lovers, your family. But particularly for your own generation. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
126:We love to be hurt and we love to have our unhealing wounds opened and reopened again: we sit staring in the mirror of art, fascinated by our own deformities. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
127:You can't escape the past in Paris, and yet what's so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn't seem to burden. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
128:My last bedside conversation in the hospital just a few weeks before Allen Ginsberg died was 'please take care of so and so. And the legacy of the Kerouac school. ~ Anne Waldman,
129:Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
130:An unnoticed corner of the world suddenly becomes noticed, and when you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it becomes sacred. (On Robert Frank's photography) ~ Allen Ginsberg,
131:Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what's vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
132:Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illumnations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! ~ Allen Ginsberg,
133:What is ironic is that Allen Ginsberg's importance was in its twilight for so many years that it took his death to bring it to the front page. He electrified an entire world! ~ Rita Dove,
134:Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
135:Ed Friedman: [talking about Patti Smith] One time she told me, "Allen Ginsberg thought I was a cute boy and he tried to pick me up, so I said, "LOOK AT THE TITS, ALLEN! NOTICE THE TITS! ~ Legs McNeil,
136:Kissass
Kissass is the Part of Peace
America will have to Kissass Mother Earth
Whites have to Kissass blacks, for Peace & Pleasure,
Only Pathway to Peace, Kissass.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
137:You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole ~ Allen Ginsberg,
138:Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
139:Of course, there are some people who behave rudely. Allen Ginsberg used to like to get up in public and take his clothes off. I don't do that, but I liked Allen Ginsberg. He was a nice guy. ~ Sam Hamill,
140:I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
141:I used to think of that line in Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl', about the 'sad cup of coffee'.. ..I have had cold coffee and hot coffee and lousy coffee, But I've never had a sad cup of coffee. ~ Robert Rauschenberg,
142:Man’s usurpation over nature is an egotism that will destroy human as well as whale kingdoms. … Academies should return to wisdom study in tree groves rather than robot study in plastic cells ~ Allen Ginsberg,
143:This is the one and only firmament; therefore it is the absolute world. There is no other world. The circle is complete. I am living in Eternity. The ways of this world are the ways of Heaven. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
144:I saw the best minds of my generation who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
145:Bob Dylan's one of the greatest blues singers of the western world; ancient art, on-the-spot improvisation, mind quickness, endless variation, classical formulae, prophetic vision, mighty wind-horse. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
146:Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
147:Allen Ginsberg startled the audience at OutWrite, the gay literary conference, when he confessed he didn’t worry about AIDS since his sex life consisted chiefly of giving blowjobs to straight college boys. ~ Christopher Bram,
148:The first person who really showed me the ugly spirit was Brion Gysin. "The ugly spirit shot Joan because . . ." and I never found out why. This Brion wrote out on a piece of paper in a sort of trance state. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
149:What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons? ~ Allen Ginsberg,
150:No rest without love, no sleep without dreams of love- be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines, the final wish is love -cannot be bitter, cannot deny, cannot withhold if denied: the weight is too heavy ~ Allen Ginsberg,
151:My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use -- my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
152:The combination of drugs, homosexuality, some good prose recited on screen. . . . In the sweat lodge ceremony we went through, did you get any glimpse of the Ugly Spirit, what that was historically or biographically? ~ Allen Ginsberg,
153:From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
154:Many seek and never see, anyone can tell them why. O they weep and O they cry and never take until they try unless they try it in their sleep and never some until they die. I ask many, they ask me. This is a great mystery. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
155:I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? ~ Allen Ginsberg,
156:My father shared the ethos of many of the beat writers and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. Probably for 25 years of my father's life, He had been an itinerant piano player and so traveled the road with bands and that sort of thing. ~ Anne Waldman,
157:Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
158:That’s the place where the books are made, I thought. That’s also where Allen Ginsberg offered a friend of mine a Fig Newton outside a deli in the East Village. By the time I first came to New York, I was already half in love. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg,
159:Those Two
That tree said
I don't like that white car under me,
it smells gasoline
That other tree next to it said
O you're always complaining
you're a neurotic
you can see by the way you're bent over.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
160:That's what the shaman said. He didn't know what he was up against. He didn't expect the strength and weight and evil intensity of this spirit, this "entity," as he called it. The same way the priest in an exorcism has to take on the spirit. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
161:I like the image of The Old Man and the Sea, of striving and succeeding but finding that the success was ghost success. In other words, in the long run, after a certain age, the motives for success, pride or oppressing people or getting power. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
162:The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does. By poetry I mean the imagining of what has been lost and what can be found - the imagining of who we are and the slow realization of it. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
163:They [Nicaragua] haven't had elections because they are in a state of seige by the United States. They would have had elections if the U.S. had left them alone. But the U.S. has mounted a full scale war against them. So how can you ask them to behave normally? ~ Allen Ginsberg,
164:So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic.' ~ Allen Ginsberg,
165:It's very much related to the American tycoon. To William Randolph Hearst, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, that whole stratum of American acquisitive evil. Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American. The ugly American at his ugly worst. That's exactly what it is. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
166:So the problem for the poetic artist or the photographer is the common problem of continuous attentiveness, continuous attempts to notice what he is noticing, continuous alertness to catch himself thinking or seeing, devotional attentiveness to the world he's moving through. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
167:What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit- man, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! ~ Allen Ginsberg,
168:You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening. If you're grasping to get your own voice, you're making a strained attempt to talk, so it's a matter of just listening to yourself as you sound when you're talking about something that's intensely important to you. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
169:The apparition of an evil, sick unconscious wild city rose before me in visible semblance, and about the dead buildings in the barren air, the bodies of the soul that built the wonderland shuffled and stalked and stalked and lurched in attitudes of immemorial nightmare all around. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
170:I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
171:Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
172:I believe that we are put here in human form to decipher the hieroglyphs of love and suffering. And, there is no degree of love or intensity of feeling that does not bring with it the possibility of a crippling hurt. But, it is a duty to take that risk and love without reserve or defense. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
173:The whole blear world of smoke and twisted steel around my head in a railroad car, and my mind wandering past the rust into futurity: I saw the sun go down in a carnal and primeval world, leaving darkness to cover my railroad train because the other side of the world was waiting for dawn. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
174:I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas / but not afraid / to speak my lonesomeness in a car, / because not only my lonesomeness / it's Ours, all over America, / O tender fellows --/ & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy / in the moon 100 years ago or in / the middle of Kansas now. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
175:Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph ~ Allen Ginsberg,
176:This is the same notion - Catholic exorcism, psychotherapy, shamanistic practices - getting to the moment when whatever it was gained access. And also to the name of the spirit. Just to know that it's the Ugly Spirit. That's a great step. Because the spirit doesn't want its name to be known. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
177:Taxi September along Jessore Road Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load past watery fields thru rain flood ruts Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts Wet processions Families walk Stunted boys big heads don't talk Look bony skulls & silent round eyes Starving black angels in human disguise. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
178:When Allen Ginsberg was still alive, he was was an artist, but he was very local. He was just another wing-nut in the neighborhood and he was very accessible. You'd see him in Tompkins Square Park or in the local delicatessen, in one of the greasy spoon restaurants on First Avenue or a Chinese restaurant. ~ Eric Drooker,
179:I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
180:Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse.

Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, "'First thought best thought' is not 'First word best word ' Ginsberg does rewrite. I'm sure he does. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston,
181:The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way. ~ Jack Kerouac,
182:An Eastern Ballad
I speak of love that comes to mind:
The moon is faithful, although blind;
She moves in thought she cannot speak.
Perfect care has made her bleak.
I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
183:I am neither romantic nor a visionary, and that is my weakness and perhaps my power; at any rate it is one difference. In less romantic and visionary terms, I am a Jew, (with powers of introspection and eclecticism attendant, perhaps.) But I am alien to your natural grace, to the spirit which you would know as a participator in America. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
184:one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others ~ Allen Ginsberg,
185:[William Butler] Yeats has the phrase Hodos Chameliontos, chameleon-like, in that you don't know where the beginning or the middle or the end is, so it's an unrelieved hallucination, because you don't know where you're coming in and you don't know where you're going out. It ends, you're going into the hallucination, or maybe coming out of it, I don't know. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
186:I don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not with the world, not to convince other people to do anything. The really interesting think is the struggle with the self, and the relation with the self, and there is no end to the improvement that can be done there, the discoveries that can be made. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
187:We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
188:Leo a Casavella, que es mi contemporáneo. Leo a Grace Morales, que es mi contemporáneo. Leo Allen Ginsberg, que es mi contemporáneo. Leo a Pasolini, que es mi contemporáneo. Leo a Cervantes, que es mi contemporáneo. Leo a Dante y a Virgilio, porque son mis contemporáneos. Sólo leo a contemporáneos. A antiguos y obsoletos, prefiero no acercarme, sean del siglo que sean. ~ Javier P rez And jar,
189:So I like slept till eleven, because we’re on Christmas break, only it’s called winter break now because Jesus is AN OPPRESSIVE ZOMBIE BASTARD AND WE DO NOT BOW DOWN TO HIS BIRTHDAY! At least not at Allen Ginsberg High School, we don’t. (Go, Fighting Beatniks!) But it’s all good, ’cause I’m going to have to get used to getting up later if I’m going to be a creature of the night. ~ Christopher Moore,
190:Every American wants MORE & MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more & more dead matter, machinery, possessions & rugs & fact information at the expense of what really counts as more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you're twice as aware of the rug. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
191:Have you read these poets? Langston Hughes Charles Bukowski John Keats Alfred Lord Tennyson Percy Bysshe Shelley Henry Wadsworth Longfellow William Butler Yeats William Blake Rudyard Kipling Roald Dahl Khalil Gibran Paul Laurence Dunbar Kabir Robert W Service Philip Larkin Dylan Thomas Henry Lawson Anne Sexton Allen Ginsberg Ogden Nash
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Help / Contact us
,
192:I visited Paterson many years ago - 20 some years ago as a kind of day trip because of William Carlos Williams, because of Allen Ginsberg having lived there. And I went to the Great Falls and sat really in the exact same spot as Adam Driver does as Paterson. And I walked around the factory buildings, and I was rereading - I was reading at the time the epic length poem "Paterson" by Williams. ~ Jim Jarmusch,
193:Regarding R. H. Blyth: Blyth's four volume Haiku became especially popular at this time [1950's] because his translations were based on the assumption that the haiku was the poetic expression of Zen. Not surprisingly, his books attracted the attention of the Beat school, most notably writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, all of whom had a prior interest in Zen. ~ Reginald Horace Blyth,
194:I was photographing the photographer Brassaï. He had very prominent eyes, like a frog's. As I focused my lens, he brought his hand up and pretended to focus his eye. It was a joke, but it added mystery to the picture. There's a sense of action in a very small world. Or with Allen Ginsberg there were people smoking cigarettes and in the smoke there's a sense of motion. It makes much out of very little. ~ John Loengard,
195:Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame ~ Allen Ginsberg,
196:Cezanne's Ports
In the foreground we see time and life
swept in a race
toward the left hand side of the picture
where shore meets shore.
But that meeting place
isn't represented;
it doesn't occur on the canvas.
For the other side of the bay
is Heaven and Eternity,
with a bleak white haze over its mountains.
And the immense water of L'Estaque is a go-between
for minute rowboats.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
197:No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake's illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet's oceanic horizon. No harm. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
198:I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
199:Allen Ginsberg asked me to sign his book. I must've stood there for five minutes drawing a complete blank. Hi Allen, from one howl to another. Dear Allen I'm glad you think I'm a poet. Love, Eileen. I'm the only woman you like, right Allen? Only the craziest thoughts passed through my mind. Finally he started getting embarrassed. Just sign it. Come by and write something better when you think of it. I scrawled something. I forget what it was. ~ Eileen Myles,
200: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-grey clouds. Larry Rivers
'll come at 10 AM 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!
~ Allen Ginsberg,
201:I never did know exactly what was meant by the term "The Beats," but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen Ginsberg, myself, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory Corso, for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years. ~ Gary Snyder,
202:The Rolling Stones were an inkling towards an appreciation of the unity of music, dance and words. Any of the black R&B people who had a stage show that involved dancing, music and words did the same thing, except that I thought Jagger's words were good, his music was good and his dancing was good. I spoke to him about Blake and tried to get him to sing [William] Blake's The Grey Monk, to use his words as lyrics. He didn't do it. In the end, I did it myself. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
203:We had collaborated with Allen Ginsberg on one of his last projects just before he died in the spring of '97, a book called Illuminated Poems - it was Allen's poems and songs and I illustrated them. Or, I illuminated them with paintings and drawings that bounced off of them. You want the picture to relate to the text without it slavishly regurgitating it or merely illustrating it, because that's redundant. You want to show another angle of what the text is saying. ~ Eric Drooker,
204:I prefer formal techniques, and use sonnets and rhyme, any manner of scheme to give a shape and order-of feeling as well as argument-to a poem. But all my life, I've also been a person who's made his bed in the morning and picks up the bath mat. That's what I mean by temperament. Whether genetic or acquired, I have a disposition to arrangements. One is born with this, as if with blue eyes or a weak heart. Do you think Allen Ginsberg ever put the cap back on his toothpaste? ~ J D McClatchy,
205:The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal... That was something I earned from Kerouac, which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing... The cure for that is to write the thing down which you will not publish and which you won't show people. To write secretly... so you can actually be free to say anything you want. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
206:An Asphodel
O dear sweet rosy
unattainable desire
...how sad, no way
to change the mad
cultivated asphodel, the
visible reality...
and skin's appalling
petals--how inspired
to be so Iying in the living
room drunk naked
and dreaming, in the absence
of electricity...
over and over eating the low root
of the asphodel,
gray fate...
rolling in generation
on the flowery couch
as on a bank in Arden-my only rose tonite's the treat
of my own nudity.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
207:This is just shit. It's happening. No blame. Happening and on the rise it would appear. What can we do to delay it? Probably zilch. To stop it? Likely less. But to survive it? Now that sounds more promising. There is evidence of bad shit having been survived before. Ancient Advice Left in cave by Wise French Caveman: "When Bigbad Shit come, no run scream hide. Try paint picture of it on wall. Drum to it. Sing to it. Dance to it. This give you handle on it." So Twister is my try.
Ken Kesey in a letter to Allen Ginsberg (August 1993) ~ Ken Kesey,
208:It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless - abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mindYou really have to make a resolution to write for yourself, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
209:Allen Ginsberg—sitting amid a huddle of Yippies off to the right—began chanting again, as he had all evening: “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare….” Ginsberg believed; he believed in everything—in democracy, in socialism, in communism, in anarchism, in Ezra Pound’s idealistic variety of fascist economics, in Buckminster Fuller’s technological Utopia, in D. H. Lawrence’s return to preindustrial pastoralism, and in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Voodoo, astrology magic; but, above all, in the natural goodness of man. ~ Robert Shea,
210:A Desolation
Now mind is clear
as a cloudless sky.
Time then to make a
home in wilderness.
What have I done but
wander with my eyes
in the trees? So I
will build: wife,
family, and seek
for neighbors.
Or I
perish of lonesomeness
or want of food or
lightning or the bear
(must tame the hart
and wear the bear) .
And maybe make an image
of my wandering, a little
image—shrine by the
roadside to signify
to traveler that I live
here in the wilderness
awake and at home.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
211:[Polythene Pam] was me, remembering a little event with a woman in Jersey, and a man who was England's answer to Allen Ginsberg, who gave us our first exposure - this is so long - you can't deal with all this. You see, everything triggers amazing memories. I met him when we were on tour and he took me back to his apartment and I had a girl and he had one he wanted me to meet. He said she dressed up in polythene, which she did. She didn't wear jackboots and kilts, I just sort of elaborated. Perverted sex in a polythene bag. Just looking for something to write about. ~ John Lennon,
212:Making The Lion For All It's Got -- A Ballad
I came home and found a lion in my room...
[First draft of "The Lion for Real" CP 174-175]
A lion met America
in the road
they stared at each other
two figures on the crossroads in the desert.
America screamed
The lion roared
They leaped at each other
America desperate to win
Fighting with bombs, flamethrowers,
knives forks submarines.
The lion ate America, bit off her head
and loped off to the golden hills
that's all there is to say
about america except
that now she's
lionshit all over the desert.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
213:Sphincter
I hope my good old asshole holds out
60 years it's been mostly OK
Tho in Bolivia a fissure operation
survived the altiplano hospital-a little blood, no polyps, occasionally
a small hemorrhoid
active, eager, receptive to phallus
coke bottle, candle, carrot
banana & fingers Now AIDS makes it shy, but still
eager to serve out with the dumps, in with the condom'd
orgasmic friend still rubbery muscular,
unashamed wide open for joy
But another 20 years who knows,
old folks got troubles everywhere necks, prostates, stomachs, joints-Hope the old hole stays young
till death, relax
~ Allen Ginsberg,
214:In Back Of The Real
railroad yard in San Jose
I wandered desolate
in front of a tank factory
and sat on a bench
near the switchman's shack.
A flower lay on the hay on
the asphalt highway
--the dread hay flower
I thought--It had a
brittle black stem and
corolla of yellowish dirty
spikes like Jesus' inchlong
crown, and a soiled
dry center cotton tuft
like a used shaving brush
that's been lying under
the garage for a year.
Yellow, yellow flower, and
flower of industry,
tough spiky ugly flower,
flower nonetheless,
with the form of the great yellow
Rose in your brain!
This is the flower of the World.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
215:I’d rather have drugs and liquor and divine visions than this empty barren fatalism on a mountaintop,” he wrote toward the end of his stint. These words are especially poignant when you consider that two years earlier he’d written to Allen Ginsberg: “I have crossed the ocean of suffering and found the path at last.” For Kerouac, the path of Buddhism proved too difficult, too alien to his temperament, and he eventually retreated into the mystical French Catholicism he’d known as a boy. Its fascination with the martyrdom of the Crucifixion jibed with his sense of himself as a doomed prophet destined for self-annihilation. The essential Buddhist ethic—do no violence to any living being—was a principle that tragically eluded him in his treatment of himself. ~ Philip Connors,
216:The Blue Angel
Marlene Dietrich is singing a lament
for mechanical love.
She leans against a mortarboard tree
on a plateau by the seashore.
She's a life-sized toy,
the doll of eternity;
her hair is shaped like an abstract hat
made out of white steel.
Her face is powdered, whitewashed and
immobile like a robot.
Jutting out of her temple, by an eye,
is a little white key.
She gazes through dull blue pupils
set in the whites of her eyes.
She closes them, and the key
turns by itself.
She opens her eyes, and they're blank
like a statue's in a museum.
Her machine begins to move, the key turns
again, her eyes change, she sings.
—you'd think I would have thought a plan
to end the inner grind,
but not till I have found a man
to occupy my mind.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
217:First Party At Ken Kesey's With Hell's Angels
Cool black night thru redwoods
cars parked outside in shade
behind the gate, stars dim above
the ravine, a fire burning by the side
porch and a few tired souls hunched over
in black leather jackets. In the huge
wooden house, a yellow chandelier
at 3 A.M. the blast of loudspeakers
hi-fi Rolling Stones Ray Charles Beatles
Jumping Joe Jackson and twenty youths
dancing to the vibration thru the floor,
a little weed in the bathroom, girls in scarlet
tights, one muscular smooth skinned man
sweating dancing for hours, beer cans
bent littering the yard, a hanged man
sculpture dangling from a high creek branch,
children sleeping softly in their bedroom bunks.
And 4 police cars parked outside the painted
gate, red lights revolving in the leaves.
December 1965
~ Allen Ginsberg,
218:Wild Orphan
Blandly mother
takes him strolling
by railroad and by river
-he's the son of the absconded
hot rod angeland he imagines cars
and rides them in his dreams,
so lonely growing up among
the imaginary automobiles
and dead souls of Tarrytown
to create
out of his own imagination
the beauty of his wild
forebears-a mythology
he cannot inherit.
Will he later hallucinate
his gods? Waking
among mysteries with
an insane gleam
of recollection?
The recognitionsomething so rare
in his soul,
met only in dreams
-nostalgias
of another life.
A question of the soul.
And the injured
losing their injury
in their innocence
-a cock, a cross,
an excellence of love.
And the father grieves
102
in flophouse
complexities of memory
a thousand miles
away, unknowing
of the unexpected
youthful stranger
bumming toward his door.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
219:Father Death Blues
Hey Father Death, I'm flying home
Hey poor man, you're all alone
Hey old daddy, I know where I'm going
Father Death, Don't cry any more
Mama's there, underneath the floor
Brother Death, please mind the store
Old Aunty Death Don't hide your bones
Old Uncle Death I hear your groans
O Sister Death how sweet your moans
O Children Deaths go breathe your breaths
Sobbing breasts'll ease your Deaths
Pain is gone, tears take the rest
Genius Death your art is done
Lover Death your body's gone
Father Death I'm coming home
Guru Death your words are true
Teacher Death I do thank you
For inspiring me to sing this Blues
Buddha Death, I wake with you
Dharma Death, your mind is new
Sangha Death, we'll work it through
Suffering is what was born
Ignorance made me forlorn
Tearful truths I cannot scorn
Father Breath once more farewell
Birth you gave was no thing ill
My heart is still, as time will tell.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
220:Five A.M.
Elan that lifts me above the clouds
into pure space, timeless, yea eternal
Breath transmuted into words
Transmuted back to breath
in one hundred two hundred years
nearly Immortal, Sappho's 26 centuries
of cadenced breathing - beyond time, clocks, empires, bodies, cars,
chariots, rocket ships skyscrapers, Nation empires
brass walls, polished marble, Inca Artwork
of the mind - but where's it come from?
Inspiration? The muses drawing breath for you? God?
Nah, don't believe it, you'll get entangled in Heaven or Hell Guilt power, that makes the heart beat wake all night
flooding mind with space, echoing through future cities, Megalopolis or
Cretan village, Zeus' birth cave Lassithi Plains - Otsego County
farmhouse, Kansas front porch?
Buddha's a help, promises ordinary mind no nirvana coffee, alcohol, cocaine, mushrooms, marijuana, laughing gas?
Nope, too heavy for this lightness lifts the brain into blue sky
at May dawn when birds start singing on East 12th street Where does it come from, where does it go forever? .
~ Allen Ginsberg,
221:Homework
Homage to Kenneth Koch
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
~ Allen Ginsberg,
222:Psalm Iv
Now I'll record my secret vision, impossible sight of the face of God:
It was no dream, I lay broad waking on a fabulous couch in Harlem
having masturbated for no love, and read half naked an open book of Blake
on my lap
Lo & behold! I was thoughtless and turned a page and gazed on the living
Sun-flower
and heard a voice, it was Blake's, reciting in earthen measure:
the voice rose out of the page to my secret ear never heard beforeI lifted my eyes to the window, red walls of buildings flashed outside,
endless sky sad Eternity
sunlight gazing on the world, apartments of Harlem standing in the
universe-each brick and cornice stained with intelligence like a vast living face-the great brain unfolding and brooding in wilderness!--Now speaking
aloud with Blake's voice-Love! thou patient presence & bone of the body! Father! thy careful
watching and waiting over my soul!
My son! My son! the endless ages have remembered me! My son! My son!
Time howled in anguish in my ear!
My son! My son! my father wept and held me in his dead arms.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
223:Passage For Allen Ginsberg
Sunflowers beside the railroad tracks,
sunflowers giving back the beauty God gave you
to one lonely traveler
who spies you from a train window
as she passes on her way to another train station.
She wonders if she were like you
rooted to your bit of earth
would she be happy,
would she be satisfied
to have the world glide past and not regret it?
For a moment, she thinks so,
then decides that, no, she never could
and turns back to her book of poetry,
remembering how hard it was to get here
and that flowers have their places as people do
and she cannot simply exchange hers for another,
even though she wants it.
That's how it is.
Her mother told her.
Now she believes her,
although she wishes she didn't.
At fifty-three, she feels the need
to rebel against the inevitable winding down.
She already feels it in her bones,
feels artery deterioration, and imagines
cancerous indications on medical charts
she hopes will never be part of her life,
as she turns back to the window
to catch the last glimpse of the sunflowers
that sent her thoughts on a journey
from which she knows she will never return,
only go on and on
and then just go.
~ Ai Ogawa,
224:Song
The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction
the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.
Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human-looks out of the heart
burning with purity-for the burden of life
is love,
but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.
No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
75
of love-be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
--cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:
the weight is too heavy
--must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.
The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye-yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.
76
~ Allen Ginsberg,
225:The Terms In Which I Think Of Reality
Reality is a question
of realizing how real
the world is already.
Time is Eternity,
ultimate and immovable;
everyone's an angel.
It's Heaven's mystery
of changing perfection :
absolute Eternity
changes! Cars are always
going down the street,
lamps go off and on.
It's a great flat plain;
we can see everything
on top of a table.
Clams open on the table,
lambs are eaten by worms
on the plain. The motion
of change is beautiful,
as well as form called
in and out of being.
Next : to distinguish process
in its particularity with
an eye to the initiation
of gratifying new changes
desired in the real world.
Here we're overwhelmed
with such unpleasant detail
we dream again of Heaven.
84
For the world is a mountain
of shit : if it's going to
be moved at all, it's got
to be taken by handfuls.
Man lives like the unhappy
whore on River Street who
in her Eternity gets only
a couple of bucks and a lot
of snide remarks in return
for seeking physical love
the best way she knows how,
never really heard of a glad
job or joyous marriage or
a difference in the heart :
or thinks it isn't for her,
which is her worst misery.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
226:Crossing Nation
Under silver wing
San Francisco's towers sprouting
thru thin gas clouds,
Tamalpais black-breasted above Pacific azure
Berkeley hills pine-covered below-Dr Leary in his brown house scribing Independence
Declaration
typewriter at window
silver panorama in natural eyeball-Sacramento valley rivercourse's Chinese
dragonflames licking green flats north-hazed
State Capitol metallic rubble, dry checkered fields
to Sierras- past Reno, Pyramid Lake's
blue Altar, pure water in Nevada sands'
brown wasteland scratched by tires
Jerry Rubin arrested! Beaten, jailed,
coccyx broken-Leary out of action--"a public menace...
persons of tender years...immature
judgement...pyschiatric examination..."
i.e. Shut up or Else Loonybin or Slam
Leroi on bum gun rap, $7,000
lawyer fees, years' negotiations-SPOCK GUILTY headlined temporary, Joan Baez'
paramour husband Dave Harris to Gaol
Dylan silent on politics, & safe-having a baby, a man-Cleaver shot at, jail'd, maddened, parole revoked,
Vietnam War flesh-heap grows higher,
blood splashing down the mountains of bodies
on to Cholon's sidewalks-Blond boys in airplane seats fed technicolor
Murderers advance w/ Death-chords
Earplugs in, steak on plastic
served--Eyes up to the Image--
19
What do I have to lose if America falls?
my body? my neck? my personality?
~ Allen Ginsberg,
227:On The Conduct Of The World Seeking Beauty Against
Government
Is that the only way we can become like Indians, like Rhinoceri,
like Quartz Crystals, like organic farmers, like what we imagine
Adam & Eve to’ve been, caressing each other with trembling limbs
before the Snake of Revolutionary Sex wrapped itself round
The Tree of Knowledge? What would Roque Dalton joke about lately
teeth chattering like a machine gun as he dabated mass tactics
with his Companeros? Necessary to kill the Yanquis with big bomb
Yes but don’t do it by yourself, better consult your mother
to get the Correct Line of Thought, if not consult Rimbaud once he got his leg cut
off
or Lenin after his second stroke sending a message thru Mrs Krupskaya
to the rude Georgian, & just before his deathly fit when the Cheka aides
outside
his door looked in coldly assuring him his affairs were in good hands no need to
move - What sickness at the
pit of his stomach moved up to
his brain?
What thought Khlebnikov on the hungry train exposing his stomach to the
sun?
Or Mayakovsky before the bullet hit his brain, what sharp propaganda for
action
on the Bureaucratic Battlefield in the Ministry of Collective Agriculture in
Ukraine?
What Slogan for Futurist architects or epic hymn for masses of Communist
Party Card holders in Futurity
on the conduct of the world seeking beauty against Government?
~ Allen Ginsberg,
228:Cosmopolitan Greetings
Stand up against governments, against God.
Stay irresponsible.
Say only what we know & imagine.
Absolutes are Coercion.
Change is absolute.
Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions.
Observe what’s vivid.
Notice what you notice.
Catch yourself thinking.
Vividness is self-selecting.
If we don’t show anyone, we’re free to write anything.
Remember the future.
Freedom costs little in the U.S.
Asvise only myself.
Don’t drink yourself to death.
Two molecules clanking us against each other require an observer to become
scientific data.
The measuring instrument determines the appearance of the phenomenal
world (after Einstein).
The universe is subjective..
Walt Whitman celebrated Person.
We are observer, measuring instrument, eye, subject, Person.
Universe is Person.
Inside skull is vast as outside skull.
What’s in between thoughts?
Mind is outer space.
What do we say to ourselves in bed at night, making no sound?
“First thought, best thought.”
Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.
Maximum information, minimum number of syllables.
Syntax condensed, sound is solid.
Intense fragments of spoken idiom, best.
Move with rhythm, roll with vowels.
Consonants around vowels make sense.
Savour vowels, appreciate consonants.
Subject is known by what she sees.
Others can measure their vision by what we see.
Candour ends paranoia.
17
~ Allen Ginsberg,
229:Velocity Of Money
I’m delighted by the velocity of money as it whistles through the windows
of Lower East Side
Delighted by skyscrapers rising the old grungy apartments falling on
84th Street
Delighted by inflation that drives me out on the street
After all what good’s the family farm, why eat turkey by thousands every
Thanksgiving?
Why not have Star Wars? Why have the same old America?!?
George Washington wasn’t good enough! Tom Paine pain in the neck,
Whitman what a jerk!
I’m delighted by double digit interest rates in the Capitalist world
I always was a communist, now we’ll win
an usury makes the walls thinner, books thicker & dumber
Usury makes my poetry more valuable
my manuscripts worth their weight in useless gold Now everybody’s atheist like me, nothing’s sacred
buy and sell your grandmother, eat up old age homes,
Peddle babies on the street, pretty boys for sale on Times Square You can shoot heroin, I can sniff cocaine,
macho men can fite on the Nicaraguan border and get paid with paper!
The velocity’s what counts as the National Debt gets higher
Everybody running after the rising dollar
Crowds of joggers down broadway past City Hall on the way to the Fed
Nobody reads Dostoyevsky books so they’ll have to give a passing ear
to my fragmented ravings in between President’s speeches
Nothing’s happening but the collapse of the Economy
so I can go back to sleep till the landlord wins his eviction suit in court.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
230:Feb. 29, 1958
Last nite I dreamed of T.S. Eliot
welcoming me to the land of dream
Sofas couches fog in England
Tea in his digs Chelsea rainbows
curtains on his windows, fog seeping in
the chimney but a nice warm house
and an incredibly sweet hooknosed
Eliot he loved me, put me up,
gave me a couch to sleep on,
conversed kindly, took me serious
asked my opinion on Mayakovsky
I read him Corso Creeley Kerouac
advised Burroughs Olson Huncke
the bearded lady in the Zoo, the
intelligent puma in Mexico City
6 chorus boys from Zanzibar
who chanted in wornout polygot
Swahili, and the rippling rythyms
of Ma Rainey and Vachel Lindsay.
On the Isle of the Queen
we had a long evening's conversation
Then he tucked me in my long
red underwear under a silken
blanket by the fire on the sofa
gave me English Hottie
and went off sadly to his bed,
Saying ah Ginsberg I am glad
to have met a fine young man like you.
At last, I woke ashamed of myself.
Is he that good and kind? Am I that great?
What's my motive dreaming his
manna? What English Department
would that impress? What failure
to be perfect prophet's made up here?
I dream of my kindness to T.S. Eliot
wanting to be a historical poet
and share in his finance of Imageryoverambitious dream of eccentric boy.
God forbid my evil dreams come true.
25
Last nite I dreamed of ~ Allen Ginsberg



.
T.S. Eliot would've been ashamed of me.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
231:Haiku (Never Published)
Drinking my tea
Without sugarNo difference.
The sparrow shits
upside down
--ah! my brain & eggs
Mayan head in a
Pacific driftwood bole
--Someday I'll live in N.Y.
Looking over my shoulder
my behind was covered
with cherry blossoms.
Winter Haiku
I didn't know the names
of the flowers--now
my garden is gone.
I slapped the mosquito
and missed.
What made me do that?
Reading haiku
I am unhappy,
longing for the Nameless.
A frog floating
in the drugstore jar:
summer rain on grey pavements.
(after Shiki)
On the porch
in my shorts;
auto lights in the rain.
Another year
32
has past-the world
is no different.
The first thing I looked for
in my old garden was
The Cherry Tree.
My old desk:
the first thing I looked for
in my house.
My early journal:
the first thing I found
in my old desk.
My mother's ghost:
the first thing I found
in the living room.
I quit shaving
but the eyes that glanced at me
remained in the mirror.
The madman
emerges from the movies:
the street at lunchtime.
Cities of boys
are in their graves,
and in this town...
Lying on my side
in the void:
the breath in my nose.
On the fifteenth floor
the dog chews a boneScreech of taxicabs.
A hardon in New York,
a boy
in San Fransisco.
33
The moon over the roof,
worms in the garden.
I rent this house.
[Haiku composed in the backyard cottage at 1624
Milvia Street, Berkeley 1955, while reading R.H.
Blyth's 4 volumes, "Haiku."]
~ Allen Ginsberg,
232:A Supermarket In California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the
streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit
supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles
full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! --- and you,
Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the
meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price
bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and
followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting
artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does
your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel
absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to
shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in
driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you
have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and
stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
~ Allen Ginsberg,
233:War Profit Litany
To Ezra Pound
These are the names of the companies that have made
money from this war
nineteenhundredsixtyeight Annodomini fourthousand
eighty Hebraic
These are the Corporations who have profited by merchandising skinburning phosphorous or shells fragmented
to thousands of fleshpiercing needles
and here listed money millions gained by each combine for
manufacture
and here are gains numbered, index'd swelling a decade, set
in order,
here named the Fathers in office in these industries, telephones directing finance,
names of directors, makers of fates, and the names of the
stockholders of these destined Aggregates,
and here are the names of their ambassadors to the Capital,
representatives to legislature, those who sit drinking
in hotel lobbies to persuade,
and separate listed, those who drop Amphetamine with
military, gossip, argue, and persuade
suggesting policy naming language proposing strategy, this
done for fee as ambassadors to Pentagon, consultants to military, paid by their industry:
and these are the names of the generals & captains military, who know thus work for war goods manufacturers;
and above these, listed, the names of the banks, combines,
investment trusts that control these industries:
and these are the names of the newspapers owned by these
banks
and these are the names of the airstations owned by these
combines;
and these are the numbers of thousands of citizens employed by these businesses named;
and the beginning of this accounting is 1958 and the end
1968, that static be contained in orderly mind,
coherent and definite,
100
and the first form of this litany begun first day December
1967 furthers this poem of these States.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
234:Footnote To Howl
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand
and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is
holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an
angel!
The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is
holy as you my soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is
holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!
Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy
Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering
beggars holy the hideous human angels!
Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks
of the grandfathers of Kansas!
Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop
apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana
hipsters peace & junk & drums!
Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy
the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the
mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!
Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the
middle class! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!
Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria &
Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow
Holy Istanbul!
Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the
clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy
the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!
Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the
locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the
abyss!
Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours!
bodies! suffering! magnanimity!
29
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent
kindness of the soul!
~ Allen Ginsberg,
235:To Aunt Rose
Aunt Rose—now—might I see you
with your thin face and buck tooth smile and pain
of rheumatism—and a long black heavy shoe
for your bony left leg
limping down the long hall in Newark on the running carpet
past the black grand piano
in the day room
where the parties were
and I sang Spanish loyalist songs
in a high squeaky voice
(hysterical) the committee listening
while you limped around the room
collected the money—
Aunt Honey, Uncle Sam, a stranger with a cloth arm
in his pocket
and huge young bald head
of Abraham Lincoln Brigade
—your long sad face
your tears of sexual frustration
(what smothered sobs and bony hips
under the pillows of Osborne Terrace)
—the time I stood on the toilet seat naked
and you powdered my thighs with calamine
against the poison ivy—my tender
and shamed first black curled hairs
what were you thinking in secret heart then
knowing me a man already—
and I an ignorant girl of family silence on the thin pedestal
of my legs in the bathroom—Museum of Newark.
Aunt Rose
Hitler is dead, Hitler is in Eternity; Hitler is with
Tamburlane and Emily Brontë
Though I see you walking still, a ghost on Osborne Terrace
87
down the long dark hall to the front door
limping a little with a pinched smile
in what must have been a silken
flower dress
welcoming my father, the Poet, on his visit to Newark
—see you arriving in the living room
dancing on your crippled leg
and clapping hands his book
had been accepted by Liveright
Hitler is dead and Liveright’s gone out of business
The Attic of the Past and Everlasting Minute are out of print
Uncle Harry sold his last silk stocking
Claire quit interpretive dancing school
Buba sits a wrinkled monument in Old
Ladies Home blinking at new babies
last time I saw you was the hospital
pale skull protruding under ashen skin
blue veined unconscious girl
in an oxygen tent
the war in Spain has ended long ago
Aunt Rose
~ Allen Ginsberg,
236: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 blueish heaven--The East
50's & 60's 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
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 grey painted bridge
trestles. Way downstream 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 tightening anus
not released the weeping scream of horror at robot Mayaguez
World self ton billions metal grief unloaded
Pnom Penh to Nakon 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.
36
~ Allen Ginsberg,
237:The Gates of Eden,” as he called it that night, took us furthest out into the realm of the imagination, to a point beyond logic and reason. Like “It’s Alright, Ma,” the song mentions a book title in its first line, but the song is more reminiscent of the poems of William Blake (and, perhaps, of Blake’s disciple Ginsberg) than it is of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, vaunting the truth that lies in surreal imagery. After an almost impenetrable first verse, the song approaches themes that were becoming familiar to Dylan’s listeners. In Genesis, Eden is the paradise where Adam and Eve had direct communication with God. According to “Gates of Eden,” it is where truth resides, without bewitching illusions. And the song is basically a list, verse after verse, of the corrosive illusions that Dylan would sing about constantly from the mid-1960s on: illusions about obedience to authority; about false religions and idols (the “utopian hermit monks” riding on the golden calf); about possessions and desire; about sexual repression and conformity (embodied by “the gray flannel dwarf”); about high-toned intellectualism. None of these count for much or even exist inside the gates of Eden. The kicker comes in the final verse, where the singer talks of his lover telling him of her dreams without any attempt at interpretation—and that at times, the singer thinks that the only truth is that there is no truth outside the gates of Eden. It’s a familiar conundrum: If there is no truth, isn’t saying as much really an illusion, too, unless we are all in Eden? (“All Cretans are liars,” says the Cretan.) What makes that one truth so special? But the point, as the lover knows, is that outside of paradise, interpretation is futile. Don’t try to figure out what the song, or what any work of art, “really” means; the meaning is in the imagery itself; attempting to define it is to succumb to the illusion that truth can be reached through human logic. So Dylan’s song told us, as he took the measure in his lyrics of what had begun as the “New Vision,” two and a half miles up Broadway from Lincoln Center at Columbia, in the mid-1940s. Apart from Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso may have been the only people in Philharmonic Hall who got it. I ~ Sean Wilentz,
238:Paterson
What do I want in these rooms papered with visions of money?
How much can I make by cutting my hair? If I put new heels on my shoes,
bathe my body reeking of masturbation and sweat, layer upon layer of
excrement
dried in employment bureaus, magazine hallways, statistical cubicles, factory
stairways,
cloakrooms of the smiling gods of psychiatry;
if in antechambers I face the presumption of department store supervisory
employees,
old clerks in their asylums of fat, the slobs and dumbbells of the ego with money
and power
to hire and fire and make and break and fart and justify their reality of wrath and
rumor of wrath to wrath-weary man,
what war I enter and for what a prize! the dead prick of commonplace obsession,
harridan vision of electricity at night and daylight misery of thumb-sucking rage.
I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in
my veins,
eyes and ears full of marijuana,
eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the border
or laying in a hotel room over the body of some suffering man or woman;
rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun;
rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati;
rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies;
rather, crowned with thorns in Galveston, nailed hand and foot in Los Angeles,
raised up to die in Denver,
pierced in the side in Chicago, perished and tombed in New Orleans and
resurrected in 1958 somewhere on Garret Mountain,
come down roaring in a blaze of hot cars and garbage,
streetcorner Evangel in front of City I-Tall, surrounded by statues of agonized
lions,
with a mouthful of shit, and the hair rising on my scalp,
screaming and dancing in praise of Eternity annihilating the sidewalk, annihilating
reality,
screaming and dancing against the orchestra in the destructible ballroom of the
world,
blood streaming from my belly and shoulders
62
flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and
highways
by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging
on the trees.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
239:My Sad Self
To Frank O’Hara
Sometimes when my eyes are red
I go up on top of the RCA Building
and gaze at my world, Manhattan—
my buildings, streets I’ve done feats in,
lofts, beds, coldwater flats
—on Fifth Ave below which I also bear in mind,
its ant cars, little yellow taxis, men
walking the size of specks of wool—
Panorama of the bridges, sunrise over Brooklyn machine,
sun go down over New Jersey where I was born
& Paterson where I played with ants—
my later loves on 15th Street,
my greater loves of Lower East Side,
my once fabulous amours in the Bronx
faraway—
paths crossing in these hidden streets,
my history summed up, my absences
and ecstasies in Harlem—
—sun shining down on all I own
in one eyeblink to the horizon
in my last eternity—
matter is water.
Sad,
I take the elevator and go
down, pondering,
and walk on the pavements staring into all man’s
plateglass, faces,
questioning after who loves,
and stop, bemused
in front of an automobile shopwindow
standing lost in calm thought,
traffic moving up & down 5th Avenue blocks behind me
waiting for a moment when ...
56
Time to go home & cook supper & listen to
the romantic war news on the radio
... all movement stops
& I walk in the timeless sadness of existence,
tenderness flowing thru the buildings,
my fingertips touching reality’s face,
my own face streaked with tears in the mirror
of some window—at dusk—
where I have no desire—
for bonbons—or to own the dresses or Japanese
lampshades of intellection—
Confused by the spectacle around me,
Man struggling up the street
with packages, newspapers,
ties, beautiful suits
toward his desire
Man, woman, streaming over the pavements
red lights clocking hurried watches &
movements at the curb—
And all these streets leading
so crosswise, honking, lengthily,
by avenues
stalked by high buildings or crusted into slums
thru such halting traffic
screaming cars and engines
so painfully to this
countryside, this graveyard
this stillness
on deathbed or mountain
once seen
never regained or desired
in the mind to come
where all Manhattan that I’ve seen must disappear.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
240:Cia Dope Calypso
In nineteen hundred forty-nine
China was won by Mao Tse-tung
Chiang Kai Shek's army ran away
They were waiting there in Thailand yesterday
Supported by the CIA
Pushing junk down Thailand way
First they stole from the Meo Tribes
Up in the hills they started taking bribes
Then they sent their soldiers up to Shan
Collecting opium to send to The Man
Pushing junk in Bangkok yesterday
Supported by the CIA
Brought their jam on mule trains down
To Chiang Mai that's a railroad town
Sold it next to the police chief's brain
He took it to town on the choochoo train
Trafficking dope to Bangkok all day
Supported by the CIA
The policeman's name was Mr. Phao
He peddled dope grand scale and how
Chief of border customs paid
By Central Intelligence's U.S. aid
The whole operation, Newspapers say
Supported by the CIA
He got so sloppy and peddled so loose
He busted himself and cooked his own goose
Took the reward for the opium load
Seizing his own haul which same he resold
Big time pusher for a decade turned grey
Working for the CIA
14
Touby Lyfong he worked for the French
A big fat man liked to dine & wench
Prince of the Meos he grew black mud
Till opium flowed through the land like a flood
Communists came and chased the French away
So Touby took a job with the CIA
The whole operation fell in to chaos
Till U.S. intelligence came in to Laos
Mary Azarian/Matt Wuerker I'll tell you no lie I'm a true American
Our big pusher there was Phoumi Nosavan
All them Princes in a power play
But Phoumi was the man for the CIA
And his best friend General Vang Pao
Ran the Meo army like a sacred cow
Helicopter smugglers filled Long Cheng's bars
In Xieng Quang province on the Plain of Jars
It started in secret they were fighting yesterday
Clandestine secret army of the CIA
All through the Sixties the dope flew free
Thru Tan Son Nhut Saigon to Marshall Ky
Air America followed through
Transporting comfiture for President Thieu
All these Dealers were decades and yesterday
The Indochinese mob of the U.S. CIA
Operation Haylift Offisir Wm Colby
Saw Marshall Ky fly opium Mr. Mustard told me
Indochina desk he was Chief of Dirty Tricks
"Hitch-hiking" with dope pushers was how he got his fix
Subsidizing the traffickers to drive the Reds away
Till Colby was the head of the CIA
15
~ Allen Ginsberg,
241:The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way--a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word 'beat' spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America--beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction--We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer--It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization--the subterraneans heroes who'd finally turned from the 'freedom' machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the 'derangement of the senses,' talking strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for American culture, a new style (we thought), a new incantation--The same thing was almost going on in the postwar France of Sartre and Genet and what's more we knew about it--But as to the actual existence of a Beat Generation, chances are it was really just an idea in our minds--We'd stay up 24 hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record after record of Wardell Gray, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, Willie Jackson, Lennie Tristano and all the rest, talking madly about that holy new feeling out there in the streets- -We'd write stories about some strange beatific Negro hepcat saint with goatee hitchhiking across Iowa with taped up horn bringing the secret message of blowing to other coasts, other cities, like a veritable Walter the Penniless leading an invisible First Crusade- -We had our mystic heroes and wrote, nay sung novels about them, erected long poems celebrating the new 'angels' of the American underground--In actuality there was only a handful of real hip swinging cats and what there was vanished mightily swiftly during the Korean War when (and after) a sinister new kind of efficiency appeared in America, maybe it was the result of the universalization of Television and nothing else (the Polite Total Police Control of Dragnet's 'peace' officers) but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity, the generation itself was shortlived and small in number. ~ Jack Kerouac,
242:Nagasaki Days
I -- A Pleasant Afternoon
for Michael Brownstein and Dick Gallup
One day 3 poets and 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 Lion's 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
58
Middleaged Ginsberg and Ellsberg taken down the road
to the greyhaired Sheriff's van -But what about Einstein? What about Einstein? Hey, Einstein
Come back!
III -- Golden Courthouse
Waiting for the Judge, breathing silent
Prisoners, witnesses, Police -the stenographer yawns into her palms.
August 9, 1978
IV -- Everybody's Fantasy
I walked outside & the bomb'd
dropped lots of plutonium
all over the Lower East Side
There weren't any buildings left just
iron skeletons
groceries burned, potholes open to
stinking sewer waters
There were people starving and crawling
across the desert
the Martian UFOs with blue
Light destroyer rays
passed over and dried up all the
waters
Charred Amazon palmtrees for
hundreds of miles on both sides
of the river
August 10, 1978
V -- Waiting Room at the Rocky Flats Plutonium Plant
59
"Give us the weapons we need to protect ourselves!"
the bareheaded guard lifts his flyswatter above the desk
-- whap!
A green-letter'd shield on the pressboard wall!
"Life is fragile. Handle with care" -My Goodness! here's where they make the nuclear bomb
triggers.
August 17, 1978
VI -- Numbers in Red Notebook
2,000,000 killed in Vietnam
13,000,000 refugees in Indochina 1972
200,000,000 years for the Galaxy to revolve on its core
24,000 the Babylonian Great Year
24,000 half life of plutonium
2,000 the most I ever got for a poetry reading
80,000 dolphins killed in the dragnet
4,000,000,000 years earth been born
Summer 1978
~ Allen Ginsberg,
243:Transcription Of Organ Music
The flower in the glass peanut bottle formerly in the
kitchen crooked to take a place in the light,
the closet door opened, because I used it before, it
kindly stayed open waiting for me, its owner.
I began to feel my misery in pallet on floor, listening
to music, my misery, that's why I want to sing.
The room closed down on me, I expected the presence
of the Creator, I saw my gray painted walls and
ceiling, they contained my room, they contained
me
as the sky contained my garden,
I opened my door
The rambler vine climbed up the cottage post,
the leaves in the night still where the day had placed
them, the animal heads of the flowers where they had
arisen
to think at the sun
Can I bring back the words? Will thought of
transcription haze my mental open eye?
The kindly search for growth, the gracious desire to exist of the flowers, my near ecstasy at existing
among them
The privilege to witness my existence-you too
must seek the sun...
My books piled up before me for my use
waiting in space where I placed them, they
haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use--my words piled up, my texts, my
manuscripts, my loves.
I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in
the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.
Saw the red blossoms in the night light, sun's
gone, they had all grown, in a moment, and were waiting stopped in time for the day sun to come and give
them...
89
Flowers which as in a dream at sunset I watered
faithfully not knowing how much I loved them.
I am so lonely in my glory--except they too out
there--I looked up--those red bush blossoms beckoning and peering in the window waiting in the blind love,
their leaves too have hope and are upturned top flat
to the sky to receive--all creation open to receive--the
flat earth itself.
The music descends, as does the tall bending
stalk of the heavy blssom, because it has to, to stay
alive, to continue to the last drop of joy.
The world knows the love that's in its breast as
in the flower, the suffering lonely world.
The Father is merciful.
The light socket is crudely attached to the ceiling, after the house was built, to receive a plug which
sticks in it alright, and serves my phonograph now...
The closet door is open for me, where I left it,
since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.
The kitchen has no door, the hole there will
admit me should I wish to enter the kitchen.
I remember when I first got laid, H.P. graciously took my cherry, I sat on the docks of Provincetown, age 23, joyful, elevated in hope with the
Father, the door to the womb wasopen to admit me
if I wished to enter.
There are unused electricity plugs all over my
house if I ever needed them.
The kitchen window is open, to admit air...
The telephone--sad to relate--sits on the
floor--I haven't had the money to get it connected-I want people to bow when they see me and say
he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of
the Creator
And the Creator gave me a shot of his presence
to gratify my wish, so as not to cheat me of my yearning
for him.
90
~ Allen Ginsberg,
244:A reflection on Robert Lowell


Robert Lowell knew I was not one of his devotees. I attended his famous “office hours” salon only a few times. Life Studies was not a book of central importance for me, though I respected it. I admired his writing, but not the way many of my Boston friends did. Among poets in his generation, poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Alan Dugan, and Allen Ginsberg meant more to me than Lowell’s. I think he probably sensed some of that.

To his credit, Lowell nevertheless was generous to me (as he was to many other young poets) just the same. In that generosity, and a kind of open, omnivorous curiosity, he was different from my dear teacher at Stanford, Yvor Winters. Like Lowell, Winters attracted followers—but Lowell seemed almost dismayed or a little bewildered by imitators; Winters seemed to want disciples: “Wintersians,” they were called.

A few years before I met Lowell, when I was still in California, I read his review of Winters’s Selected Poems. Lowell wrote that, for him, Winters’s poetry passed A. E. Housman’s test: he felt that if he recited it while he was shaving, he would cut himself. One thing Lowell and Winters shared, that I still revere in both of them, was a fiery devotion to the vocal essence of poetry: the work and interplay of sentences and lines, rhythm and pitch. The poetry in the sounds of the poetry, in a reader’s voice: neither page nor stage.

Winters criticizing the violence of Lowell’s enjambments, or Lowell admiring a poem in pentameter for its “drill-sergeant quality”: they shared that way of thinking, not matters of opinion but the matter itself, passionately engaged in the art and its vocal—call it “technical”—materials.

Lowell loved to talk about poetry and poems. His appetite for that kind of conversation seemed inexhaustible. It tended to be about historical poetry, mixed in with his contemporaries. When he asked you, what was Pope’s best work, it was as though he was talking about a living colleague . . . which in a way he was. He could be amusing about that same sort of thing. He described Julius Caesar’s entourage waiting in the street outside Cicero’s house while Caesar chatted up Cicero about writers.

“They talked about poetry,” said Lowell in his peculiar drawl. “Caesar asked Cicero what he thought of Jim Dickey.”

His considerable comic gift had to do with a humor of self and incongruity, rather than wit. More surreal than donnish. He had a memorable conversation with my daughter Caroline when she was six years old. A tall, bespectacled man with a fringe of long gray hair came into her living room, with a certain air.

“You look like somebody famous,” she said to him, “but I can’t remember who.”

“Do I?”

“Yes . . . now I remember!— Benjamin Franklin.”

“He was a terrible man, just awful.”

“Or no, I don’t mean Benjamin Franklin. I mean you look like a Christmas ornament my friend Heather made out of Play-Doh, that looked like Benjamin Franklin.”

That left Robert Lowell with nothing to do but repeat himself:

“Well, he was a terrible man.”

That silly conversation suggests the kind of social static or weirdness the man generated. It also happens to exemplify his peculiar largeness of mind . . . even, in a way, his engagement with the past. When he died, I realized that a large vacuum had appeared at the center of the world I knew. ~ Robert Pinsky,
245: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 brunnette hair and banged the window shut
I hurried home to Patterson and stayed two days
Called up old Reichian analyst
who'd kicked me out of therapy for smoking marijuana
'It's happened' I panted 'There's a Lion in my living 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 up 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 Hippogriff 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 Smoky 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 outside
thru the window
My eye caught the edge of the red neighbor apartment building standing in
deafening stillness
82
We gazed at each other his implacable yellow eye in the red halo of fur
Waxed rhuemy 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 tup 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 south 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.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
246:Kral Majales (King Of May)
And the Communists have nothing to offer but fat cheeks and eyeglasses and
lying policemen
and the Capitalists proffer Napalm and money in green suitcases to the
Naked,
and the Communists create heavy industry but the heart is also heavy
and the beautiful engineers are all dead, the secret technicians conspire for
their own glamour
in the Future, in the Future, but now drink vodka and lament the Security
Forces,
and the Capitalists drink gin and whiskey on airplanes but let Indian brown
millions starve
and when Communist and Capitalist assholes tangle the Just man is arrested
or robbed or has his head cut off,
but not like Kabir, and the cigarette cough of the Just man above the clouds
in the bright sunshine is a salute to the health of the blue sky.
For I was arrested thrice in Prague, once for singing drunk on Narodni
street,
once knocked down on the midnight pavement by a mustached agent who
screamed out BOUZERANT,
once for losing my notebooks of unusual sex politics dream opinions,
and I was sent from Havana by planes by detectives in green uniform,
and I was sent from Prague by plane by detectives in Czechoslovakian
business suits,
Cardplayers out of Cezanne, the two strange dolls that entered Joseph K's
room at morn
also entered mine and ate at my table, and examined my scribbles,
and followed me night and morn from the houses of the lovers to the cafes of
Centrum And I am the King of May, which is the power of sexual youth,
and I am the King of May, which is long hair of Adam and Beard of my
own body
and I am the King of May, which is Kral Majales in the Czechoslovakian
tongue,
and I am the King of May, which is old Human poesy, and 100,000 people
chose my name,
and I am the King of May, and in a few minutes I will land at London
Airport,
and I am the King of May, naturally, for I am of Slavic parentage and a
Buddhist Jew
51
who whorships the Sacred Heart of Christ the blue body of Krishna the
straight back of Ram
the beads of Chango the Nigerian singing Shiva Shiva in a manner which
I have invented,
and the King of May is a middleeuropean honor, mine in the XX century
despite space ships and the Time Machine, because I have heard the voice of
Blake
in a vision
and repeat that voice. And I am the King of May that sleeps with teenagers
laughing.
And I am the King of May, that I may be expelled from my Kingdom with
Honor, as of old,
To show the difference between Caesar's Kingdom and the Kingdom of the
May of Man and I am the King of May because I touched my finger to my forehead
saluting
a luminous heavy girl trembling hands who said 'one moment Mr. Ginsberg'
before a fat young Plainclothesman stepped between our bodies - I was
going to England and I am the King of May, in a giant jetplane touching Albion's airfield
trembling in fear
as the plane roars to a landing on the gray concrete, shakes & expels air,
and rolls slowly to a stop under the clouds with part of blue heaven still
visible.
And tho' I am the King of May, the Marxists have beat me upon the street,
kept me up all night in Police Station, followed me thru Springtime
Prague, detained me in secret and deported me from our kingdom by
airplane.
This I have written this poem on a jet seat in mid Heaven.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
247:Hum Bom!
Whom bomb?
We bomb'd them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb'd them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb'd them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb'd them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb you!
Whom bomb?
We bomb you!
Whom bomb?
You bomb you!
Whom bomb?
You bomb you!
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
What do we do?
You bomb! You bomb them!
What do we do?
You bomb! You bomb them!
What do we do?
We bomb! We bomb you!
What do we do?
You bomb! You bomb you!
Whom bomb?
We bomb you!
Whom bomb?
38
We bomb you!
Whom bomb? You bomb you!
Whom bomb?
You bomb you!
Whydja bomb?
We didn't wanna bomb!
Whydja bomb?
We didn't wanna bomb!
Whydja bomb?
You didn't wanna bomb!
Whydja bomb?
You didn't wanna bomb!
Who said bomb?
Who said we hadda bomb?
Who said bomb?
Who said we hadda bomb?
Who said bomb?
Who said you hadda bomb?
Who said bomb?
Who said you hadda bomb?
Who wantsa bomb?
We don't wanna bomb!
Who wantsa bomb?
We don't wanna bomb!
Who wantsa bomb?
We don't wanna bomb!
We don't wanna
we don't wanna
we don't wanna bomb!
Who wanteda bomb?
Somebody musta wanteda
Who wanteda bomb?
Somebody musta wanteda
Who wanteda bomb?
Somebody musta wanteda
Who wanteda bomb?
Somebody musta wanteda
They wanteda bomb!
They neededa bomb!
bomb!
bomb!
bomb!
bomb!
39
They
They
They
They
They
They
wanteda
neededa
wanteda
neededa
wanteda
neededa
They
They
They
They
thought
thought
thought
thought
bomb!
bomb!
bomb!
bomb!
bomb!
bomb!
they
they
they
they
hadda
hadda
hadda
hadda
bomb!
bomb!
bomb!
bomb!
Saddam said he hadda bomb!
Bush said he better bomb!
Saddam said he hadda bomb!
Bush said he better bomb!
Saddam said he hadda bomb!
Bush said he better bomb!
Saddam said he hadda bomb!
Bush said he better bomb!
Whatdid
Whatdid
Whatdid
Whatdid
Hadda
Hadda
Hadda
Hadda
he
he
he
he
get
get
get
get
Saddam's
Saddam's
Saddam's
Saddam's
say
say
say
say
ridda
ridda
ridda
ridda
still
still
still
still
he
he
he
he
better
better
better
better
Saddam
Saddam
Saddam
Saddam
there
there
there
there
bomb
bomb
bomb
bomb
for?
for?
for?
for?
with
with
with
with
bomb!
bomb!
bomb!
bomb!
building
building
building
building
bomb!
bomb!
bomb!
bomb!
Armageddon did the job
Gog & Magog Gog & Magog
Armageddon did the job
Gog & Magog Gog & Magog
Gog & Magog Gog & Magog
Armageddon does the job
40
Gog & Magog Gog & Magog
Armageddon does the job
Armageddon for the mob
Gog & Magog Gog & Magog
Armageddon for the mob
Gog & Magog Gog & Magog
Gog
Gog
Gog
Gog
& Magog Gog & Magog
Magog Gog Magog
& Magog Gog & Magog
Magog Gog Magog
Gog
Gog
Gog
Gog
Magog
Magog
Magog
Magog
Gog
Gog
Gog
Gog
Magog
Magog
Magog
Magog
Ginsberg says Gog & Magog
Armageddon did the job.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
248:Mugging (I)
Tonite I walked out of my red apartment door on East tenth street’s dusk—
Walked out of my home ten years, walked out in my honking neighborhood
Tonite at seven walked out past garbage cans chained to concrete anchors
Walked under black painted fire escapes, giant castiron plate covering a hole in
ground
—Crossed the street, traffic lite red, thirteen bus roaring by liquor store,
past corner pharmacy iron grated, past Coca Cola & Mylai posters fading scraped
on brick
Past Chinese Laundry wood door’d, & broken cement stoop steps For Rent hall
painted green & purple Puerto Rican style
Along E. 10th’s glass splattered pavement, kid blacks & Spanish oiled hair
adolescents’ crowded house fronts—
Ah, tonite I walked out on my block NY City under humid summer sky Halloween,
thinking what happened Timothy Leary joining brain police for a season?
thinking what’s all this Weathermen, secrecy & selfrighteousness beyond
reason—F.B.I. plots?
Walked past a taxicab controlling the bottle strewn curb—
past young fellows with their umbrella handles & canes leaning against a ravaged
Buick
—and as I looked at the crowd of kids on the stoop—a boy stepped up, put his
arm around my neck
tenderly I thought for a moment, squeezed harder, his umbrella handle against
my skull,
and his friends took my arm, a young brown companion tripped his foot ’gainst
my ankle—
as I went down shouting Om Ah Hūm to gangs of lovers on the stoop
watching
slowly appreciating, why this is a raid, these strangers mean strange business
with what—my pockets, bald head, broken-healed-bone leg, my softshoes, my
heart—
Have they knives? Om Ah Hūm—Have they sharp metal wood to shove in
eye ear ass? Om Ah Hūm
& slowly reclined on the pavement, struggling to keep my woolen bag of poetry
address calendar & Leary-lawyer notes hung from my shoulder
dragged in my neat orlon shirt over the crossbar of a broken metal door
dragged slowly onto the fire-soiled floor an abandoned store, laundry candy
counter 1929—
54
now a mess of papers & pillows & plastic car seat covers cracked cockroachcorpsed ground—
my wallet back pocket passed over the iron foot step guard
and fell out, stole by God Muggers’ lost fingers, Strange—
Couldn’t tell—snakeskin wallet actually plastic, 70 dollars my bank money for a
week,
old broken wallet—and dreary plastic contents—Amex card & Manf. Hanover
Trust Credit too—business card from Mr. Spears British Home Minister Drug
Squad—my draft card—membership ACLU & Naropa Institute Instructor’s
identification
Om Ah Hūm I continued chanting Om Ah Hūm
Putting my palm on the neck of an 18 year old boy fingering my back pocket
crying “Where’s the money”
“Om Ah Hūm there isn’t any”
My card Chief Boo-Hoo Neo American Church New Jersey & Lower East Side
Om Ah Hūm —what not forgotten crowded wallet—Mobil Credit, Shell? old
lovers addresses on cardboard pieces, booksellers calling cards—
—“Shut up or we’ll murder you”—“Om Ah Hūm 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 Hūm 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—
~ Allen Ginsberg,
249:In The Baggage Room At Greyhound
In the depths of the Greyhound Terminal
sitting dumbly on a baggage truck looking at the sky
waiting for the Los Angeles Express to depart
worrying about eternity over the Post Office roof in
the night-time red downtown heaven
staring through my eyeglasses I realized shuddering
these thoughts were not eternity, nor the poverty
of our lives, irritable baggage clerks,
nor the millions of weeping relatives surrounding the
buses waving goodbye,
nor other millions of the poor rushing around from
city to city to see their loved ones,
nor an indian dead with fright talking to a huge cop
by the Coke machine,
nor this trembling old lady with a cane taking the last
trip of her life,
nor the red-capped cynical porter collecting his quarters and smiling over the smashed baggage,
nor me looking around at the horrible dream,
nor mustached negro Operating Clerk named Spade,
dealing out with his marvelous long hand the
fate of thousands of express packages,
nor fairy Sam in the basement limping from leaden
trunk to trunk,
nor Joe at the counter with his nervous breakdown
smiling cowardly at the customers,
nor the grayish-green whale's stomach interior loft
where we keep the baggage in hideous racks,
hundreds of suitcases full of tragedy rocking back and
forth waiting to be opened,
nor the baggage that's lost, nor damaged handles,
nameplates vanished, busted wires & broken
ropes, whole trunks exploding on the concrete
floor,
nor seabags emptied into the night in the final
warehouse.
43
II
Yet Spade reminded me of Angel, unloading a bus,
dressed in blue overalls black face official Angel's workman cap,
pushing with his belly a huge tin horse piled high with
black baggage,
looking up as he passed the yellow light bulb of the loft
and holding high on his arm an iron shepherd's crook.
III
It was the racks, I realized, sitting myself on top of
them now as is my wont at lunchtime to rest
my tired foot,
it was the racks, great wooden shelves and stanchions
posts and beams assembled floor to roof jumbled
with baggage,
--the Japanese white metal postwar trunk gaudily
flowered & headed for Fort Bragg,
one Mexican green paper package in purple rope
adorned with names for Nogales,
hundreds of radiators all at once for Eureka,
crates of Hawaiian underwear,
rolls of posters scattered over the Peninsula, nuts to
Sacramento,
one human eye for Napa,
an aluminum box of human blood for Stockton
and a little red package of teeth for Calistogait was the racks and these on the racks I saw naked
in electric light the night before I quit,
the racks were created to hang our possessions, to keep
us together, a temporary shift in space,
God's only way of building the rickety structure of
Time,
to hold the bags to send on the roads, to carry our
luggage from place to place
looking for a bus to ride us back home to Eternity
where the heart was left and farewell tears
began.
IV
44
A swarm of baggage sitting by the counter as the transcontinental bus pulls in.
The clock registering 12:15 A.M., May 9, 1956, the
second hand moving forward, red.
Getting ready to load my last bus.-Farewell, Walnut
Creek Richmond Vallejo Portland Pacific
Highway
Fleet-footed Quicksilver, God of transience.
One last package sits lone at midnight sticking up out
of the Coast rack high as the dusty fluorescent
light.
The wage they pay us is too low to live on. Tragedy
reduced to numbers.
This for the poor shepherds. I am a communist.
Farewell ye Greyhound where I suffered so much,
hurt my knee and scraped my hand and built
my pectoral muscles big as a vagina.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
250:Sunflower Sutra
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge
shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look for the sunset over the box house
hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought
the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the
gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.
The only water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco
peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumyeyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky,
big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust---I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake--my
visions--Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes greasy Sandwiches, dead
baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the
riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past-and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with
the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye-corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds
fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root,
broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man's grime but death and human locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that
eyelid of black mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial
79
worse-than-dirt--industrial--modern--all that civilization spotting your crazy
golden crown-and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered
roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of
machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked
ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of
cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos--all these
entangled in your mummied roots--and you standing before me in the sunset, all
your glory in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a
sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in
the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the
heavens of your railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at
your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a
locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a
scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul too, and anyone who'll listen,
--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless
locomotive, we're all golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy
naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the
sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank
sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
251:Wales Visitation
White fog lifting & falling on mountain-brow
Trees moving in rivers of wind
The clouds arise
as on a wave, gigantic eddy lifting mist
above teeming ferns exquisitely swayed
along a green crag
glimpsed thru mullioned glass in valley raine—
Bardic, O Self, Visitacione, tell naught
but what seen by one man in a vale in Albion,
of the folk, whose physical sciences end in Ecology,
the wisdom of earthly relations,
of mouths & eyes interknit ten centuries visible
orchards of mind language manifest human,
of the satanic thistle that raises its horned symmetry
flowering above sister grass-daisies’ pink tiny
bloomlets angelic as lightbulbs—
Remember 160 miles from London’s symmetrical thorned tower
& network of TV pictures flashing bearded your Self
the lambs on the tree-nooked hillside this day bleating
heard in Blake’s old ear, & the silent thought of Wordsworth in eld Stillness
clouds passing through skeleton arches of Tintern Abbey—
Bard Nameless as the Vast, babble to Vastness!
All the Valley quivered, one extended motion, wind
undulating on mossy hills
a giant wash that sank white fog delicately down red runnels
on the mountainside
whose leaf-branch tendrils moved asway
in granitic undertow down—
and lifted the floating Nebulous upward, and lifted the arms of the trees
and lifted the grasses an instant in balance
and lifted the lambs to hold still
and lifted the green of the hill, in one solemn wave
97
A solid mass of Heaven, mist-infused, ebbs thru the vale,
a wavelet of Immensity, lapping gigantic through Llanthony Valley,
the length of all England, valley upon valley under Heaven’s ocean
tonned with cloud-hang,
—Heaven balanced on a grassblade.
Roar of the mountain wind slow, sigh of the body,
One Being on the mountainside stirring gently
Exquisite scales trembling everywhere in balance,
one motion thru the cloudy sky-floor shifting on the million feet of daisies,
one Majesty the motion that stirred wet grass quivering
to the farthest tendril of white fog poured down
through shivering flowers on the mountain’s head—
No imperfection in the budded mountain,
Valleys breathe, heaven and earth move together,
daisies push inches of yellow air, vegetables tremble,
grass shimmers green
sheep speckle the mountainside, revolving their jaws with empty eyes,
horses dance in the warm rain,
tree-lined canals network live farmland,
blueberries fringe stone walls on hawthorn’d hills,
pheasants croak on meadows haired with fern—
Out, out on the hillside, into the ocean sound, into delicate gusts of wet air,
Fall on the ground, O great Wetness, O Mother, No harm on your body!
Stare close, no imperfection in the grass,
each flower Buddha-eye, repeating the story,
myriad-formed—
Kneel before the foxglove raising green buds, mauve bells dropped
doubled down the stem trembling antennae,
& look in the eyes of the branded lambs that stare
breathing stockstill under dripping hawthorn—
I lay down mixing my beard with the wet hair of the mountainside,
smelling the brown vagina-moist ground, harmless,
tasting the violet thistle-hair, sweetness—
One being so balanced, so vast, that its softest breath
moves every floweret in the stillness on the valley floor,
trembles lamb-hair hung gossamer rain-beaded in the grass,
lifts trees on their roots, birds in the great draught
98
hiding their strength in the rain, bearing same weight,
Groan thru breast and neck, a great Oh! to earth heart
Calling our Presence together
The great secret is no secret
Senses fit the winds,
Visible is visible,
rain-mist curtains wave through the bearded vale,
gray atoms wet the wind’s kabbala
Crosslegged on a rock in dusk rain,
rubber booted in soft grass, mind moveless,
breath trembles in white daisies by the roadside,
Heaven breath and my own symmetric
Airs wavering thru antlered green fern
drawn in my navel, same breath as breathes thru Capel-Y-Ffn,
Sounds of Aleph and Aum
through forests of gristle,
my skull and Lord Hereford’s Knob equal,
All Albion one.
What did I notice? Particulars! The
vision of the great One is myriad—
smoke curls upward from ashtray,
house fire burned low,
The night, still wet & moody black heaven
starless
upward in motion with wet wind.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
252:Death & Fame

When I die

I don't care what happens to my body throw ashes in the air, scatter 'em in East River bury an urn in Elizabeth New Jersey, B'nai Israel Cemetery

But I want a big funeral St. Patrick's Cathedral, St. Mark's Church, the largest synagogue in Manhattan

First, there's family, brother, nephews, spry aged Edith stepmother 96, Aunt Honey from old Newark,

Doctor Joel, cousin Mindy, brother Gene one eyed one ear'd, sister-in-law blonde Connie, five nephews, stepbrothers & sisters their grandchildren, companion Peter Orlovsky, caretakers Rosenthal & Hale, Bill Morgan--

Next, teacher Trungpa Vajracharya's ghost mind, Gelek Rinpoche, there Sakyong Mipham, Dalai Lama alert, chance visiting America, Satchitananda Swami Shivananda, Dehorahava Baba, Karmapa XVI, Dudjom Rinpoche, Katagiri & Suzuki Roshi's phantoms Baker, Whalen, Daido Loorie, Qwong, Frail White-haired Kapleau Roshis, Lama Tarchen --

Then, most important, lovers over half-century Dozens, a hundred, more, older fellows bald & rich young boys met naked recently in bed, crowds surprised to see each other, innumerable, intimate, exchanging memories

"He taught me to meditate, now I'm an old veteran of the thousandday retreat --"

"I played music on subway platforms, I'm straight but loved him he loved me"

"I felt more love from him at 19 than ever from anyone"

"We'd lie under covers gossip, read my poetry, hug & kiss belly to belly arms round each other"

"I'd always get into his bed with underwear on & by morning my skivvies would be on the floor"

"Japanese, always wanted take it up my bum with a master"

"We'd talk all night about Kerouac & Cassady sit Buddhalike then sleep in his captain's bed."

"He seemed to need so much affection, a shame not to make him happy"

"I was lonely never in bed nude with anyone before, he was so gentle my stomach shuddered when he traced his finger along my abdomen nipple to hips-- "

"All I did was lay back eyes closed, he'd bring me to come with mouth & fingers along my waist"

"He gave great head"

So there be gossip from loves of 1948, ghost of Neal Cassady commin-gling with flesh and youthful blood of 1997 and surprise -- "You too? But I thought you were straight!"

"I am but Ginsberg an exception, for some reason he pleased me."

"I forgot whether I was straight gay queer or funny, was myself, tender and affectionate to be kissed on the top of my head, my forehead throat heart & solar plexus, mid-belly. on my prick, tickled with his tongue my behind"

"I loved the way he'd recite 'But at my back allways hear/ time's winged chariot hurrying near,' heads together, eye to eye, on a pillow --"

Among lovers one handsome youth straggling the rear

"I studied his poetry class, 17 year-old kid, ran some errands to his walk-up flat, seduced me didn't want to, made me come, went home, never saw him again never wanted to... "

"He couldn't get it up but loved me," "A clean old man." "He made sure I came first"

This the crowd most surprised proud at ceremonial place of honor--

Then poets & musicians -- college boys' grunge bands -- age-old rock star Beatles, faithful guitar accompanists, gay classical con-ductors, unknown high Jazz music composers, funky trum-peters, bowed bass & french horn black geniuses, folksinger fiddlers with dobro tamborine harmonica mandolin auto-harp pennywhistles & kazoos

Next, artist Italian romantic realists schooled in mystic 60's India, Late fauve Tuscan painter-poets, Classic draftsman Massa-chusets surreal jackanapes with continental wives, poverty sketchbook gesso oil watercolor masters from American provinces

Then highschool teachers, lonely Irish librarians, delicate biblio-philes, sex liberation troops nay armies, ladies of either sex

"I met him dozens of times he never remembered my name I loved him anyway, true artist"

"Nervous breakdown after menopause, his poetry humor saved me from suicide hospitals"

"Charmant, genius with modest manners, washed sink, dishes my studio guest a week in Budapest"

Thousands of readers, "Howl changed my life in Libertyville Illinois"

"I saw him read Montclair State Teachers College decided be a poet-- "

"He turned me on, I started with garage rock sang my songs in Kansas City"

"Kaddish made me weep for myself & father alive in Nevada City"

"Father Death comforted me when my sister died Boston l982"

"I read what he said in a newsmagazine, blew my mind, realized others like me out there"

Deaf & Dumb bards with hand signing quick brilliant gestures

Then Journalists, editors's secretaries, agents, portraitists & photo-graphy aficionados, rock critics, cultured laborors, cultural historians come to witness the historic funeral Super-fans, poetasters, aging Beatnicks & Deadheads, autograph-hunters, distinguished paparazzi, intelligent gawkers

Everyone knew they were part of 'History" except the deceased who never knew exactly what was happening even when I was alive
February 22, 1997
~ Allen Ginsberg,
253:Death &Amp; Fame
When I die
I don't care what happens to my body
throw ashes in the air, scatter 'em in East River
bury an urn in Elizabeth New Jersey, B'nai Israel Cemetery
But l want a big funeral
St. Patrick's Cathedral, St. Mark's Church, the largest synagogue in
Manhattan
First, there's family, brother, nephews, spry aged Edith stepmother
96, Aunt Honey from old Newark,
Doctor Joel, cousin Mindy, brother Gene one eyed one ear'd, sisterin-law blonde Connie, five nephews, stepbrothers & sisters
their grandchildren,
companion Peter Orlovsky, caretakers Rosenthal & Hale, Bill Morgan-Next, teacher Trungpa Vajracharya's ghost mind, Gelek Rinpoche,
there Sakyong Mipham, Dalai Lama alert, chance visiting
America, Satchitananda Swami
Shivananda, Dehorahava Baba, Karmapa XVI, Dudjom Rinpoche,
Katagiri & Suzuki Roshi's phantoms
Baker, Whalen, Daido Loorie, Qwong, Frail White-haired Kapleau
Roshis, Lama Tarchen -Then, most important, lovers over half-century
Dozens, a hundred, more, older fellows bald & rich
young boys met naked recently in bed, crowds surprised to see each
other, innumerable, intimate, exchanging memories
"He taught me to meditate, now I'm an old veteran of the thousand
day retreat --"
"I played music on subway platforms, I'm straight but loved him he
loved me"
"I felt more love from him at 19 than ever from anyone"
"We'd lie under covers gossip, read my poetry, hug & kiss belly to belly
arms round each other"
"I'd always get into his bed with underwear on & by morning my
skivvies would be on the floor"
"Japanese, always wanted take it up my bum with a master"
"We'd talk all night about Kerouac & Cassady sit Buddhalike then
sleep in his captain's bed."
"He seemed to need so much affection, a shame not to make him happy"
"I was lonely never in bed nude with anyone before, he was so gentle my
stomach
21
shuddered when he traced his finger along my abdomen nipple to hips-- "
"All I did was lay back eyes closed, he'd bring me to come with mouth
& fingers along my waist"
"He gave great head"
So there be gossip from loves of 1948, ghost of Neal Cassady commingling with flesh and youthful blood of 1997
and surprise -- "You too? But I thought you were straight!"
"I am but Ginsberg an exception, for some reason he pleased me."
"I forgot whether I was straight gay queer or funny, was myself, tender
and affectionate to be kissed on the top of my head,
my forehead throat heart & solar plexus, mid-belly. on my prick,
tickled with his tongue my behind"
"I loved the way he'd recite 'But at my back allways hear/ time's winged
chariot hurrying near,' heads together, eye to eye, on a
pillow --"
Among lovers one handsome youth straggling the rear
"I studied his poetry class, 17 year-old kid, ran some errands to his
walk-up flat,
seduced me didn't want to, made me come, went home, never saw him
again never wanted to... "
"He couldn't get it up but loved me," "A clean old man." "He made
sure I came first"
This the crowd most surprised proud at ceremonial place of honor-Then poets & musicians -- college boys' grunge bands -- age-old rock
star Beatles, faithful guitar accompanists, gay classical conductors, unknown high Jazz music composers, funky trumpeters, bowed bass & french horn black geniuses, folksinger
fiddlers with dobro tamborine harmonica mandolin autoharp pennywhistles & kazoos
Next, artist Italian romantic realists schooled in mystic 60's India,
Late fauve Tuscan painter-poets, Classic draftsman Massachusets surreal jackanapes with continental wives, poverty
sketchbook gesso oil watercolor masters from American
provinces
Then highschool teachers, lonely Irish librarians, delicate bibliophiles, sex liberation troops nay armies, ladies of either sex
"I met him dozens of times he never remembered my name I loved
him anyway, true artist"
"Nervous breakdown after menopause, his poetry humor saved me
from suicide hospitals"
"Charmant, genius with modest manners, washed sink, dishes my
studio guest a week in Budapest"
22
Thousands of readers, "Howl changed my life in Libertyville Illinois"
"I saw him read Montclair State Teachers College decided be a poet-- "
"He turned me on, I started with garage rock sang my songs in Kansas
City"
"Kaddish made me weep for myself & father alive in Nevada City"
"Father Death comforted me when my sister died Boston l982"
"I read what he said in a newsmagazine, blew my mind, realized
others like me out there"
Deaf & Dumb bards with hand signing quick brilliant gestures
Then Journalists, editors's secretaries, agents, portraitists & photography aficionados, rock critics, cultured laborors, cultural
historians come to witness the historic funeral
Super-fans, poetasters, aging Beatnicks & Deadheads, autographhunters, distinguished paparazzi, intelligent gawkers
Everyone knew they were part of 'History" except the deceased
who never knew exactly what was happening even when I was alive
February 22, 1997
~ Allen Ginsberg,
254:Understand That This Is A Dream
Real as a dream
What shall I do with this great opportunity to fly?
What is the interpretation of this planet, this moon?
if I can dream that I dream / and dream anything dreamable / can I dream
I am awake / and why do that?
When I dream in a dream that I wake / up what
happens when I try to move?
I dream that I move
and the effort moves and moves
till I move / and my arm hurts
Then I wake up / dismayed / I was dreaming / I was waking
when I was dreaming still / just now.
and try to remember next time in dreams
that I am in dreaming.
And dream anything I want when I'm awaken.
When I'm in awakeness what do I desire?
I desire to fulfill my emotional belly.
My whole body my heart in my fingertops thrill with some old fulfillments.
Pages of celestial rhymes burning fire-words
unconsumable but disappear.
Arcane parchments my own and the universe the answer.
Belly to Belly and knee to knee.
The hot spurt of my body to thee and thee
old boy / dreamy Earl / you Prince of Paterson / now king of me / lost
Haledon
first dream that made me take down my pants
urgently to show the cars / auto tracks / rolling down avenue hill.
That far back what do I remember / but the face of the leader of the gang
was blond / that loved me / one day on the steps of his house blocks away
all afternoon I told him about my magic Spell
I can do anything I want / palaces millions / chemistry sets / chicken
coops / white horses
stables and torture basements / I inspect my naked victims
chained upside down / my fingertips thrill approval on their thighs
white hairless cheeks I may kiss all I want
92
at my mercy. on the racks.
I pass with my strong attendants / I am myself naked
bending down with my buttocks out
for their smacks of reproval / o the heat of desire
liek shit in my asshole. The strange gang
across the street / thru the grocerystore / in the wood alley / out in the open
on the corner
Because I lied to the Dentist about that chickencoop roofing / slate stolen off
his garage
by me and the boy I loved who would punish me if he knew
what I loved him.
That now I have had that boy back in another blond form
Peter Orlovsky a Chinese teenager in Bangkok ten years twenty years
Jo Army on the campus / white blond loins / my mouth hath kisses /
full of his cock / my ass burning / full of his cock
all that I do desire. In dream and awake
this handsome body mine / answered
all I desired / intimate loves / open eyed / revealed at last / clothes on the
floor
Underwear the most revealing stripped off below the belly button in bed.
That's that / yes yes / the flat cocks the red pricks the gentle public hair /
alone with me
my magic spell. My power / what I desire alone / what after thirty years /
I got forever / after thirty years / satisfied enough with Peter / with all I
wanted /
with many men I knew one generation / our sperm passing
into our mouths and bellies / beautiful when I love / given.
Now the dream oldens / I olden / my hair a year long / my thirtyeight
birthday approaching.
I dream I
am bald / am disappearing / the campus unrecognizable / Haledon Avenue
93
will be covered with neon / motels / Supermarkets / iron
the porches and woods changed when i go back / to see Earl again
He'll be bald / fleshy father / I could pursie him further in the garage
If there's still a garage on the hill / on the planet / when I get back.
From Asia.
If I could even remember his name or his face / or find him /
When I was ten / perhaps he exists in some form.
With a belly and a belt and an auto
Whatever his last name / I never knew / in the phonebook / the Akashic
records.
I'll write my Inspiration for all Mankind to remember,
My Idea, the secret cave / in the clothes closet / that house probably down /
Nothing to go back to / everything's gone / only my idea
that's disappearing / even in dreams / gray dust piles / instant annihilation
of World War II and all its stainless steel shining-mouthed cannons
much less me and my grammar school kisses / I never kissed in time /
and go on kissing in dream and out on the street / as if it were for ever.
No forever left! Even my oldest forever gone, in Bangkok, in Benares,
swept up with words and bodies / all into the brown Ganges /
passing the burning grounds and / into the police state.
My mind, my mind / you had six feet of Earth to hoe /
Why didn't you remember and plant the seed of Law and gather the sprouts
of What?
the golden blossoms of what idea? If I dream that I dream / what dream
should I dream next? Motorcycle rickshaws / parting lamp shine / little
taxis / horses hoofs
on this Saigon midnight street. Angkor Wat ahead and the ruined city's old
Hindu faces
and there was a dream about Eternity. What should I dream when I wake?
What's left to dream, more Chinese meat? More magic Spells? More youths
to love before I change & disappear?
94
More dream words? For now that I know that I am dreaming /
What next for you Allen? Run down to the Presidents Palace full of Morphine /
The cocks crowing / in the street / Dawn trucks / What is the question?
Do I need sleep, now that there's light in the window?
I'll go to sleep. Signing off until / the next idea / the moving van arrives
empty
at the Doctor's house full of Chinese furniture.
~ Allen Ginsberg,
255:September On Jessore Road
Millions of babies watching the skies
Bellies swollen, with big round eyes
On Jessore Road--long bamboo huts
Noplace to shit but sand channel ruts
Millions
Millions
Millions
Millions
of
of
of
of
fathers in rain
mothers in pain
brothers in woe
sisters nowhere to go
One Million aunts are dying for bread
One Million uncles lamenting the dead
Grandfather millions homeless and sad
Grandmother millions silently mad
Millions of daughters walk in the mud
Millions of children wash in the flood
A Million girls vomit & groan
Millions of families hopeless alone
Millions of souls nineteenseventyone
homeless on Jessore road under grey sun
A million are dead, the million who can
Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan
Taxi September along Jessore Road
Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load
past watery fields thru rain flood ruts
Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts
Wet processions Families walk
Stunted boys big heads don't talk
Look bony skulls & silent round eyes
Starving black angels in human disguise
Mother squats weeping & points to her sons
Standing thin legged like elderly nuns
small bodied hands to their mouths in prayer
Five months small food since they settled there
70
on one floor mat with small empty pot
Father lifts up his hands at their lot
Tears come to their mother's eye
Pain makes mother Maya cry
Two children together in palmroof shade
Stare at me no word is said
Rice ration, lentils one time a week
Milk powder for warweary infants meek
No vegetable money or work for the man
Rice lasts four days eat while they can
Then children starve three days in a row
and vomit their next food unless they eat slow.
On Jessore road Mother wept at my knees
Bengali tongue cried mister Please
Identity card torn up on the floor
Husband still waits at the camp office door
Baby at play I was washing the flood
Now they won't give us any more food
The pieces are here in my celluloid purse
Innocent baby play our death curse
Two policemen surrounded by thousands of boys
Crowded waiting their daily bread joys
Carry big whistles & long bamboo sticks
to whack them in line They play hungry tricks
Breaking the line and jumping in front
Into the circle sneaks one skinny runt
Two brothers dance forward on the mud stage
Teh gaurds blow their whistles & chase them in rage
Why are these infants massed in this place
Laughing in play & pushing for space
Why do they wait here so cheerful & dread
Why this is the House where they give children bread
The man in the bread door Cries & comes out
71
Thousands of boys and girls Take up his shout
Is it joy? is it prayer? "No more bread today"
Thousands of Children at once scream "Hooray!"
Run home to tents where elders await
Messenger children with bread from the state
No bread more today! & and no place to squat
Painful baby, sick shit he has got.
Malnutrition skulls thousands for months
Dysentery drains bowels all at once
Nurse shows disease card Enterostrep
Suspension is wanting or else chlorostrep
Refugee camps in hospital shacks
Newborn lay naked on mother's thin laps
Monkeysized week old Rheumatic babe eye
Gastoenteritis Blood Poison thousands must die
September Jessore Road rickshaw
50,000 souls in one camp I saw
Rows of bamboo huts in the flood
Open drains, & wet families waiting for food
Border trucks flooded, food cant get past,
American Angel machine please come fast!
Where is Ambassador Bunker today?
Are his Helios machinegunning children at play?
Where are the helicopters of U.S. AID?
Smuggling dope in Bangkok's green shade.
Where is America's Air Force of Light?
Bombing North Laos all day and all night?
Where are the President's Armies of Gold?
Billionaire Navies merciful Bold?
Bringing us medicine food and relief?
Napalming North Viet Nam and causing more grief?
Where are our tears? Who weeps for the pain?
Where can these families go in the rain?
Jessore Road's children close their big eyes
72
Where will we sleep when Our Father dies?
Whom shall we pray to for rice and for care?
Who can bring bread to this shit flood foul'd lair?
Millions of children alone in the rain!
Millions of children weeping in pain!
Ring
Ring
Ring
Ring
O ye tongues of the world for their woe
out ye voices for Love we don't know
out ye bells of electrical pain
in the conscious of America brain
How many children are we who are lost
Whose are these daughters we see turn to ghost?
What are our souls that we have lost care?
Ring out ye musics and weep if you dare-Cries in the mud by the thatch'd house sand drain
Sleeps in huge pipes in the wet shit-field rain
waits by the pump well, Woe to the world!
whose children still starve in their mother's arms curled.
Is this what I did to myself in the past?
What shall I do Sunil Poet I asked?
Move on and leave them without any coins?
What should I care for the love of my loins?
What should we care for our cities and cars?
What shall we buy with our Food Stamps on Mars?
How many millions sit down in New York
& sup this night's table on bone & roast pork?
How many millions of beer cans are tossed
in Oceans of Mother? How much does She cost?
Cigar gasolines and asphalt car dreams
Stinking the world and dimming star beams-Finish the war in your breast with a sigh
Come tast the tears in your own Human eye
Pity us millions of phantoms you see
Starved in Samsara on planet TV
73
How many millions of children die more
before our Good Mothers perceive the Great Lord?
How many good fathers pay tax to rebuild
Armed forces that boast the children they've killed?
How
How
How
How
many
many
many
many
souls walk through Maya in pain
babes in illusory pain?
families hollow eyed lost?
grandmothers turning to ghost?
How
How
How
How
many
many
many
many
loves who never get bread?
Aunts with holes in their head?
sisters skulls on the ground?
grandfathers make no more sound?
How
How
How
How
many
many
many
many
fathers in woe
sons nowhere to go?
daughters nothing to eat?
uncles with swollen sick feet?
Millions
Millions
Millions
Millions
of
of
of
of
babies in pain
mothers in rain
brothers in woe
children nowhere to go
~ Allen Ginsberg,
256:Plutonian Ode
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 HellKing worshipped once
with black sheep throats cut, priests's face averted from
underground mysteries in 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, grey 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 clay or Crab'd
flood
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
I guess your birthday in Earthling Night, I salute your
dreadful presence last majestic as the Gods,
Sabaot, Jehova, Astapheus, Adonaeus, Elohim, Iao,
Ialdabaoth, Aeon from Aeon born ignorant in an
64
Abyss of Light,
Sophia's reflections glittering thoughtful galaxies, whirlpools of starspume 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,
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,
Where nuclear reactors creat a new Thing under the
Sun, where Rockwell war-plants fabricate this death
stuff trigger in nitrogen baths,
Hanger-Silas Mason assembles the terrified weapon
secret by ten thousands, & where Manzano Mountain boasts to store
its dreadful decay through two hundred forty millenia
while our Galaxy spirals around its nebulous core.
I enter your secret places with my mind, I speak with
your presence, I roar your Lion Roar with mortal
mouth.
One microgram inspired to one lung, ten pounds of
heavy metal dust adrift slow motion over grey
Alps
the breadth of the planet, how long before your radiance
speeds blight and death to sentient beings?
Enter my body or not I carol my spirit inside you,
Unnaproachable Weight,
O heavy heavy Element awakened I vocalize your consciousness to six worlds
I chant your absolute Vanity. Yeah monster of Anger
birthed in fear O most
Ignorant matter ever created unnatural to Earth! Delusion
of metal empires!
Destroyer of lying Scientists! Devourer of covetous
Generals, Incinerator of Armies & Melter of Wars!
Judgement of judgements, Divine Wind over vengeful
nations, Molester of Presidents, Death-Scandal of
Capital politics! Ah civilizations stupidly industrious!
65
Canker-Hex on multitudes learned or illiterate! Manufactured Spectre of human reason! O solidified
imago of practicioner in Black Arts
I dare your reality, I challenge your very being! I
publish your cause and effect!
I turn the wheel of Mind on your three hundred tons!
Your name enters mankind's ear! I embody your
ultimate powers!
My oratory advances on your vaunted Mystery! This
breath dispels your braggart fears! I sing your
form at last
behind your concrete & iron walls inside your fortress
of rubber & translucent silicon shields in filtered
cabinets and baths of lathe oil,
My voice resounds through robot glove boxes & ignot
cans and echoes in electric vaults inert of atmosphere,
I enter with spirit out loud into your fuel rod drums
underground on soundless thrones and beds of
lead
O density! This weightless anthem trumpets transcendent
through hidden chambers and breaks through
iron doors into the Infernal Room!
Over your dreadful vibration this measured harmony
floats audible, these jubilant tones are honey and
milk and wine-sweet water
Poured on the stone black floor, these syllables are
barley groats I scatter on the Reactor's core,
I call your name with hollow vowels, I psalm your Fate
close by, my breath near deathless ever at your
side
to Spell your destiny, I set this verse prophetic on your
mausoleum walls to seal you up Eternally with
Diamond Truth! O doomed Plutonium.
II
The Bar surveys Plutonian history from midnight
lit with Mercury Vapor streetlamps till in dawn's
early light
he contemplates a tranquil politic spaced out between
Nations' thought-forms proliferating bureaucratic
66
& horrific arm'd, Satanic industries projected sudden
with Five Hundred Billion Dollar Strength
around the world same time this text is set in Boulder,
Colorado before front range of Rocky Mountains
twelve miles north of Rocky Flats Nuclear Facility in
United States of North America, Western Hemisphere
of planet Earth six months and fourteen days around
our Solar System in a Spiral Galaxy
the local year after Dominion of the last God nineteen
hundred seventy eight
Completed as yellow hazed dawn clouds brighten East,
Denver city white below
Blue sky transparent rising empty deep & spacious to a
morning star high over the balcony
above some autos sat with wheels to curb downhill
from Flatiron's jagged pine ridge,
sunlit mountain meadows sloped to rust-red sandstone
cliffs above brick townhouse roofs
as sparrows waked whistling through Marine Street's
summer green leafed trees.
III
This ode to you O Poets and Orators to come, you
father Whitman as I join your side, you Congress
and American people,
you present meditators, spiritual friends & teachers,
you O Master of the Diamond Arts,
Take this wheel of syllables in hand, these vowels and
consonants to breath's end
take this inhalation of black poison to your heart, breath
out this blessing from your breast on our creation
forests cities oceans deserts rocky flats and mountains
in the Ten Directions pacify with exhalation,
enrich this Plutonian Ode to explode its empty thunder
through earthen thought-worlds
Magnetize this howl with heartless compassion, destroy
this mountain of Plutonium with ordinary mind
and body speech,
thus empower this Mind-guard spirit gone out, gone
out, gone beyond, gone beyond me, Wake space,
67
so Ah!
~ Allen Ginsberg,
257:Kaddish, Part I
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking,
talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues
shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm--and your memory in my head three years after-And read Adonais' last triumphant stanzas aloud--wept, realizing
how we suffer-And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember,
prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers--and my own imagination of a withered leaf--at dawn-Dreaming back thru life, Your time--and mine accelerating toward Apocalypse,
the final moment--the flower burning in the Day--and what comes after,
looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city
a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom
Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed-like a poem in the dark--escaped back to Oblivion-No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream,
trapped in its disappearance,
sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worshipping each other,
worshipping the God included in it all--longing or inevitability?--while it
lasts, a Vision--anything more?
It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder,
Seventh Avenue, the battlements of window office buildings shouldering each other high, under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant--and
the sky above--an old blue place.
or down the Avenue to the south, to--as I walk toward the Lower East Side
--where you walked 50 years ago, little girl--from Russia, eating the
first poisonous tomatoes of America frightened on the dock
then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?--toward
Newark-toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned ice
cream in backroom on musty brownfloor boards-Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school,
and learning to be mad, in a dream--what is this life?
Toward the Key in the window--and the great Key lays its head of light
on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the
46
sidewalk--in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward
the Yiddish Theater--and the place of poverty
you knew, and I know, but without caring now--Strange to have moved
thru Paterson, and the West, and Europe and here again,
with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstops doors and dark boys on
the street, firs escapes old as you
--Tho you're not old now, that's left here with me-Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe--and I guess that dies with
us--enough to cancel all that comes--What came is gone forever
every time-That's good!That leaves it open for no regret--no fear radiators, lacklove,
torture even toothache in the end-Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul--and the lamb, the soul,
in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change's fierce hunger--hair
and teeth--and the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin,
braintricked Implacability.
Ai! ai!we do worse! We are in a fix!And you're out, Death let you out,
Death had the Mercy, you're done with your century, done with
God, done with the path thru it--Done with yourself at last--Pure
--Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all--before the
world-There, more suffering for you.I know where you've gone, it's good.
No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now, no more
fear of Louis,
and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades, debts,
loves, frightened telephone calls, conception beds, relatives, hands-No more of sister Elanor,--she gone before you--we kept it secret you
killed her--or she killed herself to bear with you--an arthritic heart
--But Death's killed you both--No matter-Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and
weeks--forgetting, agrieve watching Marie Dressler address humanity, Chaplin dance in youth,
or Boris Godunov, Chaliapin's at the Met, halling his voice of a weeping Czar
--by standing room with Elanor & Max--watching also the Capital
ists take seats in Orchestra, white furs, diamonds,
with the YPSL's hitch-hiking thru Pennsylvania, in black baggy gym skirts
pants, photograph of 4 girls holding each other round the waste, and
laughing eye, too coy, virginal solitude of 1920
all girls grown old, or dead now, and that long hair in the grave--lucky to
have husbands later-You made it--I came too--Eugene my brother before (still grieving now and
will gream on to his last stiff hand, as he goes thru his cancer--or kill
47
--later perhaps--soon he will think--)
And it's the last moment I remember, which I see them all, thru myself, now
--tho not you
I didn't foresee what you felt--what more hideous gape of bad mouth came
first--to you--and were you prepared?
To go where?In that Dark--that--in that God? a radiance? A Lord in the
Void?Like an eye in the black cloud in a dream?Adonoi at last, with
you?
Beyond my remembrance! Incapable to guess! Not merely the yellow skull
in the grave, or a box of worm dust, and a stained ribbon--Deathshead with Halo?can you believe it?
Is it only the sun that shines once for the mind, only the flash of existence,
than none ever was?
Nothing beyond what we have--what you had--that so pitiful--yet Triumph,
to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower--fed to the
ground--but made, with its petals, colored, thinking Great Universe,
shaken, cut in the head, leaf stript, hid in an egg crate hospital, cloth
wrapped, sore--freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless.
No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and fought the
knife--lost
Cut down by an idiot Snowman's icy--even in the Spring--strange ghost
thought some--Death--Sharp icicle in his hand--crowned with old
roses--a dog for his eyes--cock of a sweatshop--heart of electric
irons.
All the accumulations of life, that wear us out--clocks, bodies, consciousness,
shoes, breasts--begotten sons--your Communism--'Paranoia' into
hospitals.
You once kicked Elanor in the leg, she died of heart failure of
p?within a year, the two of you, sisters in death.Is
Elanor happy?
Max grieves alive in an office on Lower Broadway, lone large mustache over
midnight Accountings, not life passes--as he sees--and
what does he doubt now?Still dream of making money, or that might
have made money, hired nurse, had children, found even your Immortality, Naomi?
I'll see him I've got to cut through to talk to you as I didn't
when you had a mouth.
we're bound for that, Forever like Emily Dickinson's horses
--headed to the End.
They know the way--These Steeds--run faster than we think--it's our own
life they cross--and take with them.
48
Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, married dreamed, mortal changed--Ass and face done with murder.
In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under
pine, almed in Earth, blamed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.
Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless,
Father in I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I'm
hymnless, I'm Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore
Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not
light or darkness, Dayless Eternity-Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some
of my Time, now given to Nothing--to praise Thee--But Death
This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Wonderer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping
--page beyond Psalm--Last change of mine and Naomi--to God's perfect
Darkness--Death, stay thy phantoms!
II
Over and over--refrain--of the Hospitals--still haven't written your
history--leave it abstract--a few images
run thru the mind--like the saxophone chorus of houses and years-remembrance of electrical shocks.
By long nites as a child in Paterson apartment, watching over your
nervousness--you were fat--your next move-By that afternoon I stayed home from school to take care of you-once and for all--when I vowed forever that once man disagreed with my
opinion of the cosmos, I was lost-By my later burden--vow to illuminate mankind--this is release of
particulars--(mad as you)--(sanity a trick of agreement)-But you stared out the window on the Broadway Church corner, and
spied a mystical assassin from Newark,
So phoned the Doctor--'OK go way for a rest'--so I put on my coat
and walked you downstreet--On the way a grammarschool boy screamed,
unaccountably--'Where you goin Lady to Death'? I shuddered-and you covered your nose with motheaten fur collar, gas mask
against poison sneaked into downtown atmosphere, sprayed by Grandma-And was the driver of the cheesebox Public Service bus a member of
the gang?You shuddered at his face, I could hardly get you on--to New
York, very Times Square, to grab another Greyhound-~ Allen Ginsberg,

IN CHAPTERS [0/0]









WORDNET



--- Overview of noun allen_ginsberg

The noun allen ginsberg has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts)
                
1. Ginsberg, Allen Ginsberg ::: (United States poet of the beat generation (1926-1997))


--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun allen_ginsberg

1 sense of allen ginsberg                      

Sense 1
Ginsberg, Allen Ginsberg
   INSTANCE OF=> poet
     => writer, author
       => communicator
         => person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
           => organism, being
             => living thing, animate thing
               => whole, unit
                 => object, physical object
                   => physical entity
                     => entity
           => causal agent, cause, causal agency
             => physical entity
               => entity


--- Hyponyms of noun allen_ginsberg
                                    


--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun allen_ginsberg

1 sense of allen ginsberg                      

Sense 1
Ginsberg, Allen Ginsberg
   INSTANCE OF=> poet




--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun allen_ginsberg

1 sense of allen ginsberg                      

Sense 1
Ginsberg, Allen Ginsberg
  -> poet
   => bard
   => elegist
   => odist
   => poetess
   => poet laureate
   => poet laureate
   => sonneteer
   HAS INSTANCE=> Alcaeus
   HAS INSTANCE=> Apollinaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzki
   HAS INSTANCE=> Arnold, Matthew Arnold
   HAS INSTANCE=> Arp, Jean Arp, Hans Arp
   HAS INSTANCE=> Auden, W. H. Auden, Wystan Hugh Auden
   HAS INSTANCE=> Baudelaire, Charles Baudelaire, Charles Pierre Baudelaire
   HAS INSTANCE=> Benet, Stephen Vincent Benet
   HAS INSTANCE=> Blake, William Blake
   HAS INSTANCE=> Blok, Alexander Alexandrovich Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok
   HAS INSTANCE=> Boccaccio, Giovanni Boccaccio
   HAS INSTANCE=> Bradstreet, Anne Bradstreet, Anne Dudley Bradstreet
   HAS INSTANCE=> Brecht, Bertolt Brecht
   HAS INSTANCE=> Brooke, Rupert Brooke
   HAS INSTANCE=> Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
   HAS INSTANCE=> Browning, Robert Browning
   HAS INSTANCE=> Burns, Robert Burns
   HAS INSTANCE=> Butler, Samuel Butler
   HAS INSTANCE=> Byron, Lord George Gordon Byron, Sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale
   HAS INSTANCE=> Calderon, Calderon de la Barca, Pedro Calderon de la Barca
   HAS INSTANCE=> Carducci, Giosue Carducci
   HAS INSTANCE=> Carew, Thomas Carew
   HAS INSTANCE=> Catullus, Gaius Valerius Catullus
   HAS INSTANCE=> Chaucer, Geoffrey Chaucer
   HAS INSTANCE=> Ciardi, John Ciardi, John Anthony Ciardi
   HAS INSTANCE=> Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
   HAS INSTANCE=> Corneille, Pierre Corneille
   HAS INSTANCE=> Cowper, William Cowper
   HAS INSTANCE=> Crane, Hart Crane, Harold Hart Crane
   HAS INSTANCE=> Cynewulf, Cynwulf
   HAS INSTANCE=> Dante, Dante Alighieri
   HAS INSTANCE=> de la Mare, Walter de la Mare, Walter John de la Mare
   HAS INSTANCE=> Dickinson, Emily Dickinson
   HAS INSTANCE=> Donne, John Donne
   HAS INSTANCE=> Dryden, John Dryden
   HAS INSTANCE=> Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Stearns Eliot
   HAS INSTANCE=> Fitzgerald, Edward Fitzgerald
   HAS INSTANCE=> Frost, Robert Frost, Robert Lee Frost
   HAS INSTANCE=> Garcia Lorca, Frederico Garcia Lorca, Lorca
   HAS INSTANCE=> Gilbert, William Gilbert, William S. Gilbert, William Schwenk Gilbert, Sir William Gilbert
   HAS INSTANCE=> Ginsberg, Allen Ginsberg
   HAS INSTANCE=> Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
   HAS INSTANCE=> Gongora, Luis de Gongora y Argote
   HAS INSTANCE=> Gray, Thomas Gray
   HAS INSTANCE=> Herrick, Robert Herrick
   HAS INSTANCE=> Hesiod
   HAS INSTANCE=> Hoffmannsthal, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal
   HAS INSTANCE=> Hogg, James Hogg
   HAS INSTANCE=> Homer
   HAS INSTANCE=> Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins
   HAS INSTANCE=> Horace
   HAS INSTANCE=> Housman, A. E. Housman, Alfred Edward Housman
   HAS INSTANCE=> Hughes, Ted Hughes, Edward James Hughes
   HAS INSTANCE=> Hugo, Victor Hugo, Victor-Marie Hugo
   HAS INSTANCE=> Ibsen, Henrik Ibsen, Henrik Johan Ibsen
   HAS INSTANCE=> Jarrell, Randall Jarrell
   HAS INSTANCE=> Jeffers, Robinson Jeffers, John Robinson Jeffers
   HAS INSTANCE=> Jimenez, Juan Ramon Jimenez
   HAS INSTANCE=> Jonson, Ben Jonson, Benjamin Jonson
   HAS INSTANCE=> Karlfeldt, Erik Axel Karlfeldt
   HAS INSTANCE=> Keats, John Keats
   HAS INSTANCE=> Key, Francis Scott Key
   HAS INSTANCE=> Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock
   HAS INSTANCE=> Lindsay, Vachel Lindsay, Nicholas Vachel Lindsay
   HAS INSTANCE=> Li Po
   HAS INSTANCE=> Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
   HAS INSTANCE=> Lovelace, Richard Lovelace
   HAS INSTANCE=> Lowell, Amy Lowell
   HAS INSTANCE=> Lowell, Robert Lowell, Robert Traill Spence Lowell Jr.
   HAS INSTANCE=> Lucretius, Titus Lucretius Carus
   HAS INSTANCE=> MacLeish, Archibald MacLeish
   HAS INSTANCE=> Mallarme, Stephane Mallarme
   HAS INSTANCE=> Mandelstam, Osip Mandelstam, Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, Mandelshtam
   HAS INSTANCE=> Marini, Giambattista Marini, Marino, Giambattista Marino
   HAS INSTANCE=> Marlowe, Christopher Marlowe
   HAS INSTANCE=> Marti, Jose Julian Marti
   HAS INSTANCE=> Martial
   HAS INSTANCE=> Marvell, Andrew Marvell
   HAS INSTANCE=> Masefield, John Masefield, John Edward Masefield
   HAS INSTANCE=> Masters, Edgar Lee Masters
   HAS INSTANCE=> Mayakovski, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovski
   HAS INSTANCE=> Meredith, George Meredith
   HAS INSTANCE=> Milton, John Milton
   HAS INSTANCE=> Moore, Marianne Moore, Marianne Craig Moore
   HAS INSTANCE=> Moore, Thomas Moore
   HAS INSTANCE=> Morris, William Morris
   HAS INSTANCE=> Musset, Alfred de Musset, Louis Charles Alfred de Musset
   HAS INSTANCE=> Neruda, Pablo Neruda, Reyes, Neftali Ricardo Reyes
   HAS INSTANCE=> Noyes, Alfred Noyes
   HAS INSTANCE=> Omar Khayyam
   HAS INSTANCE=> Ovid, Publius Ovidius Naso
   HAS INSTANCE=> Palgrave, Francis Turner Palgrave
   HAS INSTANCE=> Petrarch, Petrarca, Francesco Petrarca
   HAS INSTANCE=> Pindar
   HAS INSTANCE=> Plath, Sylvia Plath
   HAS INSTANCE=> Poe, Edgar Allan Poe
   HAS INSTANCE=> Pope, Alexander Pope
   HAS INSTANCE=> Pound, Ezra Pound, Ezra Loomis Pound
   HAS INSTANCE=> Pushkin, Alexander Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin
   HAS INSTANCE=> Racine, Jean Racine, Jean Baptiste Racine
   HAS INSTANCE=> Riley, James Whitcomb Riley
   HAS INSTANCE=> Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke
   HAS INSTANCE=> Rimbaud, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud
   HAS INSTANCE=> Robinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson
   HAS INSTANCE=> Rostand, Edmond Rostand
   HAS INSTANCE=> Seeger, Alan Seeger
   HAS INSTANCE=> Sexton, Anne Sexton
   HAS INSTANCE=> Shakespeare, William Shakespeare, Shakspere, William Shakspere, Bard of Avon
   HAS INSTANCE=> Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley
   HAS INSTANCE=> Shevchenko, Taras Grigoryevich Shevchenko
   HAS INSTANCE=> Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney
   HAS INSTANCE=> Silverstein, Shel Silverstein, Shelby Silverstein
   HAS INSTANCE=> Sitwell, Dame Edith Sitwell, Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell
   HAS INSTANCE=> Southey, Robert Southey
   HAS INSTANCE=> Spender, Stephen Spender, Sir Stephen Harold Spender
   HAS INSTANCE=> Spenser, Edmund Spenser
   HAS INSTANCE=> Stevens, Wallace Stevens
   HAS INSTANCE=> Suckling, Sir John Suckling
   HAS INSTANCE=> Swinburne, Algernon Charles Swinburne
   HAS INSTANCE=> Symons, Arthur Symons
   HAS INSTANCE=> Synge, J. M. Synge, John Millington Synge, Edmund John Millington Synge
   HAS INSTANCE=> Tasso, Torquato Tasso
   HAS INSTANCE=> Tate, Allen Tate, John Orley Allen Tate
   HAS INSTANCE=> Teasdale, Sara Teasdale
   HAS INSTANCE=> Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, First Baron Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson
   HAS INSTANCE=> Thespis
   HAS INSTANCE=> Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Dylan Marlais Thomas
   HAS INSTANCE=> Trumbull, John Trumbull
   HAS INSTANCE=> Tzara, Tristan Tzara, Samuel Rosenstock
   HAS INSTANCE=> Uhland, Johann Ludwig Uhland
   HAS INSTANCE=> Verlaine, Paul Verlaine
   HAS INSTANCE=> Villon, Francois Villon
   HAS INSTANCE=> Virgil, Vergil, Publius Vergilius Maro
   HAS INSTANCE=> Voznesenski, Andrei Voznesenski
   HAS INSTANCE=> Warren, Robert Penn Warren
   HAS INSTANCE=> Watts, Isaac Watts
   HAS INSTANCE=> Wheatley, Phillis Wheatley
   HAS INSTANCE=> Whitman, Walt Whitman
   HAS INSTANCE=> Whittier, John Greenleaf Whittier
   HAS INSTANCE=> Williams, William Carlos Williams
   HAS INSTANCE=> Wordsworth, William Wordsworth
   HAS INSTANCE=> Wyatt, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Wyat, Sir Thomas Wyat
   HAS INSTANCE=> Wylie, Elinor Morton Hoyt Wylie
   HAS INSTANCE=> Yeats, William Butler Yeats, W. B. Yeats
   HAS INSTANCE=> Yevtushenko, Yevgeni Yevtushenko, Yevgeni Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko
   HAS INSTANCE=> Young, Edward Young




--- Grep of noun allen_ginsberg
allen ginsberg



IN WEBGEN [10000/36]

Wikipedia - Allen Ginsberg -- American poet
Wikipedia - America (poem) -- Poem by Allen Ginsberg
Wikipedia - Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox -- Poem by Allen Ginsberg
Wikipedia - Howl and Other Poems -- Book by Allen Ginsberg
Wikipedia - Howl -- 1955 poem by Allen Ginsberg, part of the Beat Generation movement
Wikipedia - Hydrogen Jukebox -- Chamber opera by Philip Glass and Allen GInsberg
Wikipedia - Ignu -- Poem written by Allen Ginsberg
Wikipedia - Iron Horse (poem) -- Book by Allen Ginsberg
Wikipedia - Kaddish and Other Poems -- Book of poems by Allen Ginsberg
Wikipedia - Kaddish (poem) -- Poem by Allen Ginsberg
Wikipedia - Mind Breaths -- Book by Allen Ginsberg
Wikipedia - Planet News -- Book by Allen Ginsberg
Wikipedia - Reality Sandwiches -- Book by Allen Ginsberg
Wikipedia - September on Jessore Road -- Poem by Allen Ginsberg
Wikipedia - White Shroud Poems -- Book by Allen Ginsberg
Wikipedia - Wichita Vortex Sutra -- 1966 anti-war poem by Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg ::: Born: June 3, 1926; Died: April 5, 1997; Occupation: Poet;
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/342038.The_Poetry_and_Life_of_Allen_Ginsberg
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/383392.Allen_Ginsberg_s_Buddhist_Poetics
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56475.On_the_Poetry_of_Allen_Ginsberg
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/572651.Allen_Ginsberg
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/818420.Gregory_Corso_Lawrence_Ferlinghetti_Allen_Ginsberg
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4261.Allen_Ginsberg
Goodreads author - Allen_Ginsberg
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg
Dharmapedia - Allen_Ginsberg
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg
https://allpoetry.com/Allen-Ginsberg
Kill Your Darlings(2013) - A murder in 1944 draws together the great poets of the beat generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.
Howl (2010) ::: 6.7/10 -- R | 1h 24min | Biography, Drama, Romance | 27 August 2010 (Italy) -- As Allen Ginsberg talks about his life and art, his most famous poem is illustrated in animation while the obscenity trial of the work is dramatized. Directors: Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman Writers:
Kill Your Darlings (2013) ::: 6.5/10 -- R | 1h 44min | Biography, Drama, Romance | 19 September 2013 (Croatia) -- A murder in 1944 draws together the great poets of the beat generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Director: John Krokidas Writers: Austin Bunn (screenplay), Austin Bunn (story) | 1 more credit
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg Live in London
Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg
Songs of Innocence and Experience (Allen Ginsberg album)



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