Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen. Страница 135

               President naked in the bathroom

—naked on the toilet taking a shit weeping?

Who wants to be President of the

               Garden of Eden?

Car Crash

I

Snow-blizzard sowing

ice-powder drifts on stone fenced

gardens near gray woods.

Yellow hump-backed snow plow

rocking giant tires round

the road, red light flashing

iron insect brain.

Mrow, the cat with diarrhea.

Sunlight settled into human form,

tree rings settled age after age

stone forests accumulating atoms

traveled 93,000,000 miles,

carbon deposits settled into beds,

the mountain’s head breathes light,

Earth-hairs gather gold beams

thru chlorophyll, poets walk

between the green bushes

sprouting solar language.

Broken bones in bed,

hips and ribs cracked by autos,

snowdrifts over rubber tires,

tree stumps freeze, the body stump

heals temporarily in wintertime.

II

So that’s it the body, ah!

Beat yr meat in a dark bed.

Boy friends wrinkle & shit in snow.

Girls go fat-eyed to their mother’s coffin.

Cigarettes burned my tastebuds’ youth,

I smelled my lover’s behind,

This autocrash broke my hip and ribs,

Ugh, Thud, nausea-breath at solar plexus paralyzed my bowels four days—

Eyeglasses broke, eyeballs still intact—

Thank God! alas, still alive but talk words

died in my body, thoughts died in pain.

A healthy day in the snow, white breath

and warm wool sox, hat over ears, hot broth,

nakedness in warm boudoirs, stiff prick come,

fame, physic, learning, scepter, dusk

and Aurora Borealis, hot pig flesh, turkey

stuffing—all disappear in a broken skull.

Unstable element, Sight Sound flesh Touch

& Taste, all Odour, one more consciousness

backseat of a steaming auto with broken nose—

Unstable place to be, an easy way out

by metal crash instead of mind cancer.

Unreliable meat, waving a chicken bone

in a hospital bed—get what’s coming to you

like the chicken steak you ate last year.

Impossible Dr. Feelgood Forever, gotta die

made of worm-stuff And worm thoughts?

And who’s left watching, or even

remembers the car crash that severed

the skull from the spinal column?

Who gets out of body, or who’s shut in

a box of soft pain when Napalm drops

from Heaven all over the abdomen,

breasts and cheek-skin? & tongue cut out

by inhuman knives? Cow tongue? Man tongue?

What does it feel like not to talk?

To die in the back seat, Ow!

December 21, 1968

III

Raw pine walls, ice-white windows

three weeks now, snowy flatness

foot-thick down valley meadows,

wind roar in bare ash arms, oak branch

tendrils icy gleaming, yellow stain of morning water in front

door’s snow—I walk out on crutches

to see white moonglow make snow blue

—three men just rode a space ship

round the moon last week—gnashing

their teeth in Biafra & Palestine,

Assassins & Astronauts traveling from

Athens to the sea of Venus Creatrix—

Lovers’ quarrels magnified decades to mad

violence, half naked farm boys stand

with axes at the kitchen table,

trembling guilty, slicing egg

grapefruit breasts on breakfast oilcloth.

Growing old, growing old, forget the words,

mind jumps to the grave, forget words,

Love’s an old word, forget words,

Peter with shave-head beardface

mutters & screams to himself at midnight.

A new year, no party tonite, forget

old loves, old words, old feelings.

Snow everywhere around the house,

I turned off the gas-light & came upstairs

alone to read, remembering pictures of dead

moon-side, my hip broken, the cat sick,

earhead filled with my own strong music,

in a houseful of men, sleep in underwear.

Neal almost a year turned to ash, angel

in his own midnight without a phonecall,

Jack drunk in my mind or his Florida.

Forget old friends, old words, old loves,

old bodies. Bhaktivedanta advises Christ.

The body lies in bed in ’69 alone,

a gnostic book fills the lap, Aeons

revolve ’round the household, Rimbaud

age 16 adolescent sneers tight lipt

green-eyed oval in old time gravure

—1869 his velvet tie askew, hair

mussed & ruffled by policeman’s rape.

January 1, 1969, 1:30 A.M.