Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen. Страница 244
as ailanthus trees bud & grow thick green, seaweed in rainy Atlantis,
lose leaves after snowfall, sit bare-branched in January’s rusty winds?
Snap photographs focus’d on the clothesline, courtyard chimneypots a block away?
How many years lie alone in bed and stroke my cock
or read the Times on a pillow midnite, answer telephone talk, my Stepmother
or Joe in Washington, wait for a knock on the door it’s portly Peter sober hesitant
inquiring supper, rarely visiting, rueful a life gone by—you got the monthly rent?
armfuls of mid-morn mail arriving with despairing Secretaries—
rise and tuck my shirt in, turn the doorlock key, go down hallway stairs,
enter New York City, Christine’s Polish restaurant around East 12th Street corner on 1st Avenue
taxi uptown to art museums or visit Dr. Brown, chest x-rays, smoking cough or flu
Turn on the News from Palestine, Listen to Leadbelly’s tape lament, Black Girl, Jim Crow, Irene—and
Sunday Puerto Ricans climb concrete steps week after week to church.
II
Sox in the laundry, snap on the kitchen light midnite icebox
raid, sun-dried tomatoes, soft swiss cheese & ham, Pineapple juice,
low rent control $260 per mo, clear sanded gymseal’d floors, white walls,
Blake’s Tyger on the bedroom bookcase, cabs rattling on dark asphalt below,
Silence, a solitary house, Charles Fourier on bedside table waiting inspection, switch light off—
Pajamas in drawer for sleep, 80 volumes behind the headboard for browsing—
Irving Howe’s Yiddish Poetry, Atilla Jozsef, Sashibusan Das Gupta’s Obscure Religious Cults, Celine, De Vulgari Eloquentia—
What riches for old age? What cozy naps and long nights’ dreams? Browsing in Persepolis and Lhasa!
What more ask existence? Except time, more time, ripe time & calm
& Warless time to contemplate collapsing years, tho body teeth brain elbow ache,
a crooked creak at backbone bottom, dry nostrils, mottled ankle
& smart tongue, how many years to talk, snap photos, sing in theaters
improvise in classroom street church radio, far from Congress?
How many more years eyes closed 9 A.M. wake worrying
the ulcer in my cheek is’t cancer? Should I have charged Burroughs’ biographer for photos
reprinted from 40 years ago? Miles the editor’s stylistic competence OK
for Lit Hist Beat Generation? Should I rise & meditate
or sleep in daylight recuperate flu? phone ringing half an hour ago
What’s on the Answer Machine? Give back Advances to Harper’s?
Who promised deadlines for this photo book? Wasn’t I up 2 A.M. revising Poems?
Spontaneous verse?!? Take a plane to Greenland, visit Dublin?
PEN Club meet May 17, decision Israeli Censorship Arabic Press?
Call C—— O—— Yiddish translator poetress Zionist yenta?
Write concentration camp expert moralist Elie Wiesel, what’s his word
“Arabs shd throw words not stones?”—that quote accurate from the Times?
Should I get up right now, crosslegged scribbling Journals
with motor roar in street downstairs, stolen autos doctor’d at the curb
or pull the covers over achy bones? How many years awake or sleepy
How many mornings to be or not to be?
How many morning Mays to come, birds chirp insistent on six-story roofs?
buds rise in backyard cities? Forsythia yellow by brick walls & rusty bedsprings near the fence?
III
How many Sundays wake and lie immobile eyes closed remembering Death,
7 A.M. Spring Sunlight out the window the noise a Nuyorican drunkard on the corner
reminds me of Peter, Naomi, my nephew Alan, am I mad myself, have always been so
waking in N.Y. 61st year to realize childless I am a motherless freak
like so many millions, worlds from Paterson Los Angeles to Amazon
Humans & Whales screaming in despair from Empire State Building top to Arctic Ocean bottom—?
May 1–3, 1988
Numbers in U.S. File Cabinet (Death Waits to Be Executed)
100,000,000 buffalo 17th century on North American Plains
$136,000,000,000 Farm Program costs encouraged chemical overuse 1980s decade
$4,500,000 Agriculture Department research on Natural farm methods 1980s
300,000 National junkies
100,000 alcohol deaths yearly
385,000 tobacco deaths heart attack cancer a year
30,000 deaths “illicit substances” yearly
$11,000,000,000 budget war on drugs 1990
1,000,000,000 people on world malnourished diseased
3,600,000 estimated American Homeless
300,000 mental patients dumped on streets 1970s–1980s
300 homeless slept outdoors Tompkins Park N.Y.C. July 29, 1989
17,000 meals served St. Peter’s soup kitchen Morristown N.J.
110,000,000 man-made deaths Wars holocausts fatality camps XX Century
3°–8° Fahrenheit increase earth temperature next century computers project
Lambert 3-6606 Louis Ginsberg’s phone for 20 years in Paterson N.J.
65 Decibels sound level ordinary speech
100 Decibels rock concert sound level
28,000,000 current cases hearing loss U.S.A.
6,000 workers, Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant
$300,000,000 yearly pay & benefits Rocky Flats Colorado
1% Colorado manufacturing activity’s at Rocky Flats Nuclear Facility
70 FBI agents raided Rocky Flats investigating 10,000 gallon toxic waste tanks 1989
$100,000,000,000 to 200,000,000,000 estimate nuclear weapons complex cleanup costs
Savings & Loan Association bankruptcy taxpayers’ costs it says here $500,000,000,000
70,000 Salvadorians killed in Civil War majority by Government Paramilitary Death Squads funded by U.S.A.
40,000 names Doris Lessing too on National Automated Immigration Lookout System barred entering U.S.A.
3,000 citizens killed by Shining Path, Peru 1972–1979
3,000 citizens disappeared in Government custody Peru 1972–1979
U.S. produces 24% planetary Greenhouse gas, consumes 40% world’s gasoline
$2,000,000,000,000-plus U.S. National debt 1990 ante Iraq War
$65 cost of Harry Smith’s eyeglasses
20 largest World Cities by year 2000 none U.S.-European none speak English
1 in 10 Salvadorians displaced in decade’s counterinsurgency war
1 sun per known solar system
1 set Wisdom teeth
1 mother of all
1 wrong move
1 bad apple
1 way street
1 anus each
1 non-God
1 down 2 to go
March 1990
Return of Kral Majales
This silver anniversary much hair’s gone from my head and I am the King of May
And tho I am King of May my howls & proclamations present are banned by FCC on America’s electric airwaves 6 A.M. to midnight
So King of May I return through Heaven flying to reclaim my paper crown
And I am King of May with high blood pressure, diabetes, gout, Bell’s palsy, kidneystones & calm eyeglasses
And wear the foolish crown of no ignorance no wisdom anymore no fear no hope in capitalist striped tie & Communist dungarees
No laughing matter the loss of the planet next hundred years
And I am the King of May returned with a diamond big as the universe an empty mind
And I am the King of May lacklove bouzerant in Springtime with a feeble practice of meditation
And I am King of May Distinguished Brooklyn English Professor singing
All gone all gone all overgone all gone sky-high now old mind so Ah!
April 25, 1990
Elephant in the Meditation Hall
Yes all spiritual groups scandal the shrine room
What about San Francisco Roshi & the board director’s wife