America
by Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good
looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial
for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I'm not sorry.
i smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came
over from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious.
Movie producers are serious.
Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of
genitals an unpublishable private
literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twenty-five-thousand
mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who
live in my flowerpots under the
light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next ot go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all
different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old
strophe
Merica free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a
handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were
free everybody was angelic and
sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea
what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw
Israel Ameter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.
America you don't really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.

The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to
take our cars from out our
garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers' Digest. Her Wants
our auto plants in Siberia.
Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black
niggers. Hah. Her make us all
work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and
psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.


Berkeley, January 17, 1956


Sonnet Two
Edna St. Vincent Millay from "Renascence and Other Poems.", 1917

TIME does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

Edna St. Vincent Millay from "Renascence and Other Poems.", 1917


THE LOVE OF HANDWRITTEN
Puddle Style

When I'm low, I take out old notes;
she said this, she said that.

I won't hold it against her.

Her cursive can't be laminated
by memories alone;

you need the voice.

And if you don't have the voice
you have the memory of the voice
and the memory of the memory
and that too, is a voice,
at times.

Rilke is the Kerouac of German poetry
Disruptive Stijl

Rilke is the Kerouac of German poetry.
Angels, indeed!
Good grief.

With cosmogeny in the eyes,
the great aspirations of youth, blahblahblah.
In this tired world of sad reality and killing it might be nice to grasp
that sort of faith, get a foot-hold, like, angels are everywhere, hidden,
etc., but it's a tired lot, fed up with humanity to believe in the
Rilke's prescient Euro-Disney, the angels, the Mickey Mice, the smiling
faces and certainly, even behind Rilke, there was the greedy, beady-eyed
huckster attempting to elude the masses?

You've got to have a real tunnel vision to stomach that sort of syrup and
tart. A real illusionist's pride.



Rainy Day Stijl

Having something to drive you to keep collecting paychecks is always
good. I'm sorting out translating work but since it's only been two
weeks into this move, I still haven't bothered looking for anything
concrete yet. Another few weeks of the toothpick in one corner of the
mouth, a nice bitter in the left hand and alot of hours sleeping off
western civilization.


America, My America

Thanks for the geographical belaborment by the way. No matter how many
tiny lobotomies I endeavor to experience, that damned America is always
in the rear-view mirror. Like a kid sister you can't shake.

Of the whole bi-posting carp, the pyrotechnic
spectacle of whining and then on to the sardonic replies,
I realised
how uncool I must be
not to double dutch and worse so,
to be so unimaginative What genius,
implied with this double-dutching!
Mass-mail self-indulgence, Bumper stickers!
Sound
bites! All the important forms of communication in one tasty slurp...

*****

There really is a "blood bin" in rugby. Saw one player sent to it three
times in yesterday's brilliant Pommie victory over the Aussies. Sent to
the blood bin. Such a manly sport. Of course, compared to calling for
terrorists to "bring it on" against your own troops and then hiding, like
a coward, behind millions of £££ worth of security wherever you go and
being too scared of terrorists to even step out in public, well, the
blood bin and rugby pales in comparison when it comes to the manliness of

*****

THE RICH POET

The lonely, as a commodity,
fail. The exchange rate:
£ of Love= 30 pence per second.

The downtrodden mean
they won't take any more business
and nothing is serious
anymore.

When the poet is inspired
it creates a crowd.
Give free wine, toss up
a few paintings, feel the
transluscence.

When I pity a big crowd,
when I walk existential, big rocks
in my hands, I'm looking for solititude.
Get out of this poem.

This poem is for rich poets.

When the MFAs have consumed
all the wine and coffee
they have consumed a nomenclature
and they have named themselves
the poets.

When weekend open-mikes
display the plummage of amateurs,
the diaries and confessionals,
all you eat is poverty.

Because this poem is for the rich.

What does an MFA drive?
What colour hair does it prefer?
Will it eat vegetables or flesh?
Will it show up at the front door?

And when it does, how will you treat it?
Drumsticks collapsed across the knees,
salads tossed violently?

This poem is for rich poets.

Because great fun cannot be measured in metre
nor in rhyme.
It must be measured by the time
spent rich and alone
to be a poet and to
live on subsidies,
two years on fifty grand,
and down further as the currency
is ground to dust
the great, rich poet
must
seal his own fate
without asphixiation.

And the rich poet can choose.

Daily rations, love.

So we get it, on all channels,
a soap opera kiss, the pretty girl
around the corner.
And in between, tampons, soda
and miscommunications.

How great the rich poet for
how rich he is.
How pretty the coffin and the chemicals
to make him real
in death
for conversations in hallways
the rich poet:
The exchange rate of blood fluxuates
until the lifeless left,
to man the doors and create
interference.


world "leaders".