Collected Poems 1947-1997

  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.

  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 Calistoga—

  it 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

  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 vagina.

  May 9, 1956

  Psalm III

  To God: to illuminate all men. Beginning with Skid Road.

  Let Occidental and Washington be transformed into a higher place, the plaza of eternity.

  Illuminate the welders in shipyards with the brilliance of their torches.

  Let the crane operator lift up his arm for joy.

  Let elevators creak and speak, ascending and descending in awe.

  Let the mercy of the flower’s direction beckon in the eye.

  Let the straight flower bespeak its purpose in straightness—to seek the light.

  Let the crooked flower bespeak its purpose in crookedness—to seek the light.

  Let the crookedness and straightness bespeak the light.

  Let Puget Sound be a blast of light.

  I feed on your Name like a cockroach on a crumb—this cockroach is holy.

  Seattle, June, 1956

  Many Loves

  “Resolved to sing no songs henceforth but those of manly attachment”

  —Walt Whitman

  Neal Cassady was my animal: he brought me to my knees

  and taught me the love of his cock and the secrets of his mind

  And we met and conversed, went walking in the evening by the park

  Up to Harlem, recollecting Denver, and Dan Budd, a hero

  And we made shift to sack out in Harlem, after a long evening,

  Jack and host in a large double bed, I volunteered for the cot, and Neal

  Volunteered for the cot with me, we stripped and lay down.

  I wore my underwear, my shorts, and he his briefs—

  lights out on the narrow bed I turned to my side, with my back to his Irish boy’s torso,

  and huddled and balanced on the edge, and kept distance—

  and hung my head over and kept my arm over the side, withdrawn

  And he seeing my fear stretched out his arm, and put it around my breast

  Saying “Draw near me” and gathered me in upon him:

  I lay there trembling, and felt his great arm like a king’s

  And his breasts, his heart slow thudding against my back,

  and his middle torso, narrow and made of iron, soft at my back,

  his fiery firm belly warming me while I trembled—

  His belly of fists and starvation, his belly a thousand girls kissed in Colorado

  his belly of rocks thrown over Denver roofs, prowess of jumping and fists, his stomach of solitudes,

  His belly of burning iron and jails affectionate to my side:

  I began to tremble, he pulled me in closer with his arm, and hugged me long and close

  my soul melted, secrecy departed, I became

  Thenceforth open to his nature as a flower in the shining sun.

  And below his belly, in white underwear, tight between my buttocks,

  His own loins against me soft, nestling in comradeship, put forth & pressed into me, open to my awareness,

  slowly began to grow, signal me further and deeper affection, sexual tenderness.

  So gentle the man, so sweet the moment, so kind the thighs that nuzzled against me smooth-skinned powerful, warm by my legs

  That my body shudders and trembles with happiness, remembering—

  His hand opened up on my belly, his palms and fingers flat against my skin

  I fell to him, and turned, shifting, put my face on his arm resting,

  my chest against his, he helped me to turn, and held me closer

  his arm at my back beneath my head, and arm at my buttocks tender holding me in,

  our bellies together nestling, loins touched together, pressing and knowledgeable each other’s hardness, and mine stuck out of my underwear.

  Then I pressed in closer and drew my leg up between his, and he lay half on me with his thighs and bedded me down close, caressing

  and moved together pressing his cock to my thigh and mine to his

  slowly, and slowly began a love match that continues in my imagination to this day a full decade.

  Thus I met Neal & thus we felt each other’s flesh and owned each other bodies and souls.

  So then as I lay on his breast with my arms clasped around his neck and his cheek against mine,

  I put my hand down to feel his great back for the first time, jaws and pectorals of steel at my fingers,

  closer and stiller, down the silken iron back to his waist, the whole of his torso now open

  my hand at his waist trembling, waited delaying and under the elastic of his briefs,

  I first touched the smooth mount of his rock buttocks, silken in power, rounded in animal fucking and bodily nights over nurses and schoolgirls,

  O ass of long solitudes in stolen cars, and solitudes on curbs, musing fist in cheek,

  Ass of
a thousand farewells, ass of youth, youth’s lovers,

  Ass of a thousand lonely craps in gas stations ass of great painful secrecies of the years

  O ass of mystery and night! ass of gymnasiums and muscular pants

  ass of high schools and masturbation ass of lone delight, ass of mankind, so beautiful and hollow, dowry of Mind and Angels,

  Ass of hero, Neal Cassady, I had at my hand: my fingers traced the curve to the bottom of his thighs.

  I raised my thighs and stripped down my shorts to my knees, and bent to push them off

  and he raised me up from his chest, and pulled down his pants the same,

  humble and meek and obedient to his mood our silence,

  and naked at long last with angel & greek & athlete & hero and brother and boy of my dreams

  I lay with my hair intermixed with his, he asking me “What shall we do now?”

  —And confessed, years later, he thinking I was not a queer at first to please me & serve me, to blow me and make me come, maybe or if I were queer, that’s what I’d likely want of a dumb bastard like him.

  But I made my first mistake, and made him then and there my master, and bowed my head, and holding his buttock

  Took up his hard-on and held it, feeling it throb and pressing my own at his knee & breathing showed him I needed him, cock, for my dreams of insatiety & lone love.

  —And I lie here naked in the dark, dreaming

  Arctic, August 10, 1956

  Ready to Roll

  To Mexico! To Mexico! Down the dovegray highway, past Atomic City police, past the fiery border to dream cantinas!

  Standing on the sunny metropolitan plateau, stranger prince on the street, dollars in my pocket, alone, free—genitals and thighs and buttocks under skin and leather.

  Music! Taxis! Marijuana in the slums! Ancient sexy parks! Continental boulevards in America! Modern downtown for a dollar! Dungarees in Les Ambassadeurs! And here’s a hard brown cock for a quarter!

  Drunkenness! and the long night walks down brown streets, eyes, windows, buses, interior charnels behind the Cathedral, lost squares and hungry tacos, a calf’s head cooked and picked apart for meat,

  and the blackened inner roofs and tents of the Thieves’ Market, street crisscrossed on street, a naked hipster labyrinth, stealing, pausing, loitering, noticing drums, purchasing nothing

  but a broken aluminum coffeepot with a doll’s arm sticking up out of the mouth.

  Haha! what do I want? Change of solitude, spectre of drunkenness in paranoiac taxicabs, fear and gaiety of unknown lovers

  coming around the empty streetcorner dark-eyed and watching me make it there alone under the new hip moon.

  San Francisco, October 1956

  IV

  REALITY SANDWICHES: EUROPE! EUROPE!

  (1957–1959)

  POEM Rocket

  Old moon my eyes are new moon with human footprint

  no longer Romeo Sadface in drunken river Loony Pierre eyebrow, goof moon

  O possible moon in Heaven we get to first of ageless constellations of names as God is possible as All is possible so we’ll reach another life.

  Moon politicians earth weeping and warring in eternity

  tho not one star disturbed by screaming madmen from Hollywood

  oil tycoons from Romania making secret deals with flabby green Plutonians—

  slave camps on Saturn Cuban revolutions on Mars?

  Old life and new side by side, will Catholic Church find Christ on Jupiter

  Mohammed rave in Uranus will Buddha be acceptable on the stolid planets

  or will we find Zoroastrian temples flowering on Neptune?

  What monstrous new ecclesiastical design on the entire universe unfolds in the dying Pope’s brain?

  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

  O Einstein I should have sent you my flaming mss.

  O Einstein I should have pilgrimaged to your white hair!

  O fellow travelers I write you a poem in Amsterdam in the Cosmos

  where Spinoza ground his magic lenses long ago

  I write you a poem long ago

  already my feet are washed in death

  Here I am naked without identity

  with no more body than the fine black tracery of pen mark on soft paper as star talks to star multiple beams of sunlight all the same myriad thought

  in one fold of the universe where Whitman was

  and Blake and Shelley saw Milton dwelling as in a starry temple

  brooding in his blindness seeing all—

  Now at last I can speak to you beloved brothers of an unknown moon

  real Yous squatting in whatever form amidst Platonic Vapors of Eternity

  I am another Star.

  Will you eat my poems or read them

  or gaze with aluminum blind plates on sunless pages?

  do you dream or translate & accept data with indifferent droopings of antennae?

  do I make sense to your flowery green receptor eyesockets? do you have visions of God?

  Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?

  This is my rocket my personal rocket I send up my message Beyond

  Someone to hear me there

  My immortality

  without steel or cobalt basalt or diamond gold or mercurial fire

  without passports filing cabinets bits of paper warheads

  without myself finally

  pure thought

  message all and everywhere the same

  I send up my rocket to land on whatever planet awaits it

  preferably religious sweet planets no money

  fourth dimensional planets where Death shows movies

  plants speak (courteously) of ancient physics and poetry itself is manufactured by the trees

  the final Planet where the Great Brain of the Universe sits waiting for a poem to land in His golden pocket

  joining the other notes mash-notes love-sighs complaints-musical shrieks of despair and the million unutterable thoughts of frogs

  I send you my rocket of amazing chemical

  more than my hair my sperm or the cells of my body

  the speeding thought that flies upward with my desire as instantaneous as the universe and faster than light

  and leave all other questions unfinished for the moment to turn back to sleep

  in my dark bed on earth.

  Amsterdam, October 4, 1957

  Squeal

  He rises he stretches he liquefies he is hammered again

  He’s divided in shares he litters the floor of the Bourse

  He’s cut by adamantine snips and sent by railway car

  Accumulated on the margin by bony Goldfinger has various

  Visions of being an automobile consolidates

  The fortune of spectral lawyers heirs weep over him

  He melts he undergoes remarkable metamorphoses peculiar

  Hallucinations he coughs up debentures beaten

  By immense hammers in a vast loft pours in fire spurts

  Upward in molten forges he levels he dreams and he cools

  And the present adjusted steel squints.

  A hunchback tuberculosis salesman drives him cackling to St. Louis

  In the rain Hack no will of his own Creep next resale Crank

  San Pedro tomorrow St. Joe Squeak will it never end Hohokus—

  Crashes into a dirty locomotive the bastard never

  Mind stock averages decline slightly here’s the mechanic

  Blam the junkyard Help the smelter later a merger pressure accumulates

  He’s had it now Eek he’s an airplane Whine he wants to go home

  Suddenly he dives on the market like a bomb.

  Paris, December 1957

  Wrote This Last Night

  Listen to the tale of the sensitive car

  who was coughed up out of earth in Pittsburgh.
r />   She screamed like a Swedish Prime Minister

  on her first flight down the red neon highway,

  she couldn’t stand the sirens and blind lights

  of the male cars Fords Oldsmobiles Studebakers

  —her assembly line foreman had prophesied wild wreck

  on Sunset Boulevard headlights & eyeballs broken fenders & bones.

  She rode all over Mexico avoiding Los Angeles

  praying to be an old junkie in a bordertown graveyard

  with rattly doors and yellow broken windowpanes

  bent license plate weak brakes & unsalable motor

  worn out by the slow buttocks of teen-age nightmare

  panting under the impoverished jissum of the August moon,

  Anything but that final joyride with the mad producer

  and his bombshell intellectual star on the last night up from Mexicali.

  Paris, December 1957

  Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!

  POET is Priest

  Money has reckoned the soul of America

  Congress broken thru to the precipice of Eternity

  the President built a War machine which will vomit and rear up Russia out of Kansas

  The American Century betrayed by a mad Senate which no longer sleeps with its wife

  Franco has murdered Lorca the fairy son of Whitman

  just as Mayakovsky committed suicide to avoid Russia

  Hart Crane distinguished Platonist committed suicide to cave in the wrong America

  just as millions of tons of human wheat were burned in secret caverns under the White House

  while India starved and screamed and ate mad dogs full of rain

  and mountains of eggs were reduced to white powder in the halls of Congress

  on godfearing man will walk there again because of the stink of the rotten eggs of America

  and the Indians of Chiapas continue to gnaw their vitaminless tortillas

  aborigines of Australia perhaps gibber in the eggless wilderness

  and I rarely have an egg for breakfast tho my work requires infinite eggs to come to birth in Eternity

  eggs should be eaten or given to their mothers

  and the grief of the countless chickens of America is expressed in the screaming of her comedians over the radio