weightless Angels of
Television!
It’s gonna be a delightful
time, thank god nothing’s
happening muchachos
Tonite but parties & car crashes,
births & ambulance sirens,
Confetti falling over
heartbroken partygoers
doing the Lindy Hop at the
back window of the loft
years ago when Abstract-Expressionist
painters & poets had a party
celebrating U.S. Eternity
on New Year’s Eve before the War.
Brooklyn College Brain
For David Shapiro & John Ashbery
You used to wear dungarees & blue workshirt,
sneakers or cloth-top shoes, & ride alone
on subways, young & elegant unofficial
bastard of nature, sneaking sweetness into Brooklyn.
Now tweed jacket & yr father’s tie on yr breast,
salmon-pink cotton shirt & Swedish bookbag
you’re half bald, palsied lip & lower eyelid
continually tearing, gone back to college.
Goodbye Professor Ginsberg, get your identity
card next week from the front office so you can
get to class without being humiliated dumped on the
sidewalk by the black guard at the Student Union door.
Hello Professor Ginsberg have some coffee,
have some students, have some office hours
Tuesdays & Thursdays, have a couple subway tokens
in advance, have a box in the English Department,
have a look at Miss Sylvia Blitzer behind the typewriter
Have some poems er maybe they’re not so bad have a
good time workshopping Bodhicitta in the Bird Room.
March 27, 1979
Garden State
It used to be, farms,
stone houses on green lawns
a wooded hill to play Jungle Camp
asphalt roads thru Lincoln Park.
The communists picnicked
amid spring’s yellow forsythia
magnolia trees & apple blossoms, pale buds
breezy May, blue June.
Then came the mafia, alcohol
highways, garbage dumped in marshes, real
estate, World War II, money
flowed thru Nutley, bulldozers.
Einstein invented atom bombs
in Princeton, television antennae
sprung over West Orange—lobotomies
performed in Greystone State Hospital.
Old graveyards behind churches
on grassy knolls, Erie Railroad
bridges’ Checkerboard underpass
signs, paint fading, remain.
Reminds me of a time pond’s pure
water was green, drink or swim.
Traprock quarries embedded
with amethyst, quiet on Sunday.
I was afraid to talk to anyone
in Paterson, lest my sensitivity
to sex, music, the universe, be discovered &
I be laughed at, hit by colored boys.
“Mr. Professor” said the Dutchman
on Haledon Ave. “Stinky Jew” said
my friend black Joe, kinky haired.
Oldsmobiles past by in front of my eyeglasses.
Greenhouses stood by the Passaic in the sun,
little cottages in Belmar by the sea.
I heard Hitler’s voice on the radio.
I used to live on that hill up there.
They threw eggs at Norman Thomas the Socialist speaker
in Newark Military Park, the police
stood by & laughed. Used to murder
silk strikers on Mill St. in the twenties.
Now turn on your boob tube
They explain away the Harrisburg
hydrogen bubble, the Vietnam war,
They haven’t reported the end of Jersey’s gardens,
much less the end of the world.
Here in Boonton they made cannonballs
for Washington, had old iron mines,
spillways, coach houses—Trolleycars
ran thru Newark, gardeners dug front lawns.
Look for the News in your own backyard
over the whitewashed picket fence, fading signs
on upper stories of red brick factories.
The Data Terminal people stand on Route 40
now. Let’s get our stuff together. Let’s
go back Sundays & sing old springtime music
on Greystone State Mental Hospital lawn.
Spring 1979
Spring Fashions
Full moon over the shopping mall—
in a display window’s silent light
the naked mannequin observes her fingernails
Boulder, 1979
Las Vegas: Verses Improvised for El Dorado H.S. Newspaper
Aztec sandstone waterholes known by Moapa’ve
dried out under the baccarat pits
of M.G.M.’s Grand Hotel.
If Robert Maheu knew
who killed Kennedy
would he tell Santos Trafficante?
If Frank Sinatra had to grow his own
food, would he learn
how to grind piñon nuts?
If Sammy Davis had to find original water
would he lead a million old ladies laughing
round Mt. Charleston to the Sheepshead Mountains
in migratory cycle?
Does Englebert know the name of
the mountains he sings in?
When gas and water dry up
will wild mustangs
inhabit the Hilton Arcade?
Will the 130-billion-dollared-Pentagon guard
the radioactive waste dump at Beatty
for the whole Platonic Year?
Tell all the generals and Maitre D’s
to read the bronze inscriptions
under the astronomical flagpole at Hoover Dam.
Will Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Bugsy Siegel and Buddha
all lose their shirts at Las Vegas?
Yeah! because they don’t know how to gamble
like mustangs and desert lizards.
September 23, 1979
To the Punks of Dawlish
Your electric hair’s beautiful gold as Blake’s Glad Day boy,
you raise your arms for industrial crucifixion
You get 45 Pounds a week on the Production line
and 15 goes to taxes, Mrs. Thatcher’s nuclear womb swells
The Iron Lady devours your powers & hours your pounds and pride &
scatters radioactive urine on your mushroom dotted sheep fields.
“Against the Bourgeois!” you raise your lip & dandy costume
Against the Money Establishment you pogo to garage bands
After humorous slavery in th’ electronic factory
put silver pins in your nose, gold rings in your ears
talk to the Professor on the Plymouth train, asking
“Marijuana rots your brain like it says in the papers, insists on the telly?”
Cursed tragic kids rocking in a rail car on the Cornwall Coastline, Luck to your dancing revolution!
With bodies beautiful as the gold blond lads’ of Oxford—
Your rage is more elegant than most purse-lipped considerations of Cambridge,
your mouths more full of slang & kisses than tea-sipping wits of Eton whispering over scones & clotted cream
conspiring to govern your music tax your body labor & chasten your impudent speech with an Official Secrets Act.
Cornwall, November 18, 1979
Some Love
After 53 years
I still cry tears
I still fall in love
I still improve
My art with a kiss
My heart with bliss
My hands massage
K
ids from the garage
Kids from the grave
Kids who slave
At study or labor
Still show me favor
How can I complain
When love like rain
Falls all over the land
On my head on my hand
On my breast on my shoes
Kisses arrive like foreign news
Mouths suck my cock
Boys wish me good luck
How long can I last
Such love gone past
So much to come
Till I get dumb
Rarer and rarer
Boys give me favor
Older and older
Love grows bolder
Sweeter and sweeter
Wrinkled like water
My skin still trembles
My fingers nimble
Siegen, December 12, 1979
Maybe Love
Maybe love will come
cause I am not so dumb
Tonight it fills my heart
heavy sad apart
from one or two I fancy
now I’m an old fairy.
This is hard to say
I’ve come to be this way
thru many loves of youth
that taught me most heart truth
Now I come by myself
in my hand a potbellied elf
It’s not the most romantic
dream to be so frantic
for young men’s bodies,
a fine sugar daddy
blest respected known
but left to bed alone.
How come love came to end
flaccid, how pretend
desires I have used
Four decades as I cruised
from bed to bar to book
Shamefaced like a crook
Stealing here & there
pricks & buttocks bare
by accident, by circumstance
Naiveté or horny chance
stray truth or famous lie,
How come I came to die?
Love dies, body dies, the mind
keeps groping blind
half hearted full of lust
to wet the silken dust
of men that hold me dear
but won’t sleep with me near.
This morning’s cigarette
This morning’s sweet regret
habit of many years
wake me to old fears
Under the living sun
one day there’ll be no one
to kiss & to adore
& to embrace & more
lie down with side by side
tender as a bride
gentle under my touch—
Prick I love to suck.
Church bells ring again
in Heidelberg as when
in New York City town
I lay my belly down
against a boy friend’s buttock
and couldn’t get it up.
’Spite age and common Fate
I’d hoped love’d hang out late
I’d never lack for thighs
on which to sigh my sighs
This day it seems the truth
I can’t depend on youth,
I can’t keep dreaming love
I can’t pray heav’n above
or call the pow’rs of hell
to keep my body well
occupied with young devils
tongueing at my navel.
I stole up from my bed
to that of a well-bred
young friend who shared my purse
and noted my tender verse,
I held him by the ass
waiting for sweat to pass
until he said Go back
I said that I would jack
myself away, not stay
& so he let me play
Allergic to my come—
I came, & then went home.
This can’t go on forever,
this poem, nor my fever
for brown eyed mortal joy,
I love a straight white boy.
Ah the circle closes
Same old withered roses!
I haven’t found an end
I can fuck & defend
& no more can depend
on youth time to amend
what old ages portend—
Love’s death, & body’s end.
Heidelberg, December 15, 1979, 8 A.M.
Ruhr-Gebiet
Too much industry
too much eats
too much beer
too much cigarettes
Too much philosophy
too many thought forms
not enough rooms—
not enough trees
Too much Police
too much computers
too much hi fi
too much Pork
Too much coffee
too much smoking
under gray slate roofs
Too much obedience
Too many bellies
Too many business suits
Too much paperwork
too many magazines
Too much industry
No fish in the Rhine
Lorelei poisoned
Too much embarrassment
Too many fatigued
workers on the train
Ghost Jews scream
on the streetcorner
Too much old murder
too much white torture
Too much one Stammheim
too many happy Nazis
Too many crazy students
Not enough farms
not enough Appletrees
Not enough nut trees
Too much money
Too many poor
turks without vote
“Guests” do the work
Too much metal
Too much fat
Too many jokes
not enough meditation
Too much anger
Too much sugar
Too many smokestacks
Not enough snow
Too many radioactive
plutonium wastebarrels
Take the Rhine gold
Build a big tomb
A gold walled grave
to bury this deadly nuclear slag
all the Banks’ gold
Shining impenetrable
All the German gold
will save the Nation
Build a gold house
to bury the Devil
Heidelberg, December 15, 1979
Love Forgiven
Tübingen-Hamburg Schlafwagen
I
Why am I so angry at Kissinger?
Kent State? Terrorism began in 1968!
“Berlin Student Protesting Shah Shot by Police.”
II
Building lights above black water!
passing over a big river, railroad bridge & tower.
Mmm Fairyland! Must be Frankfurt!
December 1979
Love Forgiven
Straight and slender
Youthful tender
Love shows the way
And never says nay
Light & gentle-
Hearted mental
Tones sing & play
Guitar in bright day
Voicing always
Melodies, please
Sing sad, & say
Whatever you may
Righteous honest
Heart’s forgiveness
Drives woes away,
Gives Love to cold clay
Tübingen, December 16, 1979
Verses Written for Student Antidraft Registration Rally 1980
The Warrior is afraid
the warrior has a big trembling heart
the warrior sees bright explosions over Utah, a giant bomber moves over Cheyenne Mountain at Colorado Springs
the warrior laughs at its shadow, his thought flows out with his breath and dissolves in
afternoon light
The warrior never goes to War
War runs away from the warrior’s mouth
War falls apart in the warrior’s mind
The Conquered go to War, drafted into shadow armies, navy’d on shadow oceans, flying in shadow fire
only helpless Draftees fight afraid, big meaty negroes trying not to die—
The Warrior knows his own sad & tender heart, which is not the heart of most newspapers
Which is not the heart of most Television—This kind of sadness doesn’t sell popcorn
This kind of sadness never goes to war, never spends $100 Billion on MX Missile systems, never fights shadows in Utah,
never hides inside a hollow mountain near Colorado Springs with North American Aerospace Defense Command
waiting orders that he press the Secret button to Blow up the Great Cities of Earth
Shambhala, Colorado, March 15, 1980
Homework
Homage 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.
Boulder, April 26, 1980
After Whitman & Reznikoff
1
What Relief
If my pen hand were snapped by a Broadway truck
—What relief from writing letters to the Nation