when the right side my face
drooped dead muscles
’cause an O.D. on Doctor’s Antibiotic
inflamed my seventh cranial nerve inside
its cheekbone
& left me dry-nosed with crooked
smile & sneaky finger
Probing the irritation in the
middle of my face
walking daydreaming in the school hall—
That White boy in a two-piece suit
Hotel Astor bar on Times Square
I took home one night in 1946
he fucked me naked in the ass
till I smelled brown excrement
staining his cock
& tried to get up from bed to go to the
toilet a minute
but he held me down & kept pumping
at me, serious & said
“No I don’t want to stop I like it dirty
like this.”
April 30, 1982
Maturity
Young I drank beer & vomited green bile
Older drank wine vomited blood red
Now I vomit air
July 1982
“Throw Out the Yellow Journalists of Bad Grammar & Terrible Manner”
for Anne Waldman
who report Ten Commandments & Golden Rule forgetting Thou shalt not bear false witness Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you
and say the Man got crucified for insulting the Sanhedrin at a Victory Dance in the bombed out madhouse in Beirut
Out! Out! The Mad Correspondent who headlined “Madman or Messiah? He Died of Bad Pork” the night of Tathagata’s Parinirvana
or the snide reporter with yellow teeth who asked the Big Question, “Kerouac couldn’t write, so what’d he do it for, money?”
or the Time stringer who asks “You could say it was a nostalgia Trip, wouldn’t you?”
as you fly off to the moon on your translucent sexual wings forever
and the wire-service fellow ex-Harvard, “This business about Secret Police, why would you care, successful Abstract Expressionist painter, got a grudge to work out on your parents?”
Out! Out! into the Buddhafields, among stars to wander forever, weightless without a headline, without thought, without newspapers to read by the light of the Galaxies.
August 10, 1982
GOING TO THE WORLD OF THE DEAD
Going to the World of the Dead
Going to the World of the Dead
Stalin & Hitler in Bed
Gone inside of your head
Anybody got any bread?
FBI papers to shred?
Eisenhower’s ghost on a sled
Going to the world of the dead
Everybody gives you good head
Millionaires of Detroit
Millionaires of Chicago
Millionaires of New York
Millionaires of Hollywood
Let go of your money Ho Ho Ho
Let go your Big Poetry Let go Let go
Let go of your cars Ho Ho Ho
Let go your Cocaine Ho Ho Ho
Let go your meat Let go Let go
Let go Movie Picture Ho Ho Ho
Let go your Diamonds Ho Ho Ho
Let go your Dollars Let go yr Gold
Let go your Houses Your Bodies Let go
Let go your Souls Ho Ho Ho
Let go God Buddha Let go
Let go Allah Let go Let go
Let go your Armies Ho Ho Ho
Let go your war Ho Ho Ho
Let go your Holy Land Let go
Let go Palestine P.L.O.
Jews Let go Let go Let go
Let go Israel Ho Ho Ho
Let go Apocalypse Let go Let go
Let go Yr Bomb Ho Ho Ho
Your Nuclear Bomb Ho Ho Ho
Let go your Disaster your Death Let go
Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho
Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho
Millionaires of Mexico Ho Ho Ho
Millionaires of Nicaragua Let go Let go
August 22, 1982, 6:30 P.M.
Guasave-Las Mochis bus past soya & cotton fields where red flags flew over plastic huts squatting by highway side
Irritable Vegetable
Don’t send me letters Don’t send me poems
Too busy sick to write poetry Sky’s covered with gray clouds
Perfect for photography
I have brain metal fatigue Knee jerk aesthetic tears
So you got a junk habit
So you need a recommendation to Purgatory U.
So you’re working with Fort Collins’ Nuclear Freeze Campaign
So you got hi blood pressure Your big toe hurts
Someday you’ll die
So you sing Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare
So you work on the top floor of the Empire State Building
You’re a jerk
You’re a hypocrite who eats hot dogs.
October 28, 1982
Thoughts Sitting Breathing II
When I sat in my bedroom for devotions, meditations & prayers
my Gomden on a sheepskin rug beside the mirrored closet,
white curtains morning sunlit, Friday Rocky Mountain News “Market Retreats in Busiest Day”
lying on the table by Nuclear Nightmare issue of Newsweek,
Katherine Mansfield’s thick bio & Addington Symonds’ The Greek Poets
lifting a white lamp above my headboard pillow illuminating Living Country Blues’ small print 1 A.M. last night,
with B complex bottled, green mint massage oil, High Blood Pressure nightly Clonadine Hydrochloric pills,
athlete’s foot Tolnaftate cream, newsclip scissors and a rusty shoe-last bookweight standing on xeroxed Flying Saucer papers,
new ballpoint pens, watch, wallet, loose coins keys Swiss army knife
toothpicks, pencil sharpener & filefolder of Buddhist Analytic Psyche papers
scattered random across this bedstead desk—
As I breathed between white walls, Front Range cliffs resting in the sky outside south windows
I remembered last night’s television suitcoat tie debate, the neat Jewish right wing student outwitted a nervous Dartmouth pimply liberal editor
knowing that boy who swears to “get the Government off our backs” would give my tax money to Army brass bands FBI rather than St. Mark’s Poetry Project—
He can’t read verse with any sense of humor sharp eyed
but then some poets can’t either, did Ed Dorn find me fatuous, can I breathe in hot black anger & breathe out white cool bliss?
Doomed guilty layman all my life! these pills causing impotency?
Could I move bookcases & clothes out of my bedroom, 8 foot desk file cabinets & typewriter
to the small apartment next door N.Y., would that end my hideous Public Karma,
Telephones tingling down my spine, pederast paranoid hypnotic burnt out teenage fruitcake poets
banging the door for protection from Brain Damaged Electric Guitar Police in New Wave Blue Vibration Uniforms?
Be that as it may as blue empty Buddha floats through blue bodied sky,
should I settle down & practice meditation, care for my nervous Self, do nothing,
arrange paper manuscripts, die in Lower East Side peace instead of heart attack in Ethiopia,
What way out of this Ego? let it appear disappear, mental images
Nothing but thoughts, how solve World Problems by worrying in my bedroom?—
Still one clear word-mighty poem might reveal what Duncan named Grief in America
that one hundred million folk malnourish the globe while Civic Powers inflate $200 billion War Machines this year—
and who gets rich on that, don’t all of us get poor heart?—but what do I know of Military Worlds?
Airfields and Aircraft Carriers, bugle Corps, ice cream concessions,
million dollar Computer rockets—yes I glimpse CIAs
spooky dope deal vanity—but nothing of Camp Pendleton’s brainy Thoughts
Norfolk officers’ vast housing tracts, messes and helicopters, food resource
logistics Pentagon committees’ve amassed—NORAD’s Rapture Mountain
Maybe get rid of Cold War, give Russian Empire warm weather access,
inaugurate trillion dollar Solar Power factories on every Continent—
Yes access to sunny blue ocean, not Cold Murmansk & Vladivostok Ports they need a vast hot harbor
International Agreement big warships forbidden, no battleships from Russia or America in the azure Greek pond—
What about pirates, storms at sea or kamikaze Hell’s Angel North Africans shooting Jews?
Well a few small Police boats, no Cruisers or Nuclear Subs—
Yes a warm weather port for Russian access South I thought
sitting on my bedroom floor cushion 10:30 A.M. getting hungry breathing thru shades & curtains on transparent windows, morning sun shining on white painted walls and gray rug—
So remembering the old story of Russia’s claim to a warm weather harbor I came back to myself, blue clouded Colorado sky adrift above the Bluff Street Boulder house.
November 8, 1982
What the Sea Throws Up at Vlissingen
for Simon Vinkenoog
Plastic & cellophane, milk cartons & yogurt containers, blue & orange shopping bag nets
Clementine peels, paper sacks, feathers & kelp, bricks & sticks,
succulent green leaves & pine tips, waterbottles, plywood and tobacco pouches
Coffee jartops, milkbottle caps, rice bags, blue rope, an old brown shoe, an onion skin
Concrete chunks white pebbled, sea biscuits, detergent squeezers, bark and boards, a whisk-brush, a box top
Formula A Dismantling Spray-can, a whole small brown onion, a yellow cup
A boy with two canes walking the shore, a dead gull, a blue running shoe,
a shopping bag handle, lemon half, celery bunch, a cloth net—
Cork bottletop, grapefruit, rubber glove, wet firework tubes,
masses of iron-brown-tinted seaweed along the high water mark near the sea wall,
a plastic car fender, green helmet broken in half, giant hemp rope knot, tree trunk stripped of bark,
a wooden stake, a bucket, myriad plastic bottles, pasta Zara pack,
a long gray plastic oildrum, bandage roll, glass bottle, tin can, Christmas pine tree
a rusty iron pipe, me and my peepee.
January 3, 1983
I Am Not
I’m not a lesbian screaming in the basement strapped to a leather spiderweb
I’m not a Rockefeller heart attacked in the paramour bed with pants off
I’m not a radical Stalinist intellectual fairy
not an antisemitic Rabbi with black hat white beard & dirty fingernails
not the San Francisco jail cell poet beaten by minions of yellow police New Year’s eve
not Gregory Corso Orpheus Maudit of these States
nor yet a schoolteacher with marvelous salary
I’m not anyone I know
in fact I’m only here for 80 years
St. Clement’s Church, March 7, 1983
I’m a Prisoner of Allen Ginsberg
Who is this Slave Master makes
me answer letters in his name
Write poetry year after year, keep up
appearances
This egotist whose file cabinets
leave no room for more
pictures of Me?
How escape his clutches, his public sound,
bank accounts, Master Charge
interest
Who’s this politician hypnotized my life
with his favors
Petty friends & covert Nemesis, dead heroes and
living ghosts hanging around
waiting Genius handout?
Why’s this guy oblige me to sit
meditating,
shine rocknroll Moon on Midwest Collegetown
stages blind in overhead
spotlights
bawling out of tune into giant microphones
makes me go down suck teenage boys
I declare a new life, how can I pay all
his debts
next month’s rent on his body,
bald & panicky, with Pyronie’s disease
Cartilage stuff grown an inch inside
his cock root,
non-malignant.
Karme-Choling, April 4, 1983, 12:15 A.M.
221 Syllables at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center
Headless husk legs wrapped round a grass spear, an old bee trembles in sunlight.
Since yesterday noon two Brown-eyed Susans stand before the outhouse door.
Tail turned to red sunset high on a spruce crown one lone chickadee tweets.
Moonless thunder—yellow dandelions flash in fields of rainy grass.
Mad at Oryoki in the shrine-room—Thistles blossomed late afternoon.
Put on my shirt and took it off in the sun walking the path to lunch.
A dandelion seed floats above the marsh grass with the mosquitos.
Empty clouds drift above me, birds chirp, a plane roar falls down through blue sky.
Electric noon—pine bough cicadas buzz outside the machineshop door.
At 4 A.M. the two middleaged men sleeping together hold hands.
In the half-light of dawn a few birds warble under the Pleiades.
Sky reddens behind fir trees as larks twitter and sparrows cheep cheep cheep.
July 1983
Caught shoplifting ran out the department store at sunrise and woke up.
August 1983
Fighting Phantoms Fighting Phantoms
Fighting phantoms we have car wrecks on Hollywood Freeway
Fighting phantoms th’Egyptians mummified Pharaohs & rich businessmen
Fighting phantoms a young Scotsman wore tennis shoes on the battleship deck
Fighting phantoms William S. Burroughs wrote umpteen novels
Fighting giant phantoms David picked up his sling
Fighting phantoms Chögyam Trungpa Vidyadara founded Shambhala Kingdom
Fighting phantoms pay federal taxes few write tax refusal forms
Fighting phantoms a Son of God ascended his wooden cross
Fighting summer phantoms muscular young musicians jumped up screaming in the twilit movie theater
Fighting phantoms Siddhartha meditated under a Bo tree
Fighting phantoms mysticism entered into the Catholic Church of Hollywood
Fighting phantoms a hundred thousand kids ordered purple Mohawks
Fighting phantoms various fairies chased adolescent athletes through steam bath locker rooms
Fighting phantoms the ruling class blew up the military budget, 244 Billion dollars 1985—of the tax pie 63% if past military debt interest & pensions’re added in
Fighting phantoms Ronald Reagan sent cocaine armadas to Central America
Fighting phantoms poets who smoked cigarettes denounced cigarettes—
Fighting phantoms New York Times printed thousands of editorial pages
Fighting phantoms Adolf Hitler shot more Methamphetamine & chewed the Bunker rug
Fighting phantoms thousands of poets become rather good at acid satire
Fighting phantoms Jimmy Dean stepped on the gas, Orson Welles ordered another cheesecake
Fighting phantoms Ernest Hemingway shotgunned his brain
Fighting phantoms Ezra Pound hated some Jews some hated Pound
Fighting phantoms Truman dropped two Atom Bombs
Fighting phantoms Einstein invented the theory of relativity
Mid-August 1983
Arguments
I’m sick of arguments
“You threw the butter in the pan”
“I did not you let it melt on the stove”
“You invaded Turkey and killed all the Armenians!”
“I did not
! You invaded China got them addicted to Opium!”
“You built a bigger H Bomb than I did”
“You used poison gas in Indochina”
“Your agent orange defoliated ¼ the landmass It isn’t fair”
“You sprayed Paraquat”
“You smoke pot”
“You’re under arrest”
“I declare war!”
Why don’t we turn off the loudspeakers?
September 5, 1983
Sunday Prayer
An itch in the auditory canal scratches for years, use unguent,
Back pain a little, turn my head neck hurts
Balding long ago, gray whiskery hair inside ears
Eyes closed lying in bed, smart on my tongue, delicate
raw gums sore round some tooth roots—
From nineteenth year College chronic active Hepatitis
affects my kidney stones & high-blood pressure
Right cheek paralyzed slightly, eye squints tired,
lethargy dumps, no one’s abdomen to kiss,
cock skewed and lumpy erection aches—
Why show myself these sicknesses? Show anyone?
Wisdom & senescence, sickness and Death come
legended from Buddha to Kerouac—Myself
suddenly older—I made a mistake long ago.
September 25, 1983
Brown Rice Quatrains
Those high lunches needn’t matter
If you’re of businessman’s age
Anyway he enjoyed creating food
drifting across the Fragrant Nation
Who was it that began mouth talk
Gave the citizens thoughtful Saliva
Nature boy came close to Government
but secret police maintained ham & eggs
What tragedy for multiple Chickens
Think how pigs dream butcher night!
Sheep squawked nightmare, goat
fish sent regrets from meadow and sea
If he only could’ve made new Congress
We wouldn’t breathe so much sulfur smog
Sugar dances at the movies, coffee tells you on TV
and Sodium Nitrate & Nicotine Cholesterol
have nothing to do with Foreign policy.