Foreword
Vale
This is Allen Ginsberg’s last book, particular to his determining intent, his last writings when in hospital aware of his impending death, his last reflections and resolutions—his last mind. When he was told by the doctors that he had at best only a short time to live, he called his old friends to tell them the hard news, comforting, reassuring, as particular to their lives as ever. Despite the intensely demanding fame he’d had to deal with for more than forty years, he’d kept the world both intimate and transcendent. It was a “here and now” that admitted all the literal things of each day’s substance and yet well knew that all such was finally “too heavy for this lightness lifts the brain into blue sky/at May dawn when birds start singing on East 12th street…” He was, and remains, the enduring friend, the one who goes with us wherever we are taken, who counsels and consoles, who gets the facts when it seems we will never be told them, who asks “Who’ll council who lives where in the rubble/who’ll sleep in what brokenwalled hut/in the moonlight…” He kept a witness of impeccable kind.
The playful, reductive, teasing verses, which could sometime make this world seem just the bitter foolishness it finally has to, sound here clearly. What is the grandness of death, of a body finally worn out, at last the simple fact of stubbornly reluctant shit and a tediously malfunctioning heart, of “all the accumulations that wear us out,” as he put it, when still a young man? There is no irony, no despair, in delighting as one can in “No more right & wrong/yes it’s gone gone gone/ gone gone away…” No poet more heard, more respected, more knew the intricacies of melody’s patterns. He took such pleasure in the whimsical, insistent way the very rhythms could take hold of attention, bringing each word to its singular place. “Chopping apples into the fruit compote—suffer, suffer, suffer, suffer!” His company insisted upon music and he danced with a consummate grace.
Now we must make our own music, albeit his stays with us forever. William Blake’s great call, “Hear the voice of the bard …,” now changes to “The authors are in eternity,” because ours is a passing world. Yet the heroic voices, the insistent intimacies of their tenacious humanity, hold us in a profound and securing bond. Where else would we think to live? Our friend gave his whole life to keep faith with Whitman’s heartfelt insistence, “Who touches this book touches a man.” So Allen Ginsberg will not leave us even now. “To see Void vast infinite look out the window into the blue sky.”
ROBERT CREELEY
JUNE 13, 1998
New Democracy Wish List
for President Clinton White House
Retro Axioms:
“Progress” ended in XX century.
Hyper-rationalism reduces natural complexity of nature through narrow thought abstraction; Hyper-rationalization, hyper-industrialization & Hyper-technology create chaos.
U.S. command economy subsidizes fossil fuel and nuclear Energy & Science, Agriculture, Air & Motor Transport, Banking, Communications, Military Industrial Complex, licit & illicit psychoactive Drugs, also rules Mass Media via FCC. American Free Market is hi-tech myth with national socialist centralized regulation implicit everywhere except small business & little magazines.
Muscle Power connected to appropriate hi-tech might rehabilitate Earth.
Lacks & Needs:
Fossil Fuels retard the planet. Detoxify America: tainted Fire poisons Earth, fouls Air & pollutes Water.
Emphasize prevention & alternative medicine with medical insurance rebates for not using Self-insured health credits: like mythic China, “Only pay Doctor when you are well.”
Fund Ryan White Care Act, separate Church & State in Center for Disease Control, fund bleach kits, needle exchange & plainspoken AIDS education, build infrastructure of decentralized community based health care preventative medicine early intervention clinics for poverty class disease-prone high-risk teens women & men living with AIDS & TB inner city plagues.
Coordinate National crash program to research inexpensive anti-AIDS medicines.
Separate Church & State in arts, education & civil law. Restore National Endowment for the Arts & FCC freedom from Fundamentalist political intrusion.
Sexuality’s loose not fixed. Legalize it.
Decriminalize addictive drug problem, doctors can cure addiction or provide maintenance if no cure. Reduce mass-million expense on narcotics-addicted political prisoners overcrowding courts & jails, Medicalize drug trade.
Decriminalize marijuana, its disadvantages are minor; reserve hemp grass as unadvertised private small cash crop for failing family farms, encourage hemp fabric industries.
Privatize & entrust psychedelics to medical educational priestly professions. End Military monopoly on LSD research and development.
End tobacco farming subsidies, cut use. Ex-Nicotine lobbyists working in Clinton’s new White House can stop smoking.
Shift agricultural subsidies toward grain beans & vegetable diet. Tax meat as a nutritional agronomic & ecologic disaster.
With massive scale reforestation rural & in wilderness, plant also universal urban tree rows.
Establish Civilian Conservation Corps for Urban homesteading, thin out corrupt local bureaucracies obstructing populist housing reconstruction.
Encourage international trade in Eco-technology in place of enabling codependency on weapons trade.
Inaugurate National “Limits of Growth” Program for Population/Land Use/Pollution.
Jump start national state & city human and industrial waste compost & recycling.
Honor primary and secondary school teachers, elevate respect, reward educators as handsomely as Plumbers, reduce class crowding to human size, under 15 students; encourage national child-care projects.
Take back money from SLA bankruptcy profiteer goniffs.
Purge U.S. military death squad subsidies in Salvador, Guatemala, etc. We backed up dictators in Zaire, Somalia, Liberia, Sudan, Angola, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Salvador, we’re responsible: admit it then figure ways out.
Open CIA & FBI & NSA archives on Cointelpro raids, Government drug dealing, Kennedy/King assassinations, Iranian Contragate, Panama Deception, Vatican, Hand & Lavoro Bank thuggery, etc. including Bush-Noriega relations and other CIA client-agent scandals.
Open all secret files on J. Edgar Hoover-Cardinal Spellman-Roy Cohn-Joe McCarthy alcoholic Closet-Queen Conspiracy with Organized Crime to sabotage the U.S. Labor Movement, Native African-American Hispanic & Gay minority leaderships; and blackmail U.S. Presidents Congress each other for half century.
Get Government Secret Police (DEA CIA FBI NSA etc.) off our backs by the next millennium.
January 17, 1993
Peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina
General Mother Teresa
Emperor Dalai Lama XIV
Chief of Staff Thich Nhat Hanh
Army Chaplain John Paul II
followed by the shades of Gandhi
Sakharov, Sartre & his uncle
Albert Schweitzer
went to the bombed out streets
talked to Moslem Bosnians in
the burnt out grocery stores
parlayed with Croatian & Serbian Generals & Parliament
asked them to quit shooting & firing
artillery from the mountainside
overlooking villages
emptied of grandmothers—
So now there was quiet—a few fires
smoldered in back alleys
a few corpses stank in wet fields
—But who owns these houses? The
cinema theaters with broken doors?
Who owns that grocery store, that City Hall,
that windowless school with broken
rooftiles?
Who owns these little apartments, now
all worshippers of Allah
pray in towns besieged 100 miles away
overcrowded in tenements & tents, with
U.N. portosans at the crossroads?
Who owns these abandoned alleys &
/> drugstores with shattered bottle shards over
the sidewalk & inside the door?
Who’ll be the judge, attorney, file
legal briefs,
bankruptcy papers, affidavits of ownership,
deeds, old tax receipts?
Who’ll council who lives where in the rubble,
who’ll sleep in what brokenwalled hut
in the full moonlight when spring clouds
pass over the face
of the man in the moon at the end of May?
May 6, 1993, 3 A.M.
After the Party
amid glasses clinking, mineral water, schnapps
among professors’ smiling beards,
sneaker’d classicists, intelligent lady millionaire
literary Patron fag hags
earth mothers of Lambeth, Trocadero,
Hyde Park, 5th Avenue
blond haired journalists with bracelets, grand
readers of Dostojevsky & Gogol—
senior editor escorts from Trotskyite weeklies,
lesbians sitting on glossy magazine covers—
what have we here? a kid moving from
foyer to bathroom, thin body,
Pale cheeked with red cap, 18 year old window washer,
came with Señora Murillo
She admired his impudence, amused by his
sincere legs
as I admire his glance, he turns aside to
gaze at me, I’m
happy to guess he’ll show his
naked body in bed
where we talk the refined old doctrine,
Coemergent Wisdom
Lódz’, October 5, 1993
9:15 P.M. at “Construction in Process”poetry reading
After Olav H. Hauge
I
Some live on islands, hills near Trondheim
Some in St. Moritz, or the forest depths
Some lonely have beautiful wives
castles, fine carpets on Wall Street
Buy & sell currencies, solitary on marble floors
consumed by a passion for fossil fuel
magnetized by cannons, lasers, bombsights, enriched uranium
or together play the stock market
They live & die at the throw of the dice
They’re all businessmen
who have found eachother.
II
Fermented Jungle
North wind blows
Fish fly around the room
wind dies down
Fish fly under water.
III
Sometimes the Godliness
strikes me as heroic
People mill about
Bodø won the Norwegian soccer cup
It’s so crowded, fans are drunk
People’s feet get mixed up
That big man wanders around
lost, barefoot
he can’t find his feet—
Finally he goes out, late
on his way home
not sure if he’s on
his own two feet
Trondheim, October 25, 1993
These knowing age
These knowing age
fart
These knowing age
walk slowly
these knowing age
remind themselves of their grandmothers
these knowing age
take waterpills, high blood pressure,
watch their sugar and salt
these knowing age eat less meat, some
stopped smoking a decade ago
Some quit coffee, some drink it strong
These knowing age saw
best friends’ funerals, telephoned
daughters & granddaughters
Some drive, some don’t, some cook, some
do not
These knowing age often
keep quiet.
Munich, November 5, 1993
C’mon Pigs of Western Civilization Eat More Grease
Eat Eat more marbled Sirloin more Pork’n
gravy!
Lard up the dressing, fry chicken in
boiling oil
Carry it dribbling to gray climes, snowed with
salt,
Little lambs covered with mint roast in racks
surrounded by roast potatoes wet with
buttersauce,
Buttered veal medallions in creamy saliva,
buttered beef, by glistening mountains
of french fries
Stroganoffs in white hot sour cream, chops
soaked in olive oil,
surrounded by olives, salty feta cheese, followed
by Roquefort & Bleu & Stilton
thirsty
for wine, beer Cocacola Fanta Champagne
Pepsi retsina arak whiskey vodka
Agh! Watch out heart attack, pop more
angina pills
order a plate of Bratwurst, fried frankfurters,
couple billion Wimpys’, McDonald’s burgers
to the moon & burp!
Salt on those fries! Hot dogs! Milkshakes!
Forget greenbeans, everyday a few carrots,
a mini big spoonful of salty rice’ll
do, make the plate pretty;
throw in some vinegar pickles, briny sauerkraut
check yr. cholesterol, swallow a pill
and order a sugar Cream donut, pack 2 under
the size 44 belt
Pass out in the vomitorium come back cough
up strands of sandwich still chewing
pastrami at Katz’s delicatessen
Back to central Europe & gobble Kielbasa
in Lódz
swallow salami in Munich with beer, Liverwurst
on pumpernickel in Berlin, greasy cheese in
a 3 star Hotel near Syntagma, on white
bread thick-buttered
Set an example for developing nations, salt,
sugar, animal fat, coffee tobacco Schnapps
Drop dead faster! make room for
Chinese guestworkers with alien soybean
curds green cabbage & rice!
Africans Latins with rice beans & calabash can
stay thin & crowd in apartments for working
class foodfreaks—
Not like Western cuisine rich in protein
cancer heart attack hypertension sweat
bloated liver & spleen megaly
Diabetes & stroke—monuments to carnivorous
civilizations
presently murdering Belfast
Bosnia Cypress Ngorno Karabach Georgia
mailing love letter bombs in
Vienna or setting houses afire
in East Germany—have another coffee,
here’s a cigar.
And this is a plate of black forest chocolate cake,
you deserve it.
Athens, December 19, 1993
Here We Go ’Round the Mulberry Bush
I got old & shit in my pants
shit in my pants
shit in my pants
I got old & shit in my pants
shit in my pants again
We got old & shit in our pants
shit in our pants
shit in our pants
We got old & shit in our pants
shit in our pants again
You’ll be lucky if you get old
& shit in your pants
& shit in your pants
You’ll be lucky if you get old
& shit in your pants again
January 1, 1994
Tuesday Morn
Waking with aching back at base of spine, walked stiffly to kitchen toilet to pee,
more limber returned to unmade bed, sat to write, dreamlike yesterdays recorded—
From pill dispenser 60 mg Lasix, water pills brings blood to kidney to relieve heart stressed by lung liquid
one white Lanoxin something further steadies the heart, one brown Vasotec for hig
h blood pressure
a round blue potassium pill set aside for breakfast
Next another quaff of water for sleep-dried tongue
& check stove water boiling Tibetan medical powders
Quarter tsp. directly in mouth with hot water, morn & night
Next make the bed—pull out mattress, lift up sheets ballooning in air to settle all four corners,
lay on the orange-diamonded Mexican wool blanket & 3 pillows—push mattress back in place
brush teeth—then prick my finger
a drop, Exac-Tech blood sugar teststrip results noted morn & eve
98 today, a little low, swab pinkie with alcohol pad, another sip medicinal tea—
replace reading glasses with bifocals, brush teeth at front-room sink & looking out window, church door passers-by four floors below
while noon bells ring, clock ticking on the kitchen wall above the toilet cabinet—pull chain
worked this morning, flushed a wobbly porcelain throne—needa get Mike the Super fix pipes—
Back to front room, brush teeth, bowels begin to stir relief, electric shave,
brush out gray dust from razor head, wash face, clear throat’s pale yellow phlegm, blow nose
in paper towel, stick pinkie end with white cream Borofax drop in each nostril, wipe mustache, put on teashirt
Vitalis on short hair around bald head, brush back small beard—& ready for breakfast
in boxer shorts alone at home, pee again, gray sky out window
Sparrows on courtyard dirt, bare Heaven Trees—yesterday’s Times half read on the table where
red tulip blossoms dry in a glass jar—Time to crap & finish Exquisite Corpse—not much came down—
flush, climb ladder and fix the water ball, wash ass change shorts and choose fresh sox—
At last it’s time to eat, clear & safe in the morning—1 P.M.
Salt-free cornflakes from the icebox, brown rice, shredded wheat in a Chinese bowl
filled thereafter with Rice Dream milk—banana that!
Chew and wonder what to read, answer phone, yes, “Peter’s flown to Colorado, Huncke’s rent is due” to patron Hiro—
Finish cereal reading yesterday’s Times “How Mental Patients Sleep Out of Doors”