Hell’s televised, covered with words
March 23, 1997, 5 A.M.
Scatalogical Observations
The Ass knows more than the mind knows
Young romantic readers
Skip this part of the book
If you want a glimpse of life
You’re free to take a look
Shit machine shit machine
I’m an incredible shit machine
Piss machine Piss machine
Inexhaustible piss machine
Piss & shit machine
That’s the Golden Mean
Whether young or old
Move your bowels of gold
Piss & shit machine
It always comes out clean
Whether you’re old or young
Never hold your tongue
(Chorus)
Shit machine piss machine
I’m an incredible piss machine
Piss machine piss machine
Inexhaustible shit machine.
Brown or black or green
everything will be seen
Hard or soft or loose
Shit’s a glimpse of Truth
Babe or boy or youth
Fart’s without a tooth
Baby girl or maid
Many a fart in laid
Shit piss shit piss
Fuck & shit & piss
Fuck fart shit Piss
It all comes down to this
Beautiful male Madonnas
Wrathful Maids of Honor
To be frank & honest
Stink the watercloset
Shit machine piss machine
Much comes down to this
Piss machine shit machine
Nature’s not obscene
Shit piss shit piss
How’ll I end my song?
Shit piss shit piss
Nature never wrong
(Chorus)
Shit machine Piss Machine
I’m an incredible piss machine
Piss machine shit machine
Inexhaustible shit machine
March 23, 1997
My Team Is Red Hot
My dick is red hot
Your dick is diddly dot
My politics red hot
Your politics diddly-plot
My President’s red hot
your President’s diddly-blot
My land is red hot
Your land is diddly-knot
My nation’s red hot
Your nation’s diddly rot
My cosmos red hot
Your cosmos diddly iddly squat
March 23, 1997
Starry Rhymes
Sun rises east
Sun sets west
Nobody knows
What the sun knows best
North star north
Southern Cross south
Hold close the universe
In your mouth
Gemini high
Pleiades low
Winter sky
Begins to snow
Orion down
North Star up
Fiery leaves
Begin to drop
March 23, 1997, 4:51 A.M.
Thirty State Bummers
Take a pee pee take a Bum
Take your choice for number one
Old man more or someone new
Take your choice someone new
President Clinton President Dole
Number three you’re in a hole
Anchor two or anchor four
One’s a liar one’s a bore
Richard Helms Angleton live
We were lucky to survive
Jesse Helms & dirty pix
Dance your fate with his party mix
Idi Amin General Mobutu
Were paid by me & you
They were bought by me & mine
Albania, number 9
Mr. Allende was number 10
Pinochet Dictator then
Death squads in El Salvador
We paid D’Aubisson to score
Guatamalas by the dozen
Pat Robertson was country cousin
Rios-Montt the Indian killer
Born-again General Bible pillar
Nicaragua squeezed between
Col. North & a cocaine queen
Drug Czar Bush gave Company moolah
To Noriega Panama’s ruler
Venezuela’s Drug War Chief
Turned around to be a thief
Mexico’s general drug-war head
pumped informers full of lead
State Department’s favorite bloke
In Haiti he sold tons of coke
Till Aristide unhex’d the curse
CIA filled Cedras’ Purse
White Peru’s its Indian shame
Gave “Shining Path” worldwide fame
Then dictator Fujimori
Paid the World Bank hunky dory
With Indian Class the majority
Peru got respectable with poverty
Made a deal with English banks
To pay back USA with thanks
The price of rubber tin went down
Cocaine syndicates come to town
Now the money’s in cocaine crops
U.S. Hellies do their dope air drops
We got rid of the President of Costa Rica
He had no army he didn’t kill people
Lots began in ’53
Guatemala couldn’t break free
United Fruits annulled the vote
As Alan & Foster Dulles gloat
Then unseated Mosaddeq
& left Iran a police-state wreck
Then we sold the guy in Iraq
Money to bomb Iranians back
Central America Middle East
Preyed on by “Great Satan’s” beast
Worst of all, & hell be damned!
Think what happened in Vietnam
Laos, victim of the war
Nobody really knew what for
Cambodia, caught by the tail
When we blew up Mekong’s Ho Chi Minh Trail,
Descended into Anarchy
Pol Pot’s Maoist Butchery
Shihanook’s book before that day
Was called “My War with the CIA”
Who’s to blame, Who’s to blame
Anybody share America’s shame
But there’s more! Count the score!
So far we got twenty-four
25 is Afghanistan
Fundamentalists armed by The Man
Tribal Drug Lord Mountain gangs
Veiling up their own sex thangs
Looking around for number 26
Indochina was the Colonial sticks
France introduced the opium crop
France would sell the Chinese hop
Britain, U.S. got in on the deal
Opium war made the Emperor kneel
China opened to our own junk men
Shanghai famous for the opium den
Strung out on junk we took their silk
The yellow peril drank Christian milk
We’re doing exactly the same thing again
In Indochina with Marlboro men
Smoke our dope to be Favored Nation
Nicotine cancer next generation
Who’s pushing this new dope ring?
Senator Jesse Helms the Moralist King
Peaches Prunes & company goons
For the next two-hundred eighty eight moons
NAFTA NAFTA what comes after?
Toxic waste—Industrial laughter
Industrial Smog, Industrial sneers
Industrial women weeping tears
Wages low no CIO
No medical plan oh no! no! no!
No FDR No WPA
No toilet time, human say
No overtime no other way
Yankee work for a dollar a day
No jobs today No jobless pay
No future life but turn
to clay
Work hard for a little bit of honey
But USA takes all the money
March 24, 1997, 10:40 P.M.
I have a nosebleed You have a nosebleed
He has a nosebleed three
She has a nosebleed It has a nosebleed
They all bleed on me
March 24, 1997
Timmy made a hot milk
Better than a warm milk
Better than a cold milk shake
Hot cream warm cream oh La La!
Pretty boy straight kids, Ha ha ha
Sneakers Jeans & T-shirts, damn!
Got it made said houseboy Sam
All except the Ku Klux Klan
Wham Bam & thank you ma’m
March 25, 1997, 6:30 A.M.
This kind of Hepatitis can cause ya
Nosebleed skin itch bowel nausea
Swell up hanging hemorrhoid heads
Easter lilies by your hospital beds
March 24, 1997
Giddy-yup giddy-yup giddy-yap
I can’t take more of your crap
Giddy-yap Giddy-yap Giddy-yup
So you’re right, so you’re right, Shut up!
Giddy yup shut up, Giddy yup shut up
Giddy-yap giddy yap giddy yap shut up.
March 24, 1997
Turn on the heat & take a seat
& lookit junkies on the street
Forget the news from old Time-Warner
Lookit crackheads on the corner
Turn off TV 7 o’clock
They’re selling grass around the block
Minimum wage is whacha make
Narcs are mostly on the take.
Make big money from your mob
Till Old MacDonald makes a job.
March 25, 1997
Bop Sh’bam
OO Bop Sh’bam
At the poetry slam
Scream & yell
At the poetry ball
Get in a rage
On the poetry stage
Make it rhyme
In double-time
Talk real fast
till your time’s passed
Sound like a clown
& then sit down.
Listen to the next
’cause she listened to you
Tho all she says is
Peek-a-boo-boo.
March 25, 1997, 3:30 P.M.
Dream
There was a bulge in my right side, this dream recently—just now I realized I had a baby, full grown that came out of my right abdomen while I in hospital with dangerous hepatitis C.
I lay there awhile, wondering what to do, half grateful, half apprehensive. It’ll need milk, it’ll need exercise, taken out into fresh air with baby carriage.
Peter there sympathetic, he’ll help me, bent over my bed, kissed me, happy a child to care for. What compassion he has. Reassured I felt the miracle was in Peter’s reliable hands—but gee what if he began drinking again? No this’ll keep him straight. How care for a baby, what can I do?
Worried & pleased since it was true I slowly woke, still thinking it’d happened, consciousness returned slowly 2:29 AM I was awake and there’s no little mystic baby—naturally appeared, just disappeared—
A glow of happiness next morn, warm glow of pleasure half the day.
March 27, 1997, 4A.M.
Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgias)
Never go to Bulgaria, had a booklet & invitation
Same Albania, invited last year, privately by Lottery scammers or recovering alcoholics,
Or enlightened poets of the antique land of Hades Gates
Nor visit Lhasa live in Hilton or Ngawang Gelek’s household & weary ascend Potala
Nor ever return to Kashi “oldest continuously habited city in world” bathe in Ganges & sit again at Manikarnika ghat with Peter, visit Lord Jagganath again in Puri, never back to Birbhum take notes tales of Khaki Baba
Or hear music festivals in Madras with Philip
Or return to have Chai with older Sunil & the young coffeeshop poets,
Tie my head on a block in the Chinatown opium den, pass by Moslem Hotel, its rooftop Tinsmith Street Choudui Chowh Nimtallah Burning ground nor smoke ganja on the Hooghly
Nor the alleyways of Achmed’s Fez, nevermore drink mint tea at Soco Chico, visit Paul B. in Tangiers
Or see the Sphinx in Desert at Sunrise or sunset, morn & dusk in the desert
Ancient collapsed Beirut, sad bombed Babylon & Ur of old, Syria’s grim mysteries all Araby & Saudi Deserts, Yemen’s sprightly folk,
Old opium tribal Afghanistan, Tibet-Templed Beluchistan
See Shanghai again, nor caves of Dunhuang
Nor climb E. 12th Street’s stairway 3 flights again,
Nor go to literary Argentina, accompany Glass to Sao Paolo & live a month in a flat Rio’s beaches & favella boys, Bahia’s great Carnival
Nor more daydream of Bali, too far Adelaide’s festival to get new song sticks
Not see the new slums of Jakarta, mysterious Borneo forests & painted men & women
No more Sunset Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, Oz on Ocean Way
Old cousin Danny Leegant, memories of Aunt Edith in Santa Monica
No more sweet summers with lovers, teaching Blake at Naropa,
Mind Writing Slogans, new modern American Poetics, Williams Kerouac Reznikoff Rakosi Corso Creeley Orlovsky
Any visits to B’nai Israel graves of Buba, Aunt Rose, Harry Meltzer and Aunt Clara, Father Louis
Not myself except in an urn of ashes
March 30, 1997, A.M.
Afterword
On Death & Fame
This final collection of Allen Ginsberg poems completes a remarkable half century of continuous verse creation. Allen leaves nothing out and takes the readers down a final walk of sickness and decline, but still the illumination of life shines through these strophes and rhythms. In these final five years, Allen struggles through several transformations. He is placed under the ever intensifying glare of media attention as a founder of the Beat Generation. He is interviewed as a living icon/prophet to each generation from the 1940s through the 1990s and is expected to elucidate the meaning of the century’s conclusion and make new millennial predictions. The telephones ring continually for talk and advice on every subject from presidential politics to baby naming. He finally manages to place his lifelong archives into a permanent home at Stanford University. He is reviled in the New York Times on several occasions for “selling out.” For the first time in his life, he buys himself a bit of comfort. At age seventy, he leaves his fourth-floor walk-up tenement apartment and moves into an elevator loft building still within his beloved Lower East Side of Manhattan. In these years, he embraces Jewel Heart Buddhist Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he attends retreats, performs benefits, and receives profound and ultimate instructions from his teacher Gelek Rinpoche. Although struggling with illnesses continually, he does not learn of his fatal diagnosis until a week before his last breath. The poems follow these paths and illumine our own lives.
“New Democracy Wish List” was written at the request of Long Island Newsday. Allen polled his friends and collected advice on various subjects. The poem was sent to the White House and politely received. Allen’s diabetes led to a state of dysesthesia below the waist. Allen transformed any shame of incontinence to a celebration of aging and life, as in “Here We Go ’Round the Mulberry Bush.” It was Allen’s habit to write poetry in his journals in the late night or the early morning. He would often write at dawn and then go back to sleep until late morning. His waking routine took several hours. There is a good sample of that routine in “Tuesday Morn.” When Allen had collected several pages of poetry in his journals, he would photocopy them and hand them to his office to perform a first typing. Peter Hale typed them and returned them promptly. Allen would make alterations by hand and return them. Sometimes this process went on through ten drafts. We kept every draft in a file folder labeled with the title
of the poem. Often slight rhythmic corrections to poems would come in after Allen returned from giving poetry readings. Allen Ginsberg was one of very few poets who had the opportunity to refine the exact cadence of his lines through his frequent public readings.
One of Allen’s most beautiful song lyrics was “New Stanzas for Amazing Grace.” Allen never ignored the homeless or beggars. He was generous to a fault and could not pass an outstretched hand without leaving a coin and looking deeply into the face beyond the hand. Allen lived comfortably within his modest fame. As he walked the streets of Lower Manhattan, people would nod to him in recognition or simply say “Hi Allen!” as they passed. If they stopped to recall when they last met him or ask a question, he was patient and conversed with them. If someone came up and said, “Are you Allen Ginsberg?” he might answer, “No, but that is what I am called.” Allen was always supportive of the writers he admired and who were his friends. Notice in “City Lights City” which was written for the naming ceremony of Via Ferlinghetti, Allen used the occasion to create new literary renamings of streets for all the worthy writers of his circle.
“Pastel Sentences” were written in Allen’s form of American Haiku (seventeen syllables with the common haiku associational enjambment of senses but carried through on a single strophe each). These sentences were composed to accompany a set of water colors by his friend, Francesco Clemente. There was a conciliation in Allen’s poems; he was commingling his worldview with its detail of causes into Buddhist mindfulness and ego urges. He continued a flirtation with children’s poetry in “The Ballad of the Skeletons” which was turned into a rock ’n’ roll song with Paul McCartney, Philip Glass, and Lenny Kaye collaborating musically. Gus Van Sant made a music video. Memories from East Side High, Paterson, are explored in “You know what I’m saying?” Allen remembered the songs of his childhood (“Popular Tunes”). One day he walked around the loft trying to find his scarf. He sang a little ditty about the lost scarf, which became “Gone Gone Gone”: a poem about loss, which was read at a Buddhist service the day after Allen’s death.