For
Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50th Anniversary Of His Death And The
“Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With
Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies"
By
Lance Lawrence
[In
the interest of today’s endless pursue of transparency which in many cases
covers up the real deal with a few fake pieces of fluff I admit that I knew
Jack Kerouac’s daughter, Janet always called me and those I knew Jan now late
daughter (she died in 1996) whom he
never really recognized as his despite the absolute likeness and later testing for
whatever cramped reason and which took its toll on her with like her father an early
death, met out in Todo el Mundo south of Big Sur off the famous Pacific Coast
Highway. We, a group of us from the Boston area who had been told by some guys
from North Adamsville, about forty miles south of Boston who we met through
Pete Markin* who I went to Boston University with before he dropped out in the
Summer of Love, 1967 about Todo and how it was a cooler place down the road
from Big Sur which had become inundated with holy goofs and tourists and a rip
off. That s is still true today although the rip-off part is submerged since it
in no longer a hippie Garden of Eden except among those who were so stoned that
couldn’t find their ways out of the hills above the ocean and have wound up
staying there as models for what the 1960s were all about (and what I remember
hearing a few parents tell their children to avoid at all costs-oh, to be very
young-then)
We
had been staying at a cabin owned by the writer Steven Levin (mostly novels and
essays for publications like City Lights and Blue Dial Press and regional
literary journals) when one Saturday night we held a party and in walked Jan
then maybe seventeen or eighteen, nice and who wanted to be a writer like her
dad. The hook for me to meet her was the Boston-Lowell connection (one of the
few times being from Boston did me any good). We became friendly the few days
she stayed at the cabin (at my request) and I saw her a few times later. I was
having my own troubles just then and as the world knows now she had a basketful
from that crass rejection by her father and frustrations at not being taken
seriously as a writer always following in her father’s two-million-word shadows.
Funny it did not take any DNA testing for me to see that she was pure Kerouac
in features and frankly from what I read of his style that too.
I
also knew Allan Ginsburg in his om-ish days when we fired up more than one
blunt (marijuana cigarette for those who are clueless or use another term for
the stick) to see what we could see out in the National Mall where he would do
his sleek Buddha Zen mad monk thing and later Greenwich Village night where he
did serious readings to the Village literary set. I was just a little too young
to have appreciated his Howl which
along with the elegant Kaddish (for
his troubled late mother) fully since the former in particular was something
like the Beat anthem to Kerouac’s On The
Road bible. He had kind of moved on from beat and was moving on from hippie
a bit as well and it would not be until later when the dust settled that he
would go back to the later 1940s and early 1950s to explain to a candid
audience including me over grass and some wine what it was all about, what
drove the startlingly images and weird noises of that former poem. (Which I
have read and re-read several times as well as through the beauty of YouTube
has him reading forming background while I am working on the computer.
This
piece first appeared in Poetry Today shortly after Allan
Ginsburg’s Father Death death without accordion and caused a
great deal of confusion among the readers, a younger group according to the
demographics provided to me by the advertising department when I was trying to
figure out where the thing got lost in the fog, why these younger folk missed
some terms I took for granted with which every reader was at least vaguely
familiar. Some readers thought because I mentioned the word “cat” I was paying
homage to T.S. Eliot generally recognized in pre-Beat times as the ultimate
modernist poet. Meaning for Eliot aficionados the stuff that Broadway used to
make a hit musical out of although it would have been better if they, either
the confused young or the Broadway producers had counted their lives in coffee
spoons. That cat reference of mine actually referred to “hep cats” as in a
slang expression from the 1940s and 1950s before Beat went into high gear not a
cat, the family pet.
Some
readers, and I really was scratching my head over this one since this was
published in a poetry magazine for aficionados and not for some dinky survey
freshman college English class, that because I mentioned the word “homosexual”
and some jargon associated with that sexual orientation when everybody was “in
the closet” except maybe Allan Ginsburg and his Peter although they were in
friendlier Frisco mainly thought I was referring W.H. Auden. There had been
some coded words for the sexual acts associated with homosexually then, and
maybe in some older sets still in use Jesus,
Auden, a great poet no question if not a brave one slinking off to America when
things got too hot in his beloved England in September 1939 and a
self-confessed homosexual in the days when that was dangerous to declare in
late Victorian public morality England especially after what happened to Oscar
Wilde when they pulled down the hammer was hardly the only homosexual
possibility. That despite his game of claiming every good-looking guy for what
he called the “Homintern.” Frankly I didn’t personally think anybody even read Auden
anymore once the Beats be-bopped.
There
were a few others who were presented as candidates as the person I was
championing. James Lawson because some of his exploits were similar to the ones
I described but those events were hardly rare in the burned over 1950s down in
the mud of society. Jack Weir because of some West Coast references. Jeffery
Stein, the poet of the new age shtetl because of the dope. All wrong. That poet
had a name an honored name Allan Ginsburg who howled in the night at the
oddness and injustice of the world after saying Kaddish to his mother’s memory
and not be confused with this bag of bones rough crowd who refused to learn
from the silly bastard. This piece was, is for ALLAN GINSBURG who wrote for
Carl Solomon in his hours of sorrow just before he went under the knife in some
stone- cold crazy asylum and I now for him when he went under the ground. Lance
Lawrence]
*(We
have, those of us who knew Markin back in the 1960s when he hung around the
Cambridge coffeehouses with his cheap date girlfriends (he was a scholarship
boy who had no money, came from some slack family house so coffeehouses, the
ones with no admission charges and cheap coffee to maintain a seat), have often
wondered whether Markin and Kerouac would have gotten along if they had been of
the same generation. That generation born in the 1920s, his parents’ generation
if not lifestyle. From Markin’s end would Jack have been the searched for
father he had never known. From Jack’s end whether the two-million question
Markin would have clashed or meshed with the two-million- word Kerouac. I know
as early as in the 1980s when I was dating an English Literature graduate
student from Cornell that Jack was in bad odor as a literary figure to emulate
and subsequently anybody who wanted to be “school of Kerouac found hard sledding
getting published. This is probably worthy of a separate monogram in this 50th
anniversary year of the passing of Kerouac )
***********
I
have seen the best poet of the generation before mine declare that he had seen
that the best minds of his generation had turned to mush, turned out in the
barren wilderness from which no one returned except for quick stays in safe
haven mental asylums. Saw the same Negro streets he saw around Blue Hill Avenue
and Dudley Street blank and wasted in the sweated fetid humid
Thunderbird-lushed night (and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter
yelling out in unison “what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty
twice” and ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price-ready to
commit mayhem at Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by
girl but I will be discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime
looking for the ghost of Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time.
Thought that those angel-headed hipsters, those hep cats hanging around Times,
Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares crying in pools of blood coming out of the
wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for
their liquor, stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow lights of
Harvard Square where they hustled young college students, young impressionable
college students whose parents had had their best minds, those hallowed
students, wasted in the turbid streets of south Long Island (not the West Egg
of Gatsby’s dream of conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy
arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of
the fervid elites but anytown, Levitttown of those who would escape to Boston
or Wisconsin to face the angel of death up front and say no go, pass, under
luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could
have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.
Saw
hipsters cadging wine drinks from sullen co-eds staying out too late in the
Harvard Square night who turned out to be slumming from some plebian colleges
across the river maybe good Irish girls from frail Catholic parishes with
rosaries in their fair-skinned hands and a novena book between their knees who
nevertheless has Protestant lusts in their pallid hearts but unrequited (here’s
how-they would arrive at the Café Lana with ten bucks and their virginity and
leave with both and some guy with dreams of salty sucking blowjobs walking out
the backdoor and doing the whack job behind the dumpster –a waste of precious
fluids and according to Norman Mailer world-historic fucks which would product
the best minds of the next generation all dribbled away). Maybe tasty Jewish
girls from the shtetl in not East or West Egg who flocked to the other side of
the river and gave Irish guys who previously had dribbled their spunk behind
dumpsters after losing out to ten bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack
Catholic girls who refused to give that head that would have brought some of the
best minds some freaking relief (better not say fucking relief because that
would be oxymoronic). Maybe some sullen fair-skinned and blonded Protestant
girls who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no
trinities and just feel good stuff. All three varieties and yes there were more
but who knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty Amish girls run away from home,
Tantic card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red light district sluts who at least
played the game straight-played the cash nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to
even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs,
fakers and Shakers included), the sluts, Mennonites and yes those lusty
red-faced Amish runaways all coming together after midnight far from the negro
streets but not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with
their cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan
who converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old
end of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of
death at arms’ length. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality- affixed
hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets and slamming
singsters fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two- line
rhymes got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little light on the
breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah, now that I think
about the matter more closely hard times please come again no
more.
Saw
the angel of death make her appearance one night at the Café Lana and then
backstopped the Club Nana to fetch one young thing who warbled like heaven’s
own angel. Some Norman Mailer white hipster turned her on to a little sister
and then some boy and she no longer warbled but did sweet candy cane tricks for
high-end businessmen with homely wives or fruitless ones who had given up that
sort of “thing” after the third junior had been born and who were ready to make
her his mistress if she would just stop singing kumbaya after every fuck like
she was still a freaking warbler, a freaking virgin or something instead of
“used” goods or maybe good for schoolboys whose older brothers took them to her
for their first fling at going around the world, welcome to the brotherhood or
maybe some old fart who just wanted to relive his dreams before the booze, the
three wives and parcel of kids did him in and then the hustler sent her back to
the Club Nana to “score” from the club owner who was connected with Nick the
dream doper man, the Christ who would get him- and her well –on those mean
angel-abandoned death watch streets but who knew that one night at the Hayes
(everybody called it just that after they had been there one night), one after
midnight night where they had that first cup of weak-kneed coffee replenished
to keep a place in the scoreboarded night where hari-kara poets dreamed toke
dreams and some Mister dreamed of fresh-faced singer girls looking for kicks.
So please, please, hard times come again no
more.
I
have seen frosted lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of
silly foolish childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world
that that poet spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was
to have who was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made
hip to the tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house
that awaits us all.
In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th
Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)
By Book Critic Zack James
To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation, what he, or
something associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, called the
“beat” generation (beat of the drum, dead beat, dread beat, beaten down,
beatified like saintly you take your pick of the meanings-hell they all did,
the guys, and it was mostly guy who hung out on the mean streets of New York,
Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town) strictly second-hand as I was too young
to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing through my
oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, about more in a minute, but even he
was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly
through reading the book and having his mandatory two years of living on the
road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50th
anniversary is being commemorated this year as well. So even Alex and his crowd
were really too young to have been there, being an understanding there at the
creation.
Of course anytime you talk about books and my brother Alex
the name that automatically comes up is that of the late Peter Paul Markin.
Markin who Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys still alive
recently had me put together tribute book for in connection with the Summer of
Love since he, Markin, was the vanguard guy who got several of them off their
asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. (Like I said Alex
was out two years and other guys from a few months to a few years.) Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader,
Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included were strictly from hunger working
class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be
thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some hot
chick’s pants as anything else. After all this was what was what for corner
boys then, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn
Friday night corners anymore.
What made this tribe different was Markin, Markin called by
Frankie Riley the “Scribe” and that stuck all through high school. The name
stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them
was also crazy for books and poetry. Always had about ten billion facts running
around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he
was ready to do battle.
The books and poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come in. Markin was
something like an antennae for anything that any working class guy did. Others
too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read
sections out loud on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the
strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what
new breeze was coming down the road. Markin flipped out when he found out that
Kerouac had grown up in Lowell a working class town very much like North
Adamsville and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and
gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of
guys down at the base of society with little chance of grabbing the brass ring.
So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure
on my brother who was his closest friend then. So it was through Alex I got the
Kerouac bug. And now on the 60th anniversary I am passing on the bug
to you.
On The 60th Anniversary Of Allan Ginsberg’s “Howl”*Beat Poet's Corner- Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"
Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of the 1994 film documentary "The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg" reviewed in a separate entry in this space on this date.
HOWL
by Allen Ginsberg
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,
illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn,
ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-ings and
migraines of China under junk-with-drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy
and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively
vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary
indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes,
cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational
therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul,
rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare,
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture,
a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet,
and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent
and shaking with shame,
rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!
Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories
dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs!
Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of
the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night
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