Written by
Allen Ginsberg |
America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January
17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go **** yourself with your atom bomb.
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I
need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not
the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back
it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical
joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday
somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid
I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses
in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle
Max after he came over from Russia.
I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by
Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner
candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Business-
men are serious. Movie producers are serious.
Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of
marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable
private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour
and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of
underprivileged who live in my flowerpots
under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers
is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that
I'm a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly
mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as
individual as his automobiles more so they're
all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500
down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Com-
munist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a
handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and
sentimental about the workers it was all so sin-
cere you have no idea what a good thing the
party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand
old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me
cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody
must have been a spy.
America you don't really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen.
And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power
mad. She wants to take our cars from out our
garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers'
Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.
Him big bureaucracy running our fillingsta-
tions.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read.
Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us
all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in
the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes
in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and
psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my ***** shoulder to the wheel.
Berkeley, January 17, 1956
|
Written by
William Wordsworth |
In distant countries I have been, And yet I have not often seen A healthy man, a man full grown, Weep in the public roads alone. But such a one, on English ground, And in the broad high-way, I met; Along the broad high-way he came, His cheeks with tears were wet. Sturdy he seemed, though he was sad; And in his arms a lamb he had. He saw me, and he turned aside, As if he wished himself to hide: Then with his coat he made essay To wipe those briny tears away. I follow'd him, and said, "My friend What ails you? wherefore weep you so?" —"Shame on me, Sir! this lusty lamb, He makes my tears to flow. To-day I fetched him from the rock; He is the last of all my flock." When I was young, a single man, And after youthful follies ran. Though little given to care and thought, Yet, so it was, a ewe I bought; And other sheep from her I raised, As healthy sheep as you might see, And then I married, and was rich As I could wish to be; Of sheep I numbered a full score, And every year increas'd my store. Year after year my stock it grew, And from this one, this single ewe, Full fifty comely sheep I raised, As sweet a flock as ever grazed! Upon the mountain did they feed; They throve, and we at home did thrive. —This lusty lamb of all my store Is all that is alive; And now I care not if we die, And perish all of poverty. Six children, Sir! had I to feed, Hard labour in a time of need! My pride was tamed, and in our grief, I of the parish ask'd relief. They said I was a wealthy man; My sheep upon the mountain fed, And it was fit that thence I took Whereof to buy us bread: "Do this; how can we give to you," They cried, "what to the poor is due?" I sold a sheep as they had said, And bought my little children bread, And they were healthy with their food; For me it never did me good. A woeful time it was for me, To see the end of all my gains, The pretty flock which I had reared With all my care and pains, To see it melt like snow away! For me it was a woeful day. Another still! and still another! A little lamb, and then its mother! It was a vein that never stopp'd, Like blood-drops from my heart they dropp'd. Till thirty were not left alive They dwindled, dwindled, one by one, And I may say that many a time I wished they all were gone: They dwindled one by one away; For me it was a woeful day. To wicked deeds I was inclined, And wicked fancies cross'd my mind, And every man I chanc'd to see, I thought he knew some ill of me. No peace, no comfort could I find, No ease, within doors or without, And crazily, and wearily I went my work about. Oft-times I thought to run away; For me it was a woeful day. Sir! 'twas a precious flock to me, As dear as my own children be; For daily with my growing store I loved my children more and more. Alas! it was an evil time; God cursed me in my sore distress, I prayed, yet every day I thought I loved my children less; And every week, and every day, My flock, it seemed to melt away. They dwindled. Sir, sad sight to see! From ten to five, from five to three, A lamb, a weather, and a ewe; And then at last, from three to two; And of my fifty, yesterday I had but only one, And here it lies upon my arm, Alas! and I have none; To-day I fetched it from the rock; It is the last of all my flock.
|
Written by
Mark Doty |
Because the road to our house
is a back road, meadowlands punctuated
by gravel quarry and lumberyard,
there are unexpected travelers
some nights on our way home from work.
Once, on the lawn of the Tool
and Die Company, a swan;
the word doesn't convey the shock
of the thing, white architecture
rippling like a pond's rain-pocked skin,
beak lifting to hiss at my approach.
Magisterial, set down in elegant authority,
he let us know exactly how close we might come.
After a week of long rains
that filled the marsh until it poured
across the road to make in low woods
a new heaven for toads,
a snapping turtle lumbered down the center
of the asphalt like an ambulatory helmet.
His long tail dragged, blunt head jutting out
of the lapidary prehistoric sleep of shell.
We'd have lifted him from the road
but thought he might bend his long neck back
to snap. I tried herding him; he rushed,
though we didn't think those blocky legs
could hurry-- then ambled back
to the center of the road, a target
for kids who'd delight in the crush
of something slow with the look
of primeval invulnerability. He turned
the blunt spear point of his jaws,
puffing his undermouth like a bullfrog,
and snapped at your shoe,
vising a beakful of-- thank God--
leather. You had to shake him loose. We left him
to his own devices, talked on the way home
of what must lead him to new marsh
or old home ground. The next day you saw,
one town over, remains of shell
in front of the little liquor store. I argued
it was too far from where we'd seen him,
too small to be his... though who could tell
what the day's heat might have taken
from his body. For days he became a stain,
a blotch that could have been merely
oil. I did not want to believe that
was what we saw alive in the firm center
of his authority and right
to walk the center of the road,
head up like a missionary moving certainly
into the country of his hopes.
In the movies in this small town
I stopped for popcorn while you went ahead
to claim seats. When I entered the cool dark
I saw straight couples everywhere,
no single silhouette who might be you.
I walked those two aisles too small
to lose anyone and thought of a book
I read in seventh grade, "Stranger Than Science,"
in which a man simply walked away,
at a picnic, and was,
in the act of striding forward
to examine a flower, gone.
By the time the previews ended
I was nearly in tears-- then realized
the head of one-half the couple in the first row
was only your leather jacket propped in the seat
that would be mine. I don't think I remember
anything of the first half of the movie.
I don't know what happened to the swan. I read
every week of some man's lover showing
the first symptoms, the night sweat
or casual flu, and then the wasting begins
and the disappearance a day at a time.
I don't know what happened to the swan;
I don't know if the stain on the street
was our turtle or some other. I don't know
where these things we meet and know briefly,
as well as we can or they will let us,
go. I only know that I do not want you
--you with your white and muscular wings
that rise and ripple beneath or above me,
your magnificent neck, eyes the deep mottled autumnal colors
of polished tortoise-- I do not want you ever to die.
|
Written by
T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot |
Similiter et omnes revereantur Diaconos, ut mandatum Jesu Christi; et Episcopum, ut
Jesum Christum, existentem filium Patris; Presbyteros autem, ut concilium Dei et
conjunctionem Apostolorum. Sine his Ecclesia non vocatur; de quibus suadeo vos sic
habeo.
S. Ignatii Ad Trallianos.
And when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of
the Laodiceans.
THE BROAD-BACKED hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.
Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.
The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.
The ’potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.
At mating time the hippo’s voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.
The hippopotamus’s day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way—
The Church can sleep and feed at once.
I saw the ’potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.
Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.
He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.
|
Written by
John Davidson |
I couldn't touch a stop and turn a screw,
And set the blooming world a-work for me,
Like such as cut their teeth -- I hope, like you --
On the handle of a skeleton gold key;
I cut mine on a leek, which I eat it every week:
I'm a clerk at thirty bob as you can see.
But I don't allow it's luck and all a toss;
There's no such thing as being starred and crossed;
It's just the power of some to be a boss,
And the bally power of others to be bossed:
I face the music, sir; you bet I ain't a cur;
Strike me lucky if I don't believe I'm lost!
For like a mole I journey in the dark,
A-travelling along the underground
From my Pillar'd Halls and broad Suburbean Park,
To come the daily dull official round;
And home again at night with my pipe all alight,
A-scheming how to count ten bob a pound.
And it's often very cold and very wet,
And my missus stitches towels for a hunks;
And the Pillar'd Halls is half of it to let--
Three rooms about the size of travelling trunks.
And we cough, my wife and I, to dislocate a sigh,
When the noisy little kids are in their bunks.
But you never hear her do a growl or whine,
For she's made of flint and roses, very odd;
And I've got to cut my meaning rather fine,
Or I'd blubber, for I'm made of greens and sod:
So p'r'haps we are in Hell for all that I can tell,
And lost and damn'd and served up hot to God.
I ain't blaspheming, Mr. Silver-tongue;
I'm saying things a bit beyond your art:
Of all the rummy starts you ever sprung,
Thirty bob a week's the rummiest start!
With your science and your books and your the'ries about spooks,
Did you ever hear of looking in your heart?
I didn't mean your pocket, Mr., no:
I mean that having children and a wife,
With thirty bob on which to come and go,
Isn't dancing to the tabor and the fife:
When it doesn't make you drink, by Heaven! it makes you think,
And notice curious items about life.
I step into my heart and there I meet
A god-almighty devil singing small,
Who would like to shout and whistle in the street,
And squelch the passers flat against the wall;
If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take,
He would take it, ask for more, and eat them all.
And I meet a sort of simpleton beside,
The kind that life is always giving beans;
With thirty bob a week to keep a bride
He fell in love and married in his teens:
At thirty bob he stuck; but he knows it isn't luck:
He knows the seas are deeper than tureens.
And the god-almighty devil and the fool
That meet me in the High Street on the strike,
When I walk about my heart a-gathering wool,
Are my good and evil angels if you like.
And both of them together in every kind of weather
Ride me like a double-seated bike.
That's rough a bit and needs its meaning curled.
But I have a high old hot un in my mind --
A most engrugious notion of the world,
That leaves your lightning 'rithmetic behind:
I give it at a glance when I say 'There ain't no chance,
Nor nothing of the lucky-lottery kind.'
And it's this way that I make it out to be:
No fathers, mothers, countres, climates -- none;
Not Adam was responsible for me,
Nor society, nor systems, nary one:
A little sleeping seed, I woke -- I did, indeed --
A million years before the blooming sun.
I woke because I thought the time had come;
Beyond my will there was no other cause;
And everywhere I found myself at home,
Because I chose to be the thing I was;
And in whatever shape of mollusc or of ape
I always went according to the laws.
I was the love that chose my mother out;
I joined two lives and from the union burst;
My weakness and my strength without a doubt
Are mine alone for ever from the first:
It's just the very same with a difference in the name
As 'Thy will be done.' You say it if you durst!
They say it daily up and down the land
As easy as you take a drink, it's true;
But the difficultest go to understand,
And the difficultest job a man can do,
Is to come it brave and meek with thirty bob a week,
And feel that that's the proper thing for you.
It's a naked child against a hungry wolf;
It's playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;
It's walking on a string across a gulf
With millstones fore-and-aft about your neck;
But the thing is daily done by many and many a one;
And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.
|
Written by
Sir Walter Raleigh |
Our great work, the Otia Merseiana,
Edited by learned Mister Sampson,
And supported by Professor Woodward,
Is financed by numerous Bogus Meetings
Hastily convened by Kuno Meyer
To impose upon the Man of Business.
All in vain! The accomplished Man of Business
Disapproves of Otia Merseiana,
Turns his back on Doctor Kuno Meyer;
Cannot be enticed by Mister Sampson,
To be present at the Bogus Meetings,
Though attended by Professor Woodward.
Little cares the staid Professor Woodward:
He, being something of a man of business,
Knows that not a hundred Bogus Meetings
To discuss the Otia Merseiana
Can involve himself and Mister Sampson
In the debts of Doctor Kuno Meyer.
So the poor deluded Kuno Meyer,
Unenlightened by Professor Woodward --
Whom, upon the word of Mister Sampson,
He believes to be a man of business
Fit to run the Otia Merseiana --
Keeps on calling endless Bogus Meetings.
Every week has now its Bogus Meetings,
Punctually convened by Kuno Meyer
In the name of Otia Merseiana:
Every other week Professor Woodward
Takes his place, and, as a man of business,
Audits the accounts with Mister Sampson.
He and impecunious Mister Sampson
Are the mainstay of the Bogus Meetings;
But the alienated Man of Business
Cannot be allured by Kuno Meyer
To attend and meet Professor Woodward,
Glory of the Otia Merseiana.
Kuno Meyer! Great Professor Woodward!
Bogus Meetings damn, for men of business,
Mister Sampson's Otia Merseiana.
|
Written by
Austin Clarke |
When night stirred at sea,
An the fire brought a crowd in
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.
Men that had seen her
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went --
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.
|
Written by
Andrew Barton Paterson |
Now listen to me and I'll tell you my views concerning the African war,
And the man who upholds any different views, the same is a ritten Pro-Boer!
(Though I'm getting a little bit doubtful myself, as it drags on week after week:
But it's better not ask any questions at all -- let us silence all doubts with a shriek!)
And first let us shriek the unstinted abuse that the Tory Press prefer --
De Wet is a madman, and Steyn is a liar, and Kruger a pitiful cur!
(Though I think if Oom Paul -- as old as he is -- were to walk down the Strand with his gun,
A lot of these heroes would hide in the sewers or take to their heels and run!
For Paul he has fought like a man in his day, but now that he's feeble and weak
And tired, and lonely, and old and grey, of course it's quite safe to shriek!)
And next let us join in the bloodthirsty shriek, Hooray for Lord Kitchener's "bag"!
For the fireman's torch and the hangman's cord -- they are hung on the English Flag!
In the front of our brave old army! Whoop! the farmhouse blazes bright.
And the women weep and their children die -- how dare they presume to fight!
For none of them dress in a uniform, the same as by rights they ought.
They're fighting in rags and in naked feet, like Wallace's Scotchmen fought!
(And they clothe themselves from our captured troops -- and they're catching them every week;
And they don't hand them -- and the shame is ours, but we cover the shame with a shriek!)
And, lastly, we'll shriek the political shriek as we sit in the dark and doubt;
Where the Birmingham Judas led us in, and there's no one to lead us out.
And Rosebery -- whom we depended upon! Would only the Oracle speak!
"You go to the Grocers," says he, "for your laws!" By Heavens! it's time to shriek!
|
Written by
Philip Levine |
19 years old and going nowhere,
I got a ride to Bessemer and walked
the night road toward Birmingham
passing dark groups of men cursing
the end of a week like every week.
Out of town I found a small grove
of trees, high narrow pines, and I
sat back against the trunk of one
as the first rains began slowly.
South, the lights of Bessemer glowed
as though a new sun rose there,
but it was midnight and another shift
tooled the rolling mills. I must
have slept awhile, for someone
else was there beside me. I could
see a cigarette's soft light,
and once a hand grazed mine, man
or woman's I never knew. Slowly
I could feel the darkness fill
my eyes and the dream that came was
of a bright world where sunlight
fell on the long even rows of houses
and I looked down from great height
at a burned world I believed
I never had to enter. When
the true sun rose I was stiff
and wet, and there beside me was
the small white proof that someone
rolled and smoked and left me there
unharmed, truly untouched.
A hundred yards off I could hear
cars on the highway. A life
was calling to be lived, but how
and why I had still to learn.
|
Written by
Rg Gregory |
we say blame the teachers
don't we send our young to school
to be taught the simple rules
for decent public-spirited behaviour
do we pay such crushing rates
to have our children turned to louts
we're sick of all this fuss
we say blame the teachers
or the preachers
they're all the same to us
we say blame the preachers
what right have they to shake
their moral fingers every week
at us and call us pharisees and sinners
let them wave their holy book
where these thugs can take a look
we're sick of all this fuss
we say blame the preachers
or the police
they're all the same to us
we say blame the police
they're very quick to chase us
when we speed in the wrong places
or accidentally cross the lights at red
but don't they take their time
when there's really been a crime
we're sick of all this fuss
we say blame the police
or politicians
they're all the same to us
we say blame the politicians
they promise and they promise
when election time is on us
sterner measures to prevent delinquency
yet when they win their phoney war
they do nothing as before
we're sick of all this fuss
we say blame the politicians
or society
they're all the same to us
we say blame society
blame the bosses blame the workers
blame the bankers blame the forces
blame the doctors dentists papers - blame tv
blame the jews united nations
blame our neighbours friends relations
we're sick of all this fuss
we say blame society
or the world
but don't blame us
|