LW: Will you please state your full name?
AG: Allen Ginsberg.
LW: What is your Occupation?
AG: Poet.
LW: Have you authored any books in the field of poetry?
AG: In 1956, Howl and other Poems; in 1960, Kaddish and other poems; in 1963, Empty Mirror; in 1963, Reality Sandwiches, and in 1969, Planet News.
LW: Now, in addition to your writing, Mr. Ginsberg, are you presently engaged in any other activity?
AG: I teach, lecture, and recite poetry at universities.
LW: Now, did you ever study abroad?
AG: Yes. In India and Japan.
LW: Could you indicate for the court and jury what the area of your studies consisted of?
AG: Mantra yoga, meditation exercises and sitting quietly, breathing exercises to calm the body and calm the mind, but mainly a branch called mantra yoga, which is yoga which involved prayer and chanting.
LW: How long did you study?
AG: I was in India for a year and a third, and then in Japan studying with Gary Snyder, a Zen poet, at Daitoku-ji monastery, D-A-I T-O-K-U-J-I. I sat there for the zazen exercises for centering the body and quieting the mind.
LW: Are you still studying under any of your former teachers?
AG: Yes, Swami Bahktivedanta – faith, philosophy – Bhakti Vedanta, B-A-H-K-T-I V-E-D-A-N-T-A. I have seen him and chanted within the last few years in different cities, and he has asked me to continue chanting, especially on public occasions. This involves chanting and praying, praying out loud and in community.
LW: In the course of a mantra chant, is there any particular position that the person doing that assumes?
AG: Any position which will let the stomach relax and be easy, fall out, so that aspiration can be deep into the body, to relax the body completely and calm the mind, based as cross-legged,
LW: And is it – chanting -to be done privately, or is it in public?
Thomas Foran (prosecutor): Oh, your Honor, I object. I think we have gone far enough now..
Judge (Julius Hoffman): I think I have a vague idea now of the witness’ profession. It is vague.
TF: I think I might also indicate that he is an excellent speller.
AG: : Sir,,
Judge: Yes, sir.
AG: In India, the profession of’ poetry and the profession of chanting are linked together as one practice.
Judge: That’s right, I give you credit for that.

Allen Ginsberg & Jerry Rubin – Photo: Larry Sloman
LW: Mr. Ginsberg, do you know the defendant Jerry Rubin?
AG: Yes, I do.
LW: Do you recall where it was that you first met him?
AG: : In Berkeley and San Francisco in 1965 during the time of the anti-Vietnam war marches in Berkeley. I saw him again at the Human Be-in in San Francisco. We shared the stage with many other people.
LW: Would you describe for the Court and jury what the “Be-in” in San Francisco was?
AG: A large assembly of younger people who came together to…
TF: Objection, your Honor.
Judge: Just a minutes I am not sure how you spell the “be-in”.
LW: B-E I-N, I believe – “be-in”.
AG: Human be-in.
Judge: I really can’t pass on the validity of the objection because I don’t understand the question.
LW: I asked him to explain what a “be-in” was.
TF: I would love to know also but I don’t think it has anything to do with this lawsuit.
Judge: I will over the objection of the Government, tell what a “be-in” is.
AG: A gathering-together of younger people aware of the planetary fate that we are all sitting in the middle of, imbued with a new consciousness, a new kind of society involving prayer, music, and spiritual life together rather than competition, acquisition and war.

LW: And was that the activity that was engaged in in San Francisco at this “be-in”?
AG: There was what was called a “gathering of the tribes” of all the different affinity groups, spiritual groups, political group, yoga groups, music groups and poetry groups that all felt the same crisis of identity crisis of the planet and political crisis in America, who all came together in the largest assemblage of such younger people that had taken place since the war, in the presence of the Zen master Suzuki, and in the presence of the rock bands, and the presence of Timothy Leary and Mr. Rubin.
LW: Now, later on in the year of 1967 did you have occasion to meet again with the defendant Jerry Rubin?
AG: Yes, we met in a cafe in Berkeley and discussed his mayoral race for the city of Berkeley. He had run for mayor.
LW: Did you have any participation in that campaign?
AG:: I encouraged it, blessed it.
LW: Now, do you know the defendant Abbie Hoffman?

Abbie Hoffman (1982 at Naropa) – photo (c) Lance Gurwell
AG: Yes.
LW: Now, calling your attention to the month of February 1968, did you have any occasion in that month to meet with Abbie Hoffman?
AG: Yeah.
LW: Do you recall what Mr. Hoffman said in the course of the conversation.
AG: Yippee.. among other things.. He said that politics had become theater and magic, that it was the manipulation of imagery through mass media that was confusing and hypnotizing the people in the United States and making them accept a war which they did not really believe in, that people were involved in a life style that was intolerable to young folks, which involved brutality and police violence as well as a larger violence in Vietnam, and that ourselves might be able to get together in Chicago and invite teachers to present different ideas of what is wrong with the planet, what we can do to solve the pollution crisis, what we can do to solve the Vietnam war, to present different ideas for making the society more sacred and less commercial, less materialistic, what we could do to uplevel or improve the whole tone of the trap that we all felt ourselves in as the population grew and as politics became more and more violent and chaotic.
LW: Now, did he ascribe any particular name to that project?
AG: Festival of Life.
LW After he spoke to you, what, if anything, was your response to suggestion?
AG: I was worried whether or not the whole scene would get violent. I was worried whether we would be allowed to put on such a situation allowed to put.. I was worried, you know, whether the government would let us do something that was funnier or prettier or more charming than what was going to be going on in the Convention hall.

TF: I object and ask that it be stricken. It was not responsive.
Judge: Yes. I sustain the objection.
AG: Sir, that was our conversation,
LW: Now, during that same month, February of 1968, did you have occasion to meet with Jerry Rubin?
AG: I spoke with Jerry Rubin on the phone, I believe.
LW: Will you relate to the Court and jury what Jerry Rubin said to you?
AG: Jerry told me that he and others were going to Chicago to apply for permission from the city government for a permit to hold a Festival of Life and that he was talking with John Sinclair about getting rock and roll bands together and other musicians and that he would report back to me.
LW: Mr. Ginsberg, do you recall anything else that Mr. Rubin said to you in the course of that telephone conversation?
AG:: Yes, he said that he thought it would be interesting if we could get up little schools like ecology schools, music schools, political schools, schools about the Vietnam war, schools with yogis.
He asked if I could contact (William) Burroughs and ask Burroughs to come to teach non-verbal, non-conceptual feeling states.
LW: Now you indicated a school of ecology. Could you explain to the Court and jury what that is?
AG: Ecology is the interrelation of all the living forms on the surface of the planet involving the food chain—that is to say, whales eat plankton: larger fishes eat smaller fish, octopus or squid eat shellfish which eat plankton; human beings eat the shellfish or squid or smaller fish which eat the smaller tiny microorganisms
TF: That is enough, your Honor.
Judge: Yes. We all have a clear idea of what ecology is.
AG: Well, the destruction of ecology is what would have been taught. That is, how it is being destroyed by human intervention and messing it up with pollution.
LW: Now you also indicated that Mr. Rubin mentioned nonverbal education. Will you explain what that is to the Court and jury?
AG Most of our consciousness, since we are continually looking at images on television and listening to words, reading newspapers, talking in courts such as this, most of our consciousness is filled with language, with a kind of matter babble behind the ear, a continuous yakety-yak that actually prevents us from breathing deeply in our bodies and sensing more subtly and sweetly the feelings that we actually do have as persons to each other rather than as talking machines.
LW: Now, Mr. Ginsberg, on March 17, where were you?
AG: I took part in a press conference fit the Hotel Americana in New York City.
LW: Who else was present fit this press conference?
AG: Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were there as well as Phil Ochs, the folk singer, Arlo Guthrie, some members of the USA band, some members of the Diggers groups.
LW: Could you indicate to the Court and jury what Jerry Rubin said?
AG: He said that a lot of younger people in America would come to Chicago during the Convention and hold a Festival of Life in the parks, and he announced that they were negotiating with the City Hall to get a permit to have a life festival in the parks.
LW: Do you recall what Abbie Hoffman said?
AG: He said that they were going to go to Chicago in groups to negotiate with representatives of Mayor Daley to get a permit for a large-scale Gathering of the Tribes and he mentioned the human be-in in San Francisco.
LW: Did you yourself participate in that press conference?
AG: Yes. I stepped to the microphone also. My statement was that the planet Earth at the present moment was endangered by violence, overpopulation, pollution, ecological destruction brought about by our own greed; that our younger children in America and other countries of the world might not survive the next thirty years; that it was a planetary crisis that had not been recognized by any government of the world and had not been recognized by our own government, nor the politicians who were preparing for the elections; that the younger people of America were aware of that and that precisely was what was called psychedelic consciousness; that we were going to gather together as we had before in the San Francisco human be-in to manifest our presence over and above the presence of the more selfish elder politicians who were not thinking in terms of what their children would need in future generations, or even ill the generation immediately coming, or even for themselves in their own lifetime and were continuing to threaten the planet with violence, with war, with mass murder, with germ warfare. And since the younger people knew that in the United States, we are going to invite them there, find that the central motive would be a presentation of a desire for the preservation of the planet. The desire for preservation of the planet and the planet’s form was manifested to my mind by the great mantra from India to the preserver god Vishnu whose mantra is the Hare Krishna. And then I chanted the Hare Krishna for ten minutes to the television cameras, and it goes:
Hare krishna/hare krishna/krishna krishna/hare hare/hare rama/hare rama/rama rama/hare hare.

LW: Now in chanting that did you have all accompaniment of any particular instrument?
( laughter)
LW: Your Honor, I object to the laughter of the Court on this. I think this is a serious presentation of a religious concept.
Judge: I don’t understand. I don’t understand it because it was… the language of the United States District Court is English.
William Kunstler (defence attorney) : I know, but you don’t laugh at all languages.
Judge: I didn’t laugh. I didn’t laugh.
AG: I would be happy to explain it.
Judge: I didn’t laugh at all. I wish I could tell you how I feel. (laughter) …I didn’t even smile.
Laugh—I didn’t even smile.
WK: Well, I thought—
Judge: All I could tell you is that I didn’t understand it because whatever language the witness is using..
AG: Sanskrit, sir.
Judge: Well, that is one I don’t know. That is the reason I didn’t understand it.
AG: Might we go on to in explanation?
Judge: Will you keep quiet, Mr. Witness, while I am talking to the lawyers?
AG: I will be glad to give an explanation.
Judge: I never laugh at a witness, sir. I protect witnesses who come to this court. But I do tell you that the language of the American court is English unless you have all interpreter. You may use an interpreter for the remainder of the witness’ testimony.
WK: No. I have heard, Your Honor, priests explain the mass in Latin in American courts and I think Mr. Ginsberg is doing exactly the same thing in Sanskrit for another type of religious experience.
Judge: I don’t understand Sanskrit. I venture to say the jury members don’t. Perhaps we have some people on the jury who do understand Sanskrit, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t even have known it was Sanskrit until he told me. I can’t see that that is material to the issues here, that is all.
LW: Let me ask this: Mr. Ginsberg, I show you an object marked 150 for identification, and I ask you to examine that object.
AG Yes.
[Allen “identifies” the object (a harmonium) by playing it]
TF: All right. Your Honor, that is enough. I object to it, your Honor. I think it is outrageous for counsel to..
Judge: You asked him to examine it find instead of that he played a tune on it. I sustain the objection.
AG: It adds spirituality to the case, sir.
Judge: Will you remain quiet, sir.
AG: I am sorry.
LW: Having examined that, could you identify it for the court and jury?
AG: It is an instrument known is the harmonium, which I used at the press conference at the Americana Hotel. It is commonly used in India.

Allen Ginsberg’s harmonium
TF: I object to that.
Judge: I sustain the objection.
LW: Will you explain to the Court and to the jury what chant you were chanting at the press conference?
AG: I was chanting a mantra called the “mala mantra,” the great mantra of preservation of that aspect of the Indian religion called Vishnu the Preserver. Every time human evil rises so high that the planet itself is threatened, and all of its inhabitants and their children are threatened, Vishnu will preserve a return.

In back of the real
railroad yard in San Jose
I wandered desolate
in front of a tank factory
and sat on a bench
near the switchman's shack.
A flower lay on the hay on
the asphalt highway
- the dread hay flower
I thought- It had a
brittle black stem and
corolla of yellowish dirty
spikes like Jesus' inchlong
crown, and a soiled
dry center cotton tuft
like a used shaving brush
that's been lying under
the garage for a year.
Yellow, yellow flower, and
flower of industry,
tough spikey ugly flower,
flower nonetheless,
with the form of the great yellow
Rose in your brain !
This is the flower of the World.

WILD ORPHAN
Blandly mother
takes him strolling
by railroad and by river
-he's the son of the absconded
hot rod angel-
and he imagines cars
and rides them in his dreams,
so lonely growing up among
the imaginary automobiles
and dead souls of Tarrytown
to create
out of his own imagination
the beauty of his wild
forebears - a mythology
he cannot inherit.
Will he later hallucinate
his gods? Waking
among mysteries with
an insane gleam
of recollection?
The recognitionsomething
so rare
in his soul,
met only in dreams
- nostalgias
of another life.
43
A question of the soul.
And the injured
losing their injury
in their innocence
a cock, a cross,
an excellence of love.
And the father grieves
in flophouse
complexities of memory
a thousand miles
away, unknowing
of the unexpected
youthful stranger
bumming toward his door.

SONG
The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction
the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.
Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
inhuman-
looks out of the heart
burning with purity -
for the burden of life
is love,
but we carry the weight
wearily,
40
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.
No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love-
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
-cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:
the weight is too heavy
- must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.
The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye -
yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.

AN ASPHODEL
0 dear sweet rosy
unattainable desire
. . . how sad, no way
to change the mad
cultivated asphodel, the
visible reality .. .
and skin's appalling
petals - how inspired
to be so lying in the living
room drunk naked
and dreaming, in the absence
of electricity ...
over and over eating the low root
of the asphodel,
gray fate . . .
rolling in generation
on the flowery couch
as on a bank in Arden -
my only rose tonite's the treat
of my own nudity.

IN THE BAGGAGE ROOM AT GREYHOUND
I
In the depths of the Greyhound Terminal
sitting dumbly on a baggage truck looking at the sky waiting for
the Los Angeles Express to depart
worrying about eternity over the Post Office roof in the night-time
red downtown heaven,
staring through my eyeglasses I realized shuddering these thoughts
were not eternity, nor the poverty of our lives, irritable
baggage clerks,
nor the millions of weeping relatives surrounding the buses waving
goodbye,
nor other millions of the poor rushing around from city to city to
see their loved ones,
nor an indian dead with fright talking to a huge cop by the Coke
·
machine,
nor this trembling old lady with a cane taking the last trip of her
life,
nor the red capped cynical porter collecting his quarters and
smiling over the smashed baggage,
nor me looking around at the horrible dream,
nor mustached negro Operating Clerk named Spade, dealing out
with his marvelous long hand the fate of thousands of
express packages,
nor fairy Sam in the basement limping from leaden trunk to trunk,
nor Joe at the counter with his nervous breakdown smiling cowardly
at the customers,
nor the grayish-green whale's stomach interior loft where we keep
the baggage in hideous racks,
36
hundreds of suitcases full of tragedy rocking back and forth waiting
to be opened,
nor the baggage that's lost, nor damaged handles, nameplates
vanished, busted wires & broken ropes, whole trunks
exploding on the concrete floor,
nor seabags emptied into the night in the final warehouse.
II
Yet Spade reminded me of Angel, unloading a bus,
dressed in blue overalls black face official Angel's workman cap,
pushing with his belly a huge tin horse piled high with black
baggage,
looking up as he passed the yellow light bulb of the loft
and holding high on his arm an iron shepherd's crook.
III
It was the racks, I realized, sitting myself on top of them now as is
my wont at lunchtime to rest my tired foot,
it was the racks, great wooden shelves and stanchions posts and
beams assembled floor to roof jumbled with baggage,
-the Japanese white metal postwar trunk gaudily flowered &
headed for Fort Bragg,
one Mexican green paper package in purple rope adorned with
names for Nogales,
hundreds of radiators all at once for Eureka,
crates of Hawaiian underwear,
rolls of posters scattered over the Peninsula, nuts to Sacramento,
one human eye for Napa,
37
an aluminum box of human blood for Stockton
and a little red package of teeth for Calistoga-
it was the racks and these on the racks I saw naked in electric
light the night before I quit,
the racks were created to hang our possessions, to keep us together,
a temporary shift in space,
God's only way of building the rickety structure of Time,
to hold the bags to send on the roads, to carry our luggage frmn
place to place
looking for a bus to ride us back home to Eternity where the heart
was left and farewell tears began.
IV
A swarm of baggage sitting by the counter as the transcontinental
bus pulls in.
The clock registering 12.15 A.M., May 9, 1956, the second hand
moving forward, red.
Getting ready to load my last bus.- Farewell, Walnut Creek
Richmond Vallejo Portland Pacific Highway
Fleet-footed Quicksilver, God of transience.
One last package sits lone at midnight sticking up out of the Coast
rack high as the dusty fluorescent light.
The wage they pay us is too low to live on. Tragedy reduced to
numbers.
This for the poor shepherds. I am a communist.
Farewell ye Greyhound where I suffered so much,
hurt my knee and scraped my hand and built my pectoral muscles
big as vagina.

AMERICA
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 fuck 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.
32
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. Businessmen 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 cousist of two joints of marijuana millions of
genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400
miles an hour and twentyfive-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.
33
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 & V anzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist 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 sincere 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 fillingstations.
34
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 queer shoulder to the wheel.

SUNFLOWER SUTRA
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down
under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to
look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole,
companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul,
bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled
steel roots of trees of machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top
of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in
those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hungover
like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow
against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of
ancient sawdust-
- I rushed up enchanted - it was my first sunflower, memories
of Blake - my visions - Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy
Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires
forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank,
condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the
dank muck and the razor sharp artifacts passing into the
past-
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak
and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden
locomotives in its eye -
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered
crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless
mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head
like a dried wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the
29
sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black
twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower 0 my soul,
I loved you then !
The grime was no man's grime but death and human
locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that
smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis'ry, that sooty hand
or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirtindustrial-
modern- all that civilization spotting your
crazy golden crown -
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends
and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and
sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and
innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I
name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of
wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses
out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos- all these
entapgled in your mummied roots- and you there standing before
me in the sunset, all your glory in your form !
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely
sunflower existence ! a sweet natural eye to the new hip
moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset
shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze !
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while
you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when
did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent
dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the
specter and shade of a once powerful mad American
locomotive?
30
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower !
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not !
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my
side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul too, and anyone
who'll listen,
- \Ve're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty
imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers
inside, we're blessed by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers
.in the ·Sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow
of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan
evening sitdown vision.
Berkeley 1955

TRANSCRIPTION OF ORGAN MUSIC
The flower in the glass peanut bottle formerly in the kitchen
crooked to take a place in the light,
the closet door opened, because I used it before, it kindly stayed
open waiting for me, its owner.
I began to feel my misery in pallet on floor, listening to musiC,
my misery, that's why I want to sing.
The room closed down on me, I expected the presence of the
Creator, I saw my gray painted walls and ceiling, they
contained my room, they contained me
as the sky contained my garden,
I opened my door
The rambler vine climbed up the cottage post, the
leaves in the night still where the day had placed them, the animal
heads of the flowers where they had arisen
to think at the sun
Can I bring back the words? Will thought of transcription
haze my mental open eye?
The kindly search for growth, the gracious desire to exist of
the flowers, my near ecstasy at existing among them
The privilege to witness my existence- you too must seek
the sun . . .
My books piled up before me for my use
waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't
disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to usemy
words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.
26
I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of
things, walked out to the garden crying.
Saw the red blossoms in the night light, sun's gone, they had
all grown, in a moment, and were waiting stopped in time for the
day sun to come and give them ... .
Flowers which as in a dream at sunset I watered faithfully not
knowing how much I loved them.
I am so lonely in my glory- except they too out there- I
looked up- those red bush blossoms beckoning and peering in the
window waiting in blind love, their leaves too have hope and are
upturned top flat to the sky to receive- all creation open to
receive- the flat earth itself.
The music descends, as does the tall bending stalk of the heavy
blossom, because it has to, to stay alive, to continue to the last
drop of joy.
The world kr.ows the love that's in its breast as in the flower,
the suffering lonely world.
The Father is merciful.
The light socket is crudely attached to the ceiling, after the
house was built, to receive a plug which sticks in it alright, and
serves my phonograph now . . .
The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it
open, it has graciously stayed open.
The kitchen has no door, the hole there will admit me should
I wish to enter the kitchen.
I remember when I first got laid, H. P. graciously took my
cherry, I sat on the docks of Provincetown, age 23, joyful, elevated
in hope with the Father, the door to the womb was open to admit
me if I wished to enter.
27
There are unused electricity plugs all over my house if I ever
need them.
The kitchen window is open, to admit air ...
The telephone- sad to relate- sits on the floor- I haven't
the money to get it connected-
I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted
with poetry, he has seen the presence of the Creator.
And the Creator gave me a shot of his presence to gratify my
wish, so as not to cheat me of my yearning for him.
Berkeley 1955

A SUPERMARKET IN CALIFORNIA
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations
!
What peaches and what penumbras ! Whole families
shopping at night ! Aisles full of husbands ! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes ! - and you, Garcia Lorca,
what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the
grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each : Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
{I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd. )
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees
add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.
24
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past
blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry
and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the
boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
Berkeley 1955

HOWL FOR CARL SOLOMON
When he was younger, and I was younger, I used to know
Allen Ginsberg, a young poet living in Paterson, New Jersey,
where he, son of a well-known poet, had been born and grew
up. He was physically slight of build and mentally much
disturbed by the life which he had encountered about him
during those first years after the first world war as it was exhibited
to him in and about New York City. He was always on
the point of ' going away ', where it didn't seem to matter; he
disturbed me, I never thought he'd live to grow up and write
a book of poems. His ability to survive, travel, and go on
writing astonishes me. That he has gone on developing and
perfecting his art is no less amazing to me.
Now he turns up fifteen or twenty years later with an arresting
poem. Literally he has, from all the evidence, been through
hell. On the way he met a man named Carl Solomon with
whom he shared among the teeth and excrement of this life
something that cannot be described but in the words he has
used to describe it. It is a howl of defeat. Not defeat at all for
he has gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience,
a trivial experience. Everyone in this life is defeated but a man,
if he be a man, is not defeated.
It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body,
through the horrifying experiences described from life in these
pages. The wonder of the thing is not that he has survived
but that he, from the very depths, has found a fellow whom he
can love, a love he celebrates without looking aside in these
poems. Say what you will, he proves to us, in spite of the most
debasing experiences that life can offer a man, the spirit of
love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the
courage and the faith - and the art ! to persist.
8
It is the belief in the art of poetry that has gone hand in hand
with this man into his Golgotha, from that charnel house,
similar in every way, to that of the Jews in the past war. But
this is in our own country, our own fondest purlieus. We are
blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are
damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the
angels. This poet sees through and all around the horrors he
partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids
nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims
it as his own - and, we believe, laughs at it and has the
time and affrontery to love a fellow of his choice and record
that love in a well-made poem.
Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are gomg
through hell.
William Carlos Williams.
9
HOWL
for
Carl Solomon
I
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,
10
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 afternoon 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,
a 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-grindings and
migraines of China under junk-withdrawal 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,
11
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow
toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop
kaballa 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 streetlight 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 conunitting no crime but their own wild
cooking pederasty and intoxication,
12
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 rosegardens and the
grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen
freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccupped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob
behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blonde &
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 gyzyrn 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 sunrise, 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
13
& especially secret gas-station solipisisms 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 hungover 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
14
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 alleyways & 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
1930's German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up
groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the
blast of colossal steamwhistles,
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,
15
who crashed through their minds in jail wa1tmg for impossible
criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality m
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 hypnotism &
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 metrasol
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 madman 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 AM
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-
16
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.
17
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls
and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable
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 judgement! 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 ab;mdon !
Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
18
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries!
spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks!
monstrous bombs !
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements,
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 !
19
III
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
20
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 twentyfive-thousand mad comrades all
together singing the final stanzas of the lnternationale
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 0 skinny legions run outside 0 starryspangled
shock of mercy the eternal war is here 0 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
San Francisco 1955-56
21
FOOTNOTE TO HOWL
Holy ! Holy ! Holy ! Holy ! Holy ! Holy! Holy ! Holy ! Holy !
Holy ! Holy ! Holy ! Holy ! Holy ! Holy !
The world is holy ! The soul is holy ! The skin is holy ! The nose
is holy ! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy !
Everything is holy ! everybody's holy ! everywhere is holy !
everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!
The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my
soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the
hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy !
Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac
holy Huneke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown
buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human
angels!
Holy my mother in the insane asylum ! Holy the cocks of the
grandfathers of Kansas !
Holy the groaning saxophone ! Holy the bop apocalypse ! Holy the
jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace & junk & drums!
Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the
cafeterias filled with the millions ! Holy the mysterious
rivers of tears under the streets !
Holy the lone juggernaut ! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass
! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion ! Who digs
Los Angeles IS Los Angeles !
Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy
Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul !
Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space
holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy
the Angel in Moloch !
22
Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive
holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles
holy the eyeball holy the abyss !
Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies!
suffering! magnanimity!
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the
soul!

Ginsberg en John Lennon liggen qua filisofie dicht bij elkaar.
Ginsberg gaat alleen wat verder door naar perfectie van ons geluksgevoel.
Het geef mij hoop door te blijven dromen en me in te zetten de perfektie van geluk op deze arde na te streven.
Hoop doet leven ,verdrijft weerstanden en angsten .

America
Allan Ginsberg - 1956

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 fuck 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. Businessmen 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 jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-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 Communist 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 sincere 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 the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.
America you don’t really want to go to war.
America its 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 Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
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 queer shoulder to the wheel.

"I saw the best minds of my generation starving, hysterical, naked..." - Allan Ginsberg

"Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls" - Allan Ginsberg