America 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 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.
My favorite thing about this poem is listening to Ginsberg read it, especially with music. He reads it almost like a comedy.
Wooden Heart by Listener
We’re all born to broken people on their most honest day of living
And since that first breath, we’ll need grace that we’ve never given (well)
Well, I've been haunted by standard red devils and white ghosts
It's not only when these eyes are closed
These lies are ropes that I tie down in my stomach
But they hold this ship together, tossed like leaves in this weather
My dreams are sails that I point towards my true north
Stretched thin over my rib bones, and pray that it gets better
But it won’t, at least I don’t believe it will...
So I've built a wooden heart inside this iron ship
To sail these blood red seas and find your coasts
Don’t let these waves wash away your hopes
This war-ship is sinking, and I still believe in anchors
Pulling fist fulls of rotten wood from my heart, oh
I still believe in saviors
Because we are all made out of shipwrecks, every single board
Washed and bound like crooked teeth on these rocky shores
So come on and let’s wash each other
With tears of joy and tears of grief
And fold our lives like crashing waves and run up on this beach
Come on and sew us together
Just some tattered rags stained forever
We only have what we remember
I am the barely-living son of a woman and man who barely made it
But we’re making it
Taped together on borrowed crutches and new starts
We all have the same holes in our hearts
Everything falls apart at the exact same time
It all comes together perfectly for the next step
But my fear is this prison that I keep locked below the main deck
I keep a key under my pillow, it’s quiet and it’s hidden
And my hopes are weapons that I’m still learning how to use right
But they’re heavy and I’m awkward, I'm always running out of fight
So I’ve carved a wooden heart, put it in this sinking ship
Hoping it would help me float for just a few more weeks
But I am all made out of shipwrecks, every twisted beam
Lost and found like you and me, all scattered out on the seas
So come on, let’s wash each other
With tears of joy and tears of grief
And fold our lives like crashing waves and run up on this beach
Come on and sew us together
We're just some tattered rags stained forever
We only have what we remember
My throat, it still tastes like house fire and salt water
I wear this tide like loose skin, come on and rock me to sea
If we hold on tight, we’ll hold each other together
And not just be some fools rushing to die in our sleep
While these machines will rust, I promise
But we'll still be electric, shocking each other back to life
Your hand in mine, my fingers and your veins connected
Our bones grown together in time
Our hands entwined, and my fingers and your veins connected
Our spines grown stronger inside
'Cause I know that our church is all made out of shipwrecks
From every hull these rocks have claimed
But we pick ourselves up
And try and grow better through this change
So come on and let’s wash each other
With tears of joy and tears of grief
And fold our lives like crashing waves and run up on this beach
Come on and sew us together
We're just some tattered rags stained forever
We only have what we remember
Ten Thousand Days for the Sword
Much of #penny-arcade
Phrases I like
How did you get here?
I just stuck out my thumb
What are you doing here?
My best
Sam Kriss
Charles likes helicopters. It might be the only thing he has in common with his family: they’re all helicopter pilots. Rescue pilots, military pilots. It’s chivalry again. The armoured knights of the atomic age.
(source)
shooting an arrow and painting a bullseye around it (sources)
when they burned the library of Alexandria the crowd cheered in horrible joy. They understood that there was something older than wisdom, and it was fire, and something truer than words, and it was ashes (source)