JAC ROUAC

POMES ALL SIZES

INTRODUCTION RY ALLEN GINSBERG

THE POCKET POETS SERIES #48

C IT Y L I C �ITS B 0 0 K S

SAN FRANCISCO
POMES A LL SIZES© 1992 by John Sampas, Literary Representative
Introduction© 1992 by A llen Ginsberg

Cover: Kerouac. Painting by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1990.

Courtesy of Dennis Q. Sullivan
Cover Design: John Miller, Big Fish Books
Ty pesetting: Jeff Brandenburg, ImageComp
Production Coordination: Eric Houts

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969.

[Poems. Selections]
Parnes all sizes I by Jack Kerouac..
p. em.- (Pocket poets series; no. 48)
·ISBN 0-87286-269-0 : $10.95
I. Title.
Ps3521.E735A 6 1992
811'.54-dc20
92-1204
CIP

City Lights Books are available to bookstores through our primary

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regional distributors. For personal orders and catalogs, please write to
City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133.

CITY LIGHT S BOOKS are edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and

Nancy J. Peters and published at the City Lights Bookstore,
261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133.

10 9 8 7
 CON TEN TS

Introduction by Allen Ginsberg I 1

Bus East I 1
Hitchhiker I 8
Neal in Court I 9
Bowery Blues I 14 ,

On Waking from a Dream of Robert Fournier I 26-27

God I 42
Haiku Berkeley I 43
Poim I 47
Various Little Pomes I 48
Two Dharma Notes I 51
Catha I 52
Beginning with a Few Haikus I 56
[Enlightenments] I 66
On Ether I 73
Letter to Allen 1955 I 75
Mexico Rooftop I 76
Mexican Loneliness I 78
The Last Hotel I 80
Berkeley Song in F Major I 81
A Sudden Sketch Poem I 87
Poem Written In the Zoco Chico I 89
Three Tangier Poems I 90
Tangier Poem I 91
Poem I 92
Flies I 94
Poem I 95
How to Meditate I 96
Buddha I 97
Poem I 100
Haiku I 100
My Views on Religion I 10 1
Lady I 103
Cari tas I 104
Poem I 107
Lil Poem on Louis Ferdinand Celine I 108
.

Skid Row Wine I 109

The Moon I Ill
Poem I 1 1 2
The Thrashing Doves I 1 13
The Sea-Shroud I 1 15
My Gang I 1 17
Pax I 120
Haiku I 12 1
Prayer I 121
Poem I 121
Angel Mine I 122
Perm I 122
Poems of the Buddhas of Old I 123
Morphine I 132
Silly Goofball Pomes I 133
Pome I 137
3 Poems about Titles of Novels I 138
To Lou Little I 14 1
Airapetianz I 143
If I Were jesus, God I 145
Idiot I 146
Old Western Movies I 148
Woman I 150
Hymn I 151
Goofball Blues I 153
Goofball Sillypomes I 154
Drunken Scribbling Poem I 155
Running Through-Chinese Poem Song I 156
Sken 3 I 160
Cognac Blues I 161
Beau Bebe I 162
The Shack of Desolation I 163
Poor Sottish Kerouac I 164
Long Island Chinese Poem Rain I 1 65
Pome I 166
Pome on Doctor Sax I 167
A Curse at the Devil I 170
 IN TRODUC TION

BY ALLEN GINSBERG

Part I
KERouAc's PoMES ALL SnEs

He was Poet: - You guys call yourselves poets, write little short lines, I'm a
poet but I write lines paragraphs and pages and many pages long. Thus he
wrote in mid-50s, a letter from Mexico City enclosing a scroll of his
Blues.
Thus his ear auditing Burroughs' naked prose poetry: "Motel
motel motel loneliness moans along still oily tidal waters of East
Texas bayous . . . "

His ear followed the road of sound: " . . . the mad road, keening
in a seizure of tarpaulin power." He didn 't know what the phrase
meant, as he wrote it, later realized that "tarpaulin" covered truck
gondolas piled with logs or pipes.
His ear came from reading and music: Thomas Wolfe, Herman
Melville, Shakespeare, C. F. Atkinson's translation of Spengler's Ger­
manic portentous sound in TheDecline of the West, Sir Thomas Browne,
Rabelais, Shelley, Poe, Hart Crane - a romantic ear. And modern
Whitman, Eliot, Pound, Celine and Genet. Soul from Dostoyevsky
and Gogol. Music from Bach 's "St. Matthew Passion" to Thelonious
Monk's "Mysterioso."

1
 His influence is worldwide, not only in spirit, with beat planetary
Youth Culture, but poetic, technical. It woke Bob Dylan to world
minstrelry: "How do you know Kerouac 's poetry?" I asked Mr. Dylan
after we improvised songs and read some Mexico City Blues choruses
over Kerouac's gravestone 1976 Lowell's Edison Cemetery, cameras
on us walking side by side under high trees and shifting clouds as we
disappeared down distant aisles of gravestones. Dylan's answer: Some­
one handed me Mexico City Blues in St.Paul in 1959 and it blew my mind.
He said it was the first poetry that spoke his own language.
My own poetry's always been modeled on Kerouac's practice of
tracing his mind's thoughts and sounds directly on the page. Poetry
can be 'Writing the mind," the Ven. Chogyam Trungpa phrased it,
corollary to his slogan "First thought, best thought, " itself parallel to
Kerouac's formulation "Mind is shapely, Art is shapely." Reading
Mexico City Blues to that great Buddhist teacher from the front carseat
on a long drive Karme Choling Retreat Center ( 1972 called Tail of
the Tiger) to New York, Trungpa laughed all the way as he listened:
"Anger doesn't like to be reminded of fits . . . . The wheel of the
quivering meat conception . . . . The doll-like way she stands / bow­
legged in my dreams waiting to serve me . . . . Don't ignore other
parts of the mind . . . . " As we got out of the car he stood on the
pavement and said, It's a perfect exposition of mind.
The next day he told me, I kept hearing Kerouac's voice all night, or
yours and Anne Waldman's . . . . It' d given him a ne\v idea of American
poetry, for his own poetry - thus Trungpa Rinpoche's last decade's
open-form international spontaneous style _First Thought Best Thought
poetry collection. Thus two years later the 'Jack Kerouac School of
Disembodied Poetics" was founded with Naropa Institute, certainly a

..
11
center for meeting of classical Eastern wisdom meditative practice
with Western alert spontaneous candid thought, healthy synthesis of
Eastern and Western Mind, at last these twain 've met forever Hallelu-
jah Svaha!
But back to America in mid-50s - the scroll of Mexico City Blues
mailed to our cottage in Berkeley inspired poet Philip Whalen to
write "Big Baby Buddha Golden 65 feet high" ( "Big high song for
somebody") . Philip Lamantia, authentic surrealist American poet,
had already delighted in Kerouac's catholic tender mind Big Sur
1950 on Peyote.
Gary Snyder preparing to go to Japan was impressed by Kerouac's
intuitive familiarity with Dharma sutra and its manifestation in Blues:
VVhen Ifirst saw Mexico City Blues I was immediately taken by the ease of it,
the effortless way it moved on - apparently effortless - at the same time there
was some constant surprise arising in the words, always something happening
with the words. You can see the mind at work, see the mind in it.Each poem
was complete in itself, each had a similar mode of movement, each like a little
stanza born.In the year [1955] I was getting to knowjack, I was touched by
Mexico City Blues and Whitman, the same influence at that time, struck by
poems Kerouac published in the Berkeley Bussei.
Michael McClure was inspired to the later ditties of September
Blackberries.It 's the sheer beauty of his treatment of everyday divine world ...
.

the smallest voice was equal to the most heroic chunk of matter ....In
addition I was illuminated, thrilled, deeply moved by seeing the natural
unplanned growth of them, poem after poem, each with a life of its own ....
There s a movement thru space of an energy, a system that acts to organize that
system. You see Kerouac 's flow, you can follow his spiritual energy as the
system moves along acting to organize itself into a great religious poem. He s

111
the model from which the spirit drives outward organizing itself into a
previously nonexistent structure - equivalent to life, it 's like a living being,
Mexico City Blues.
All San Francisco Renaissance poets were curious, interested,
impressed, sometimes inspired by Kerouac's solitary autocthonous
strength, ear, Kerouac's sound, his unobstructed grasp of American
idiom. Thus Robert Duncan's astonishment at Kerouac's "Belief and
Technique for Modern Prose: List of Essentials" I'd tacked on my
wall when he visited Marconi Hotel, North Beach 1955.
Robert Creeley speaks of that time: Jack had an extraordinary ear,
that impeccable ear that could hearpatterns and make patterns in the sounds
and rhythms of the language as spoken.Extraordinary ear, in the way he
could manage such a live and insistently natural structure.Jack was a genius
at the register of the speaking voice, a human voice talking.Its effect on my
poetry? He gave an absolute measure of what the range of that kind of writing
was.
Before that, the standards ranged from Cummings to Prevert, but with
Kerouac we had a hy,man voice, not as imitation, but as fact of that voice
talking. That he could do it in both poetry and prose interested me.
Same confusion of critics as with Lawrence, the constant problem of falling
between two stools, prose and poetry.He was classified as novelist despite the
evidence of "October in the Railroad Earth," Mexico City Blues, and
Visions of Cody that the distinction between the two forms was in certain
writers artificial - they are inseparable. Kerouac s simultaneous ability in
prose and poetry, like Hardy, like Lawrence, like Joyce, like Jean Genet, like
Burroughs, proposes questions that are more fruitful to contemplate than to
dismiss ....

IV
 Kerouac was a writer, as Burroughs remarked; that is, he wrote.He
practiced writing, and for him writing was a sacred practice as he
himself prayed, "I made a supplication in this dream." Holy recol­
lected visions of mortal existence with panoramic scope of suffering
and transitoriness - Buddhist sympathy and Catholic compassion
- gave motif constantly lofty and playful - the very mind of poetry.
So Olson championed Kerouac from a distance. And Lew Welch
drove across American with him, writing Haiku.
The second generation of New York school, well-versed in the
spontaneous sophistications of O' Hara and Ashbery, recognized
Kerouac's genius and were influenced by this American spontaneity
- Ted Berrigan and Aram Saroyan notably, who interviewed him
for Paris Review; Tom Clark and Anne Waldman, themselves powers
at St. Mark's Poetry Project, inherited some of Kerouac's energy and
intelligence in U.S. ordinary mind - sacred mind, pop art mind,
Bop mind. And Leroijones (Amiri Baraka) , who liberated a world of
African-American verse, also caught some of Jack Kerouac's mind
and musical vibration and publicly praised Kerouac's theoretic ratio­
nale of authentic oral spontaneity. And certainly it was Kerouac who
collaborated with William Burroughs in Burroughs' first "hardboiled"
fiction back in 1945 and passed the roman tic "gemlike flame" of
sacred prose-poetry, h ome-made , personal , spontaneous, to
Burroughs himself: Kerouac was a catalyst there. And how many
would-be poets, ordinary poets, and genius poets in U.S. found
Kerouac's legend and texts a model inspiration?
Certainly a colossus, for his poetry books and parallel prose
poetry passages in novels (whether in still-life sketches of first 150

v
pages of Visions of Cod y, or the Shroud at the window of Dr Sax, or the
ear babble of "Old Angel Midnight") or the haiku, playful snapshots
& matured musings in the present posthumously published Pomes A ll
Sizes.Kerouac is a major, perhaps seminal, poet of the latter half of
U.S. XX Century - and mayhap thru his imprint on Dylan and
myself among others, a poetic influence over the entire planet. Jack
Kerouac was above all a poet's poet, as well as a people 's poet and an
Ivory Tower poet, like Rimbaud legended to youth round the world.
Alas a poet not yet appreciated by the Academy as represented by
major college Anthologies used in the quarter century or so since
Kerouac 's death 1969. Nineteen-sixties' New A merican Poetry intro­
duced Kerouac to the world of Anthology (as well as myself, O'Hara,
Ashbery, Corso, Koch, Olson, Creeley, Lamantia, Wieners, Snyder,
Levertov, et al. ) . Following that - total amnesia! But look in 1990s'
Norton, Macmillan, Harvard, O,xford, Heath, etc. etc. textbooks
lined up row after row in College Bookstores, arriving at English
Department mailboxes, heavy tomes authored by Professors from
sea to shining sea, published with groaning labor, we find poet after
poet influenced consciously by Kerouac, or swept up unconsciously
into the cultural stream of self-empowerment - initiated by Kerouac
- academic poets with loosened verse, minority poets of all colors
indebted to Kerouac's bardic breakthru - But where 's a text of
Kerouac? Nowhere to be found to astonish and delight youngsters
who open these classroom books. Mediocre poets mix with modern
great names, experimental poets mix with re-formalist pigmies, first­
rate ordinary versifiers mix with multicultural identity boosters. But
Kerouac the author-catalyst of this American Literary Revolution?
Not yet to be found in "establishment" Anthologies!

.
VI
 He'll be read in volumes like this, which Kerouac himself pre­
pared before his death for City Lights Books, publisher of his out­
landish classic original Book of Dreams ( 1961 ) , and first posthumous
Scattered Poems ( 1971 ) . Lawrence Ferlinghetti speaks: I was influenced
by Kerouac, not in the 50s by Mexico City Blues, but years later. I stole quite
a few images from him - I've used that "quivering meat wheel" . ... I
remem ber, from Jacks French poems, I picked up on how you can blend the
French and English, and I did that in some of my poems.He s a hero to French
Canadian writers, not only to prose writers but also brother to Qyibecois poets.
Here's a treasure - in the mainstream of American Literature,
random as this collection is, of notebook jottings, little magazine
items - containing lovely familiar classic Kerouacisms, nostalgic
gathas from 1955 Berkeley cottage days, pure sober tender Kerouac
of your yore, pithy exquisite later drunken laments and bitter nuts
and verses. Pomes A ll Sizes- modest title - to be appreciated by
cognoscenti and literate strangers - more valuable for being isolato,
original, unrecognized, exactly because such beauty 's too personal
to be noticed by literature ' s officialdom - "mis-noticed " -
sociopolitically "inconvenient" to include in the exasperating parade
of college-wise-notable acceptable poetry collections by profession­
als and editors.
''This prophecy Merlin shall make for I live before his time:" 'Till
Kerouac as poet's understood, his formal verse beauty visible to
scholars, and his surprise mind tenderness taken straight-forwardly
and felt by vulnerable Professors, the teaching ofAmerican literature'll
never get on the right track, a conscious breath of U.S. poetry be
neglected, the nation won't exhale its own compassionate spirit,
hordes of literary bureaucrats will continue to snuffle shallow inspi-

. .

Vll
ration and new generations'll be turned off to Poetry except for
individual chance in finding this original Kerouac book or works by
Kerouac fellow traveler poets like-minded and lighthearted on the
same road announced by Walt Whitman.

New Year's Day 1992

Part II
RETROSPECT ON BEAT GENERATION

Meditating, still thinking of Kerouac's role as Dharma Bodhisattva

Bringer or Messenger in Mexico City Blues, and after conversation
with Wm. Burroughs at 4:00 pm, inquiring Jack's catalytic effect in
encouraging Bill to write - also having inspected Ann Charters'
Viking Portable Library 1992 Beat Reader, ruminated: -
That the quality most pure in Kerouac was his grasp that life is
really a dream ( "a dream already ended, " he wrote) as well as being
real, both real and dream, both at the same time - a deep insight
_
that cut through knots of artificial intellect, extremism, totalitarian
rationality, "new reasons for spitefulness," cut through all the basic
vanity, resentment, & wrongheadedness that cursed most XX-Cen­
tury political and literary movements - or weakened them with
impermanent grounding or stained them with the fog of misdirection.
That realization of dream as the suchness of this universe pervaded
the spiritual intelligence of all Beat writers on differing levels, whether
Burroughs' suspicion of all "apparent sensory phenomena"; Herbert

Vlll
Huneke's Evening Sun Turned Crimson; Corso's paradoxical wit (viz. ,
"Death hiding beneath the kitchen sink: 'I'm not real' it cried, 'I'm
just a rumor spread by Life, ' " a late paradox, or his earlier "Dirty
Ears aims a knife at me I I pump him full of lost watches") ; or
Orlovsky's compassionate view ofMinnerbia, "Her teeth-brush dream
is the one she loves best"; or Snyder's meditations in mind wilder­
ness; or Sensei VVhalen's pithy aphorisms, "Poetry is a graph of the
mind moving"; or McClure's insight into the gnat, "Nature abhors a
vacuum"; or Lamantia's Ecstasis prophecy, "I long for the I it is
nameless that I long for"; even John Wieners' heavy woe's the work
of conscious dreamer, "Particles of light I worshipped in the pitches
of the nigh t."
But the doctrine of consciousness of Sunyata, emptiness, with all
its transcendental wisdom including panoramic awareness, oceanic
city vastness, a humoresque appreciation of minute details of the big
dream, especially "character in the bleak inhuman aloneness" in
"Memorial Cello Time" is most clearly and consistently set forth in
the body of Kerouac's prose, poetry, and essays.
This basic metaphysical understanding of the eternal nature of
dream, more or less clearly perceived by the various "Beat" authors
according to their individual temperaments, served as common
ground and saved their essential work from the decay of tirne -
because the "message" was permanent, as "change" and "emptiness"
are a permanent gnosis from Heraclitus' time to now. As Beauty itself
is the realization of simultaneous "emptiness" & "form," the co­
emergent wisdom of Buddhadharma.
"Come back and tell me in a hundred years," Kerouac com­
manded - his koan.

IX
 "What was the face you had before you were born? " - that
question was always at the heart of Beat poetry. It could be called the
"Golden Ash" school, as Kerouac qualified existence. Thus Beat: "a
dream already ended . . . " Thus beatific, "the Golden Ash" of dream.
One could call this Heart Failure a big success.

1/8/92

X
 BUS EAST

Poem written on a bus April 1954

from S.E to New York

Bus EAsT

Society , h as good intentions

Bureaucracy is like a friend

5 years ago-other furies

other losses-

America's trying
to control the
uncon trollable
Forest fires,
Vice

The essen tial smile

In the essential sleep
Of the children
Of the essential mind

I'm all thru playing

the American
Now I'm going to
live a good quiet life

I
The world should be
built for foot walkers

Oily rivers
Of spiney N evady

I am jake Cake
Rake
Write like Blake

The horse is not

pleased
Sight of his
gorgeous finery
in the dust
Its silken nostrils
did disgust

Cats arent kind

Kiddies arent sweet

April in Nevada­
lnvestigatin Dismal Cheyenne
Where the war parties
In fields of straw
Aimed over oxen
At Indian Chiefs
In wild headdress

2
Pouring thru the gap
In Wyoming plain
To make the settlers
Eat more dust
than dust was eaten
In the States
From East at Seacoast
Where wagons made up
To dreadful Plains
Of clazer vup

Saltry settlers
Anxious to masturbate
The Mongol Sea
( I ' m too tired
in Cheyenne-No
sleep in 4 nights now, &
2 to go)

NEBRASKA
April doesn t hurt here
Like it does in New England
The ground
Vast and brown
Surrounds dry towns
Located in the dust
Of the coming locust

3
Live for survival, not for "kicks"

Be a bangtail describer,
like of shrouded traveler
in Textile tenement &
the birds fighting in yr
ears-like Burroughs
exact to describe &
gettin $

The Angry Hunger

( hunger is anger
who fears
the hungry
feareth
the angry)

And so I came home

To Golden far away
Twas on the horizon -
Every blessed day
As we rolled
And we rolled
From Donner tragic Pass
Thru April in Nevada
And out Salt City Way
Into the dry Nebraskas
And sad Wyomings

4
Where young girls
And pretty lover boys
With Mickey Mantle eyes
Wander under moons
Sawing in lost cradle
And judge 0 Fastera
Passes whiggling by
To ask of young love :
"Was it the same wind
Of April Plains eve
that ruffled the dress
Of my lost love
Louanna
In the Western
Far off night
Lost as the whistle
Of the passing Train
Everywhere West
Roams moaning
The deep basso
-Vom! Vom!
-Was it the same love
Notified my bones
As mortify yrs now
Children of the soft
Wyoming April night?
Couldna been!
But was! But was !"

5
And on the prairie
The wildflower blows
In the night
For bees & birds
And sleeping hidden
Animals of life.

Then Chicago
Spitters in the spotty street
Cheap beans, loop,
Girls made eyes at me
And I had 35
Cents in my jeans-

Then Toledo
Springtime starry
Lover night
Of hot rod boys
And cool girls
A wandering
A wandering
In search of April pain
A plash of rain
Will not dispel
This fumigatin hell
Of lover lane
This park of roses
Blue as bees

6
I n former airy poses
In aerial 0 Way hoses
No tamarand
An d figancine
Can the musterand
Be less kind
Sol-
Sol-
Bring forth yr
Ah Sunflower-
Ah me Montana
Phosphorescen t Rose
An d bridge in
fairly land
I ' d understand it all-

7
 HI TCHHIKER

"Tryna get to sunny Californy"-

Boom . I t's the awful raincoat
making me look like a selfdefeated self­
murdering imaginary gangster, an idiot in
a rueful coat, how can they understand
my damp packs- my mud packs-
"Lookjohn, a hitchhiker"
"He looks like he's gof a gun underneath
that I . R.A. coat"
"Look Fred, that man by the road "
"Some sexfiend got in print in 1938
in Sex Magazine "-
"You found his blue corpse in a
greenshade edition, with axe blots"

8
 NEAL IN COURT

All Neal's life has been hard

And harsh
People don t believe him
And he's all alone
Look at his bones
In courthouse scenes
And look at the pictures
Of his railroad track
And judge
And have secret witnesses
Against his misery

Raven, Craven,
Nobody cares-
Hate to lose their jobs
Put old Cassady in jail

But he sits bong Buddha

Hands Catholic crossed
In the witness chair

And the afternoon wears on

In the schoolhouse kiddy court
Of old black velve t angels

9
With white hair
And tassels in their caps

He did make the joint;

Facts of Coupling;
"You give a sign
To the engineer"

He 's got them beat

With his young composure

Exhibit No. 4
Shows the long ladder
And the brake
Platform
Where he fell & cracked his ankle

He nods & listens patiently

To the prosecutor's counsel
Smiling speaking civilly
For the society of ladies
And respect of settlements
And has an aging chin .
The Jewish stenographess
Writes unconcerned

In silent machine shorthand

And watches sexily

10
 The lips of speaking men
And frowns to catch the last word
Spoken in Eternity
Eyes gazed on suit lapel
And burping to look down-

Papers rustle, people cough

Ivan 's not here to turn
all pale
Nor Dmitri but to shout
"You all tried to kill
yr fathers
The Immemorial Lout!"
So have an other beer
Neal
Your money
big or small ' ll
Come
And when come
You only have a few more
years
Like Raven
more or less
To hang on-

For you 've don e it all before

In Millbrae & in Burlingame
In Samarkand, Chandrapore,

II
Jamie, Cathy, Johnny
All were there -
Redwood, Belmont, & Nameless
too -
Harsh harbors, duties,­
Flower cars-& bums­
Dont let the punk
In smart brown. suit
Who cant lick you
In street fight
Screw you out of thousands
In this million years
Of strife, the Moose
of heaven 's looking down.

East end of the rail

West end of the Ram
The stars are looking down
On all yr pain & tears
And Allen Ginsberg loves you
And Carolyn too -
Le t old Raven lie
We ' ll hang him in the sea

Fog will kiss him

Make him shiver
Bones'll belie
His coral deficiency

12
Insincere & sad
The world 's a farce
To stand and sneer at
On the corner of
Snark & Phnark

March 30, 1954,

San francisco City Hall

13
 BOWERY BLUES

by jean-Louis

For I
Prophesy
That the night
Will be bright
With the gold
Of old
In the inn
Within.

Cooper Union Cafeteria-late cold March afternoon , the street

(Third Avenue ) is cobbled, cold, desolate with trolley tracks­
Some man on the corner is waving his hand down N o-ing some­
body emphatically and out of sight behind a black and white pillar,
cold clowns in the moment horror of the world-A Porto Rican
kid with a green stick, stooping to bat the sidewalk but changing
his mind and halting on -Two new small trucks parked-The
withery gray rose stone building across the street with its rime
heights in the quiet winter sky, inside are quiet workers by neon
entablatures prac ticing fan ning lessons with the murderous
Marbo -A yakking blonde with awful wide smile is making her
mouth lip talk to an old Bodhisattva papa on the sidewalk, the
tense quickness of her hard working words-Meanwhile a funny
bum with no sense tries to panhandle them and is waved away

14
stumbling, he doesnt care about society women embarrassed with
paper bags on sidewalks-Unutterably sad the broken winter
shattered face of a man passing in the bleak ripple -Followed by
a Russian boxer with an expression of Baltic lostness, something
grim and Slavic and so helplessly beyond my conditional ken or
ability to evaluate and believe that I shudder as at the touch of
cold stone to think of him, the sickened old awfulness of it like
slats of wood wall in an old brewery truck

Shin McOn tario with

no money, no bets, no
health , palls on by
pawing his inside coat
no hope of ever
seeing Miama again
since he lost his pickles
on Orchard Street
and his father
S t u h t e l f e d e hre d
him to hospitals
Of gray
bleak
bone
drying
in the moon
that mortifies his coat
and words sing

15
what mind
brings
Bleeding bloody seamen
Of Indian England
Battering in coats
Of Third Ave noo
With no sense and their brows
Streaked with wine sop
Blood of ogligit
Sad adventurers
Far from the pipe
Of Liverpool
The bean of bone
Bottle Liffey brown
Far hung unseen
Top tippers
Of ocean wave .
God bless & sing for them
As I can not
*

Cooper Union Blues,

The Musak is too Sod .
The gayety of grave
Candidates makes

16
My gut weep
And my brains
Are awash
Down the side of the
blue orange table
As little sneery snirfling
Porto Rican hero
Bats by booming
His coat pocket
Fisting to the Vicinity
Where Mortuary
Waits for bait.
(What kind of service
Do broken barrels give? )
0 have pity
Bodhisattva
Of Intellectual
Radiance !

Save the world from her eyebrows

Of beautiful illusion
Hope, 0 hope ,
0 Nope, 0 pope
*

17
Crowded coaters
In a fron t seat
Car, gray & grim,
Push on thru
To the basketball
*

Various absurd parades­

The strict in tact
Intent man with
Broken back
Balling his suitcase
Down from Washington
Building in the night
Passing little scaggly
Children with Ma' s
Of mopey hope .

Too sad, too sad

The well kept
Clean cut
Ferret man.

And the old blue Irishman

With untenable dignity
Beer bellying home
To drowsy dowdy 1V
Suppers of gravy
And bile -

18
Wearing old new coats
Meant to be smooth on youths
Wrinkled on his barrel
Like sea wind
Infatuating sea eyes
To thinkin
Ripples & old age
Are real .
*

Poor young husbandry

With coat of tan
Digging change in palms
For bleaker coffees
Than afternoon gloom
Where work of stone
Was endowed
With tired hope.
Hope 0 hope
Cooper Union Hope
0 Bowery of Hopes!
0 absence !
0 bli ttering real
Non staring redfaced
Wild reality!
Hiding in the night
Like my dead father

19
I see the crystal
Shavings shifting
Out of sight
Dropping pigeons of light
To the Turd World

Enough, sad ones­

False petals
Of pure lotus
In drugstore windows
Where cups of 0
Are smoked

Paddy McGilligan
Muttering in the street
Just hit town
From Calci bleak

Ole Mop Polock Pat

Angry as a cat
About to stumble
In to the movie
Of the night
Through which he sees
Mooda lands
Un seen
Like waking in the night
To transcendental Milk
In the room

20
Sad jewish respectable
rag men with trucks
And watchers
Shaking cloth
Into the gutter
Saying I dunno,no,no,
As gray green hat
Sits on their heads
Protecting them
From Infinity above
Which shines with white
Wide & brown black clouds
As Liberty Sun
Honks over the Sea
Sending Ships
From inner sea
Free
To de rool york
Pock Town of Part
Shelf High Hawk
Man Dung Town .
Rinkidink Charley is Crazy.
*

21
Ugly pig
Burping
In the sidewalk
As surrealistic
Typewriters
Swim singing by
And bigger marines
Lizard thru the side
Of the gloom
Like water
For this
is the Sea
Of
Reality.
*

The story of man

Makes me sick
Inside , outside,
I don t know why
Something so conditional
And all talk
Should hurt me so.

I am hurt
I am scared

22
I want to live
I want to die
I dont know
Where to turn
In the Void
And when
To cut
Out

For no Church told me

No Guru holds me
No advice
Just stone
Of New York
And on the cafeteria
We hear
The saxophone
0 dead Ruby
Died of Shot
In Thirty Two,
Sounding like old times
And de bombed
Empty decapitated
Murder by the clock.
And I see Shadows
Dancing in to Doom
In love, holding
Tight the lovely asses
Of the little girls

23
In love with sex
Showing themselves
In white undergarments
At elevated windows
Hoping for the Worst.

I cant take it
Anymore
If I cant hold
My little behind
To me in my room

Then it's goodbye

Sangsara
For me
Besides
Girls aren t as good
As they look
And Samadhi
Is better
Than you think
When it starts in
Hitting your head­
In with Buzz
Of glittergold
Heaven 's Angels
Wailing
Saying

24
We ve been waiting for you
Since Morning, Jack
-Why were you so long
Dallying in the sooty room?
This Transcendental Brilliance
Is the better part
(Of Nothingness
I sing)

Okay.
Qui t.
Mad.
Stop.

Mar 29, 1 955 , NY

25
Long Poem In Canuckian Child Patoi Probably Medi eval

Robert, Robert, ta belle grosse mere

enterez dan l'beurre-
La j me rapele
La j me rapele

Robert, t' e ta tit

Mais tu waite encore plus gros
Que tu I' est deja-
C' est toute un reve qu' arretera
Avant quon l'finisse -
Quand on laisse Ia Divinite
le finir
Robert, Robert­
Ou est ton arbre?
Quo sse qu' on y fai te avec tes
lndes especialles?
A tu tombez dans un trou
de tristesse avec moi
Dans Ia nuit commune
et sale et pire que mal?
Robert, ou est ton beau
frere? Tes ti te ridresse ,

26
 ON WAKING FROM A DREAM
OF ROBERT FOURNIER

And this is an English Blues

Robert, Robert, yr beautiful big mother

buried in butter -
Now I remember
Now I remember

Robert, you were small

But you ' ll be yet bigger
Than you are already­
I t's all a dream that'll end
Before we finish it­
Wh en we let Divinity
end it
Robert, Robert­
Where is your grass?
What' d they do with your
special nothingness?
Did you fall in a hole
of sadness with me
In the common nigh t
and dirty and worse than bad?
Robert, where is yr beautiful
brother? Yr little laughs,

27
 laughage, riendresse, malheur'se
aise- ou est ton son?
Ou sont les neiges?
les etoiles eloignez?
Les Reves?

Ya des faces dans l 'arbre

qu'il nous moque pas.
Robert, tes £leurs, tes femmes,
tes folles,-
tes friandises de hines
en cuisines.
Es tu mort ton gros pere
enterrez dans rna mer?
"Dread drizzle mere, Robert.
dread drizzle mere "
Je vue les armes de face
vegetables, comme des
picottes dans rna
noirceur d yeux-
J 'attend les ti fou
chantez leur musique
idiotique e t tendre
et charman t comme
comediens de Vienne,
Chante dans sa cabane ,
attend-

28
 "laughage ," nothingness, unhappy
ease-where is your sound?
Where are the snows?
the wandered stars?
The D reams?

There are faces in the tree

that do not mock us.
Robert, your flowers, your women,
your madwomen ,-
your delicacies of beans
in kitchens.
Is he dead your big father
buried in my sea?
"Dread drizzle mere, Robert,
dread drizzle mere"
I see the armies of faces
vegetable, like
pockmarks in my
darkness of eyes-
I hear the little nuts
singing their music
idiotic and tender
and charming like
comedians of Vienne,
sings in his shack,
waits-

29
 les rats mange sa granche
tandis qu'il chante !
Robert, Robert, les rats
mange son coeur, son
nom y' est Alain­
Alain nee Fournier
La chanson de Dieu rna
ren trez la oreilles assoir,
mon coeur, Robert, je veux
t' expliquer-
Fa pu de face souffrante
dans les bars brunes .
Laisse plus les chiens t'mordre ,
Offre leux plus ta patte
de pauvre brume, viens
avec moi au ciel pur,
ecoute
Je voue de co�pures
de chair dan mon aise­
Mais c 'est toute pardu
dans la meme luisante
ocean de l ' amour de Dieu
L'amor de Dios-_
Love of God-
J ' ai ta mere par les mains,
Marie Louise, je la sord,
J ' l a rna dan mon
l'eglise, j 'y allume des

30
 The rats eat his barn
while he sings !
Robert, Robert, the rats
eat his heart, his
name is Allen­
Allen born Fournier
The song of God
came in my ears tonight,
my heart, Robert, I wan t
to explain to you-
Make no more suffering grimaces
in the brown bars
Don ' t let the dogs bite you any more,
Offer them no more your leg
Of poor mist, come
with me to the pure heaven,
listen
I see scars
of fl esh in my ease­
But it's all lost
in the same shining
ocean of the Love of God
L' amor de Dios-
Love of God-
1 have your mother by the hands,
Marie Louise, I bring her out,
I put her in my
church, I light her

31
fleur, j 'la fa travaillez
pour le Bon Seigneur­
est pas peur Robert,
arne tendre et tranquil-
Ah c' est un reve pour
cossez les chose bati,
quoi d'autre?
Vien avec moi
Robert, assoir,
braille plus,-
Ren te avec moi dans
les Indes-
Fini l' reve,-
lnstruit ta mere, ton pere,
ton pauvre grand frere,
tes vieux freres du matin­
Sort!-
Monte!
Ascend!
Vas entour!
Ou tu peu !
Sur la terre comme tu peu tu pu,
pi c' est fini,-
Reve-inveiglez,
emorfouillez, fou,
candrassez,
impossiblement vife
et toignan t-

32
flowers, I make her work
for the Good Lord­
have no fear Robert,
soul tender and tranquil-
Ah it's a dream to
break things built,
what else?
Come with me
Robert, tonight,
cry no more , ­
Come in with me
into tpe Nothingnessess­
Finish the dream,-
Instruct your mother, your father,
your poor tall brother,
your old brothers of morning­
Go out!
Go up !
Ascend !
Go below!
Where you can !
On earth as you may you stink,
then it's finished-
Dream-inveigled,
mortified, crazy,
broken-up,
impossibly quick
and tugging-

33
Marde pour les chailles
moronique du diable­
La Vie n ' est Pas

Robert, Robert,
je tu perdu
dans Ia mer omnisce
pour toujours
dejas
helas- !
Les vignes mon tres les potos,
Les hommes souffres-
Les Bouddhes
chante tranquilement -­

entre tous -
La tristesse e t Ia mort
et I' amour false
de jambes et larmes­
Sort! - Rentre !
Monte ! Cour!
Dor!
Ecoute, Robert Ia priere
du Seigneur-pour tue ­
"0 Robert-qui a Ia -
clef du pouvoire
Leuve ta grosse main
diamante
Rende a rien les choses
idiotique deboute,

34
Shit for the whores
n1oronical of the devil­
Life is Not

Robert, Robert,
I 've lost you
in the ocean of omniscience
for ever
already
alas- !
The vines climb the posts,
Men suffer-
The Buddhas
sing tranquilly
throughout all-
The sadness and the death
and the false love
of legs and tears-
Go out!-Come in !
Go up! Run !
Sleep!
Listen, Robert, the prayer
of the Lord-for you­
"0 Robert-who has the
key of power
Raise your big hand
of diamond.
Bring to naugh t the things
idiotically standing,

35
 Detrui­
Extermine-
0 Robert, donneur du
courage, donne courage
tous qu'ils sont
en extremite de souffrance -
0 Robert, qui Purifie,
purifie tous qu ' ils sont
escalve d 'I' ego
Que le victor de
la souffrance, gagne ­
encore et encore -
0 Robert, parfaitement·

en connaissance de
Ia lumiere saint,
amene tou te les
pauvres vivants de
1' existence a ta
conna1ssance .
.

0 Robert, parfait en
sagesse et amour
tendre, sort toutes
les pauvres vivants de
leur prison d' existence
et amene Ia a
les Indes Sacrees
Om! Amen !
Adoration a Tathagata
le connaisseur de

36
 Destroy­
Exterminate -
0 Robert, giver of
courage, gtve courage
.

to all those who are

in extremity of suffering­
a Robert, who Purifies,
purify all who are
slaves of the ego
May the victor of
suffering, win ­
again and again-
0 Robert, perfectly
. .
In consciousness
of the holy light,
bring all the
poor living beings of
existence to your
.
consciousness.
0 Robert, perfect in
sageness and love
tender, bring out all
the poor living beings out of
their prison of existence
and bring them to
the Sacred N othingnesses
Om! Amen !
Adoration to Tathagata
the knower of

37
 I' essence universelle
de toutes les choses
du reve et en dehors
du reve . A Sugata
le connaisseur de bonnesse
sans fin toupartout,
A Buddha, qui est
reveillez pour toujours
et a ete reveillez
pour toujours et sera
reveillez pour toujours,
parfait en pitie
et intelligence, qui
a accompli,
et accompli main tenant,
et accomplira, dans
toutes le directions vers
de dan t et vers dehors,
toutes les mots de mystere. "

Tire Ia manivelle
Amen
Par semaine.
A Dieu.
Bon Soir.
Un Bee.
Un nuee.
Adieu.

38
 the Universal Essence
of all things
of the dream and outside
the dream . To Sugata
the knower of goodness
unlimited everywhere,
to Buddha, who is
awake for always
and has been awake
for always and will be
awake for always,
perfect in pity
and intelligence, who
has accomplished,
and accomplishes now,
and will accomplish, in
all directions in and out,
all the words of mystery. "

Turn the handle .

Amen
By the week.
To God .
Goodnight.
A Kiss.
A cloud.
Farewell.

39
 Autre foi.
Ma main.
Adieu .
Au Seigneur.
Bon Soir.
Dormez vous.

Ed: Kerouac didn't mark the French accent,;; in his typescript of this poem, just
as he often ignored apostrophes in English.

40
Next time.
My hand.
Farewell.
To the Lord.
Goodnight.
Sleep you all.

October 1 0, 1 955 , Berkeley

41
 GOD

In his jests serious, in his murders victim,

or which, is God? Who began
before non-existence 's dependence
on existence, Who came before
the chicken and the egg

Who started out

enormous Light
the dark brilliance of the Mystery
for all good hearts to shrou-d inside
and keep their understanding sympathy
in tact as Beethoven 's courageous
slow sigh.

In his atrocities victim?

In his jests damned?
In his damnation damnation?
Or is God just the golden hover
light manifesting Mayakaya
the illusion of the moon , branches
across the face of the moon?

0 perturbing swttlontaggek
montiana godio
Thou high suffermaker!
Tell me now, in Your Poem!

42
 HAIKU BERKELEY

Haiku Snyder
I hurt the black ink
on your kind book
the only inconsistency sin
I done yet to you
sweet heart

And john Wino anyway

was to blame

Don t kick me out

of your tea
house
great man

Still a boy
Noble Youth
And when I meet you
Smash Mountain Man
A Million Ones from now
And offer you 5 Gian t
Flowers
And you predict me
Tree Lover
the Coming Lover

43
 Buddha
of All the Worlds
With no body
& nothing distinguishable
from other bodies & yours
By which time you ' ll be
(you see) 6,000,000,000
years old
I ' ll still call you Noble Youth,
0 Ever Weeping
*

Learned! Learned!

This is the end

of my enlightenmen t!
*

And you Whalen

world slinger ( like I said)
Celt-
You started it all
And yr ideal eyes
Blue love shining
Everywhere
Leave me never alone

44
 For I whine
VVhen otherwise
Tryna be human

With no Buddha guts

& can t bend tendons
-0 how collapsed
the tendon beam ! ­
Worms, a million years long
-Philli pi, shield,
sun-star, wailer,
VVhalen, alright,
excuse me for popping
off

To hear the desert sigh

*

And you sweet Allen

Ah Allen Ah Me
You know
About me
VVhat I'd say
Le t it be
We know
We're old friends
& Never die

45
Lamantia Finally
Brilliant & Beautiful
What did you do?
( If I may ask a question)
With the golden rosary beads
I gave you 1955 years
ago
*

I say "I ' d like to see

The poems Li Po
Distributed in the Yellow River"
And Whalen says "Alright
We' ll go down and dive
And see . "

46
 POIM

Walking on Water
Nothing Ever Happened
Not Ever Happening
True Story
Old Story
New Story
Old & New
HoLY BaLONEY
Holy Cow
Holy Cats
Wow
Whatever
To The Feast
Story Book
Book
Story Words
"Anyway, It Happened "
Nothing Happened
Everybody Invited

47
VARIOUS LITTLE POMES

The ants go roaming

in the mirror of
the mind,
over sand
which I see
falsely
*

I know this to be
an empty state,
that is to say,
a state of form

My dream of a
horrible city is
individual discrimination
- the actual
city is universal
mind
*

48
I stop dreaming
And the ripples
Disappear from
universal mind 's
actual face
and what's left
is I ' m not here
any more

"Bodhisattva-Heroes have no separated individuali ty"

The reality is
nothingness­
We think
we strive

49
Primordially Undifferentiated

Sravasti, City of
Wonders, is now Village
of Sahet-Mahet,
River Rapti
*

AI on e-on e-All,
I meditate Alone,
imitating Brahina
--
God Allah

50
 TWO DHARMA NOTES

"The Buddha-Teaching
must be relinquished:
how much more so
misteaching. "
(Price's Diamond Sutra)

Mind Essence
(Tathagata-garbha)
is Non-Assertion
(Wu-Wei-Fa)

The
essence
is not
disturbed

" Unformulated
Principle"
*

51
7 treasures: gold,
silver, lapis lazuli ,
cornelian, red pearls,
crystal, agate.

GATHA

Sitting in the chair

In the morning ground
Is no sitting in no
chair in no mo� ning ground

No returning, no
non-returning
No Karma, no
non-Karma

52
" Happiness, abiding
in peace, in seclusion
in the midst of the
forest"
IS

abiding nowhere

UnHappiness, abiding
in anxiety in society
in the midst of the
city
IS

abiding nowhere

Not-two,
means,

no abider in his
abode

No realizer in his
realizing

"Develop a pure
lucid mind"
*

53
All things in the The simplest fact
River of Extinction is that all things
already dead & die off-the
extinct­ least fact faced
rocks, people, anywhere -
flowers- "All living beings
even empty space are not, in
is extinct, since fact, living beings"
it will have, has, because they' re
nothing to divide, dead in time­
nothing to fill its time 's a minute,
empty form a pop-

No
time -Time is
extinct since it
will have, has, nothing
to change, nothing to fill
its empty form
*

54
At present, the
1 OO,OOO,OOOth
myriad of mul ti millionth
Buddha is
myself
my-not-self

Thus �Q
(Tathagata,
Arriver-at-Actual-Isness)

Come

This is my VYAKARANA Prediction

In the ages of the
future you will come to
be a Buddha called Smash
Mountain Man
( Gary Snyder)
In the ages of the future
I will come to be a
Buddha called Tree Lover
"Why predict the predictable?"

55
 BEGINNING WITH A FEW HAIKUS
SOME OF THEM AD DRESSES IN THE BOOK

Lee Crawford
1126 San Benito
Burri Burri,
So. San Francisco
Calif.

F train
to University
& Shattuck
One block to left
(Ginsberg)

Snow Love

"Charming little bedraggled

princes "-Allen

56
1 HAIKU?
Disappointed in the
waning moon ­
Pleiades, vine,
wine bottle .

The waters see

The waters saw
So this is eternity

Can time crack rock?

Marble ' ll chip,
Diamond die.

Soup wont burn ­

Spiders cant get
outa sinks-
Brew more tea

57
5

Mist in the window

Flower, weed,
Birds at dawn

Juj u beads on
Zen Manual­
My knees are cold

Morning, hot sun,

empty hard ground,
invisible voidness

Leaves dry Autumn

yard,
Bed of white posies,
Spice bush sprouting

58
9

Flowers waiting,
Phantoms,
Phantasmal surface
of earth under
blue old space

10

NoT EVEN WoRD FETTERED!

NoT EVEN WAITING!
NoT EVEN!

1 1 wALTER LEHRMAN's HAIKU

One Friday when we were all dead
He said 'I didnt think it would
be so good. '

12

Dry old bigleaf,

twisted young vine,
pot with rag,
million grasses
shining

59
 13 GARY SNYDER's HAIKU (Spoken on the Mountain)
'Talking about the literary
life- the yellow
aspens. "

14 GARY SNYDER's SECOND HAIKU 15 GARY SNYDER AGAIN

" I get a hardon from here " I was thirteen
to Connecticut, Goodness, before I started skiing
3, 000 miles. " during the war. "

16 GARY AGAIN
'Just mad waiting for these
cocksucking letters-And
I go out to Central Park"

17 GARY AGAIN
"And there she is just an elegant­
And I ' m wearing an old
pair ofjeans"

18 GARY ONcE MoRE

"There she is-I 'm wearing

an old pair of jeans-
I say ' I 've got to' "

60
19

Listen to the birds

sing! All the little birds
will die!

20

Dusk: the bird on the fence

a contemporary
of mine

21

Nightfall: too dark

to read the page,
too cold.

22

Useless, useless,
heavy rain driving
into the sea!

61
23 GARY SNYDER
"Goofballs in the wine­
truck
goes by. "

24

Drunk in the early morn

"OooH" says my good
Buddha friend

25 HAIKu-KoAN
Does a dog have
the Buddha-nature?
Water is water.

26

You're bored.
Why? I ' m getting
to be old

62
27

First we buy the meat

and then we buy
the pot

28

There is no sin -
I know perfectly well
where I am

29

The Tathagata doesnt exist

in honor of which I will go
and climb mountains

30 CATHA

When I said to you

in Washington Square Park
"Am I my brother's keeper? "
it was Autumn

63
31 NATALIE 's HAIKU
"Remember that poet­
the girls are
talking now"

32 GARY
"Hundreds of comedies
about
aldultery"

33 HAIKU FRoM A CARDBOARD Box

Giant Tide
Gamble Made
in America

34 CATHA
The world is old
and wise
And I am tired
of my eyes

64
35 CATHA
All kinds of young love
for sale
I cant get my black hands
on it

36

Decorated for the re-emergence

of the great
Virgin Fuck

37 PHILLIP WHALEN's HAIKU

"Walked 5 miles with wine
then brought me
.

geranium "

65
[ENLIGHTENMENTS]

When you become enligh tened

you will know that you've
been enlightened all along
*

Alright, I ' m sick of this

enlightenment-now I ' m
dumb again - the
delicate blue morning
sky thru the tree. --
*

Dont worry about food,

Little Joh�, there' s some
everywhere
*

Allen says "When people get

religious they start feeding
e v e r y b o d y"
*

66
-The morning of
the end of my enlightenment
*

Enligh tenment is: do what

you want
eat what there is
*

The soul burns out the eyes

World, it's about time you

realized there 's too much food
for everybody to eat
*

67
The secret shape of the sun
Is a shield-flying to the right
To the West presumably
Just like the Roman Ear
Of Ezra Pound
In the Surrealist drawing
Just like Charioteer
*

The monument in the park

For the institute of the blind
Because it is not seen
Is truly a great monument

Would to God I could make one

So artistically fabulous
As that with my hands
*

Flowers aim crookedly

For the straight death

68
The white eyes of the criminals of Alcatraz thinking
thoughts of Love on their little Island Blest
while San Francisco crawls with hatred in the streets

And in rolls the Holy Fog from jesus ballooning

Shrouds of puff over Gold's Gate-the mysterious
Source East of Western Torment, Western Me
*

Humility
lS

Beatitude
THE BEATific GENERATION
*

Beginning to see the light, outside the church­

The Negro boy and the White boy
Hand in hand-Sunday morning with Philip Lamantia
*

69
There is the delusion of existence
because of my failure to realize
not-two-ness, i . e . , deluded
and the deluding is the double
trick

Failure
which is not really a failure
really-
Ripple of delusion is
that it is

Con the train

*

There is gladness which the Sain t feels;

there is mating, which the bitter husband feels;
but when gladness of mating is, is Love

70
BATH TUB THOUGHT
A rock is like space
because it doesnt move;
And space is like a rock
Because it is empty.
Words are Buddhas.
*

Nothing's wrong
Something's right

W.C.Fields' Bathrobe
*

71
If I dont leave San Francisco
Soon -1'11 be weeping cruds.
Wandering fair blossoms
of false ethereality
is what I see now.
Pretty soon I ' ll be down
On the Battered Internationale
Listening to devoured little girls
Who dance before the devout
And hungry men who devour
Her limb by limb, that
She 's an artist
Though clumsy
Her big limbs move
··

But she caint cackle

Nor kick
And nobody knows
what to do
with my woodshed
blues.
Goodbye, Rexroth
until another time.

72
 ON E THER

Jordan Belson: ''Everything is reduced

to its absolute meaning"

The Heel of Eloheim

Ether brings them out

*

Let slide sweetly

the transformations
of the thinking
*

The liberation
from Jack Kerouac
*

73
With Mike long ago
Under the little
dawn clouds­
waiting for the
work-car-Sebastian
was phenomenally
alive, is now
noumenally dead,
just
as
pure
as I

74
 LE TTER TO ALLEN 1955

I dont wanta see

no Senora
De Hueva from Chappy
Chi-a-pas-
Wot I got to do
mit jungles?
And boogs? Malaria­
Frogs, bulls, volcanoes,

hammocks of no rest
hung in trees
of antiquity
full of moss
and bacterii

Wanta go, I do,

to sweet Watsonville,
sleep in the river
of Cairi

However, Garver and I

do hereby formally
request for Robert
Lavigne 's Mazatlan Address

75
 MEXICO ROOFTOP

It's blue -with a pink movie neon

E-changing in the jungle sky
where rats havent chanced to swamp
the mudstilt builders, but Who climbed,
the builders, and made it the High Plateau

So's on October Fullmoon Nights, a palm

hairs in the scene, and Aztec Temple
apartment house arches stare
with a premeditated ogling glare
with light-holes & pool-puddles

And the dog barks at Stars-they

are pretty quie t-Tho all kinds
drams and whistlers hongkong the noise
of the street the stars are as faint
and as happy as they glow

In Sweet Canada or Carthage below,

in Rome and in Sisyphus bosom
- U rk, the brown strange glare
of modernized Mexican architecture
housingprojects cant be deAztecfied

76
It's blue -with day yellows night lemon
and daywhites nightpale
the color of chalk at a chalk quarry
or gravel in hell- the walls
ofJ ugurtha never as grim

I guess, as the walls of that side

of the building-but music reforms
the scene , atch or tortay, poor leetles
Mexican lovers boys draining
out their corazon for love of the sun

Awright, this poem's a failure ­

Throw it in a drawer

77
 MEXICAN LONELINESS

And I am an unhappy stranger

grooking in the streets of Mexico­
My friends have died on me, my
lovers disappeared� my whores banned,
my bed rocked and heaved by
earthquake -and no holy weed
to get high by candlelight
and dream-only fumes of buses,
dust storms, and maids peeking at me
thru a hole in the door
secretly drilled to watch
masturbators fuck pillows-
! am the Gargoyle
of Our Lady
dreaming in space
gray mist dreams- -
My face is poin ted towards Napoleon
-- I have no form
--

My address book is full of RIP's

I have no value in the void,
at home without honor,­
My only friend is an old fag
without a typewriter
Who, if he 's my friend,
I ' ll be buggered.

78
I have some mayonnaise left,
a whole unwan ted bottle of oil,
peasants washing my sky light,
a nut clearing his throat
in the bathroom next to mine
a hundred times a day
sharing my common ceiling-
If I get drunk I get thirsty
-if I walk my foot breaks down
-if I smile my mask's a farce
-if I cry I 'm just a child-
-if I remember I ' m a liar
-if I write the writing's done-
-if I die the dying's over-
-if I live the dying's just begun-
-if I wai t the waiting's longer
-if I go the going's gone-
if I sleep the bliss is heavy­
the bliss is heavy on my lids­
-if I go to cheap movies
the bedbugs get me­
Expensive movies I cant afford
-If I do nothing
nothing does

79
 TH E lAS T HOTEL

The last hotel

I can see the black wall
I can see the silhouette in the window
He's talking
I ' m not interested in what he 's talking about
I ' m only interested in the fact that it's the last hotel

The last hotel

Ghosts in my bed
The goats I bled
The last hotel

80
BERKELEY SONG IN F MAJOR

FAREWELL TO MY BABIES

Walt Whitman is striding

Down the moun tain of Berkeley
Where with one step
He abominates & destroys
The whole atomic laboratory
Wherein it becomes a jewel
In his heel, 0 Eloheim!

With one quick look

His belly golden bull
He turns Mrs Matchyot
To butter, one quick look
Eats up the fairies & robbers
In Robbies coffee saloon ,
On ·he goes-wild hat
Big white beard
Fifteen feet tall
-No more lung stew
"Why- Isn t he hungry? "
"He eateth n o more
This is the final end-
He bears the 32 marks of perfection
He's on his way to Oakland
The cesspool of the Coast
81
Where beyond the dumps
I see telephone pole
A hundred miles high
With invisible wires
Of Transcendency­
Walt! Jack!
Then across the Blue Bay
Gold step the Isle
Of Alcatraz, white eyes
Of lovely criminals,
Hatred Beaches, cops,
Pails, pockets, buckets,
Stores, sleeping bags-,
Gold Gates & the Fog -·

Which Jesus Sendeth

from Up by Japan
the Alaskan Seal
Rock Territory
Known/ as Potato

(it all adds up to roil ,

or royal, one )
Walt Bluebeard Handsome
Whitman , farewell
-For he also strides
to East & gobbles
Up Burma & Tits
the Mock Top Peaks
of T h i b e t a -

82
 Returning, like sun
the shield
Around the other side
Where first we thought
We saw him visioning
Down the shuddering mount
Of Berkeley's Atomic
Test Laboratory
Full of mice & men

-And it's snowing

This sunny morning

And the grass blade

( so celebrate )
jostles slowly
like a woman 's
beautiful
breast
side to side
In the Peep Show
of Eternality
& Salvation
&
and

S ' nuf,- this parsimonious

pwap pwap tiddle
all all day

83
We ' ll have no more jots & tittles
We 'll have no more leaves
broken off at the base
of the Stem
That means
we ' ll have more j ots & tittles
more leaves like that
More
More gold
& snow
& show
But dont be fooled, kiddies­
The white screen is still
A White Screen
And the movie 'bout monkies
You see there
in the Vines & Berkelies
is projected by the spectral
Honogrank Machine
known as: Chaplin

Another name for film ­

T' all come from ether
And t's' ether
Either that or-What?
Whop What But
Bot Go On
Bop Wallower?

84
 Nay-
Jack the middle
Mass everything
*

There 's a tomato plant

In this mad garden of yrs
Allen Ginsberg
That grew six foot tall
And ran around along the
high
weed
With its empty-reed middle
The nature of which is as
empty
as
The sun that follows two guys
Walking away from the same
poor
pond
And I seen the secret of the ant:
Which is:
To them sand is boulders
And the boulders are pure
empty
gold

85
Essence aint the an ts
Essence aintjack Whatyrcallit
Essence
Essence isnt a butter bee
on a white petal
dreaming of far
pure lands learned
long ago
Essence
Essence, it means,
Essence is the ants
Is the Jack W i t t t
Is the essence
Is the long bee
I told about

Is is
Is

86
 A S UD DEN SKETCH POEM

Gary's sink has a shroudy burlap

the rub brush tinware plout
leans on right side
like a red woman 's hair
the faucet leaks little lovedrops
The teacup's upsidedown with visions
of green mountains and brown lousy
Chinese mysterious up heights
The frying pan 's still wet
The spoon's by 2 petals of flower
The washrag's hung on edge like bloomers
I dont know what to say
about the dishpan , the soap
The sink itself inside or what
is hidden underneath the bomb burlap
Shroudflap except two onions
And an orange and old wheat germ.
Wheat meal. The hoodlatch heliograph
With the cross that makes the devil
Hiss, ah , the upper coral sensen soups
And fast condiments, curries, rices,
Roaches, reels, tin , tip, plastickets,
Toothbrushes and armies, and armies
Of insulated schiller, squozen gumbrop

87
 Peste pans, light of marin, pirshyar,
Magic dancing lights of gray and white
And all for verse I wrote it

April 1 956, McCorkle 's Shack

88
POEM WRI T TEN I N THE ZOCO CHICO

He walks
without thinking about the sea
His older brother
shows his gold tooth
trying to prove something on Sunday afternoon
One boy has a green fez
that gives him permission from the sea
He's the Jamal in the sea
that restores him harmlessly
He has any kinda claim
to a gold chain
Some Burgher Berbers have false teeth
Then comes and overruns the great mock wave

Some bulldogs have rubber teeth

The submarines are there to gyp the Egyptians
I see nothing there but a bird
The history of the world is lost in silence.

89
 THREE TANGIER POEMS

Vapors mere
Shapes so dear?
Bell rung,
What's sung?
*

I strike at that snake-heart that hurt my family

*

Ah but Ah but Ah
Where ocean water kisses beach sand
Lonely living blue balloon

The boys are kicking the ball

·
far across the fiel d­
The lonely goalie waits

What the Buddhas are saying

in the "upper air":
Fish-film facing lost life-sea

My sweet spring sex loins

joined to yours
Beneath the molten moon

90
 TANGI ER P OEM

Your father spurted you out in perfect ghost-form

All you gotta do is die

All you gotta do is fly.
If your father's name is Dedalus
how can you be Icarus?

195 7

91
 POEM

Anyway the time has come to explain

the Golden Eternity
and how the iridescen t paraphernalia of radiating candles
ceases
when mentation ceases
because I know what it's like to die,
to cease men tating, one day I died,
I fain ted actually, I was stooping smelling
strapping flowers in the cosmos yard
of my mother's cozy flower house .
in Auffinsham Shire , in Queens,
and stood up fast taking deep breath ,
blood rushed from head, next thing I knew
woke up flat on my back in the grassy sun
and had been out fine minutes.

And I had seen the Golden Eternity.

The Lamb was alone with the Lamb.
The Babe was alone with the Baby Lamb.
The Shroud was alone with the Golden Shroud.

I was alone wit� God, who

is God, who was Me ,
who was All,

92
 he stood high on a hill
overlooking Mexico City
radiating messages
out of a white Tiot

1958, Northport
 FLIES

And wasn t there ever a time when flies

didnt seek the sun through forbidden
windowpanes?

And when men didnt pray for God

to deliver them from mistake,
Gesundheit?

Or when football players didnt huddle

and plot the fall of opposi p.g team
On chalkmark?

Who cares? God loves us all, his Own

thought & Images in His dream,
Gesundheit.

No Jew of Torah or incantatory

Koran was ever smarter
than God.

Loved God-all love God, themselves

-why.worry about the queer in Room 3?
God bless you.

94
 Drink whisky sours in the Ritz
at 3 pm Sunday talk of Tolstoy,
quien care?

All I want outa this persephone

is poems instructing lovemilk thru
anemone -

POEM

I could become a great grinning host

like a skeleton

Hung Up In Heaven

95
 HOW TO MEDITATE

-lights out-
fall, hands a-clasped, into instantaneous
ecstasy like a sho t of h eroin or morphine,
the gland inside of my brain discharging
the good glad fluid ( Holy Fluid) as
I hap-down and hold all my body parts
down to a deadstop trance-Healing
all my sicknesses-erasing all - not
even the shred of a "I-hope-you" or a
Loony Balloon left in it, but �he mind
blank, serene, thoughtless. When a thought
comes a-springing from afar with its held­
forth figure of image, you spoof it out,
you spuff it off, you fake it, and
it fades, and thought never comes - and
with joy you realize for the first time
"Thinking's just like not thinking-
So I don t have to think
any
more"

96
 B UD DHA

I used to sit under trees and medi tate

on the diamond bright silence of darkness
and the bright look of diamonds in space
and space that was stiff with lights
and diamonds shot through, and silence

And when a dog barked I took it for soundwaves

and cars passing too, and once I heard
a jet-plane which I thought was a mosquito
in my heart, and once I saw salmon walls
of pink and roses, moving and ululating
with the drapish

Once I forgave dogs, and pitied men, sat

in the rain countin Juju beads, raindrops
are ecstasy, ecstasy is raindrops-birds
sleep when the trees are giving out light
in the night, rabbits sleep too, and dogs

I had a path that I followed thru piney woods

and a phosphorescent white hound-dog named Bob
who led me the way when the clouds covered
the stars, and then communicated to me
the sleepings of a loving dog enamoured
of God

97
On Saturday mornings I was there, in the sun,
contemplating the blue-bright air, as eyes
of Lone Rangers penetrated the dust
of my canyon thoughts, and Indians
and children, and movie shows

Or Saturday Morning in China when all is so fair

crystal imaginings of pristine lakes, talk
with rocks, walks with a Chi-pack across
Mongolias and silent temple rocks in valleys
of boulder and tarn-washed clay,-sh h-
sit and otay

And if men were dyin or sleep in in rooftops

beyond, or frogs croaked once or thrice
to indicate supreme mystical majesty, what's
the diff? and I saw blue sky no different
from dead cat-and love and marriage

No different than mud-. that's blood-

and lighted clay too-illuminated intelligent
faces of angels everywhere, with Dostoevsky's
unease praying in their X-brow faces,
twisted and great,

And many a time the Buddha played a leaf

on me at midnight thinkin-time, to
remind me 'This Thinking Has Stopped, '
_

98
which it had, because no thinking was there
but wasnt liquidly mysteriously brainly there

And finally I turned into a diamond stone

and sat rigid and golden, gold too- didnt dare
breathe, to break up the diamond that cant
even cut into butter anyway, how brittle
the diamond, how quick returned thought,­
Impossible to exist
Buddha say:
'All's possible '

99
 POEM

I am God

HAIKU

Came down from my

ivory tower
And found no world

100
 M Y V IEWS ON RELIGION

Heaven has everything to do with healing

and healing has nothing to do with heaven

If jesus Christ is the son of God so am I

If suffering has anything to do

-if cake won t do, or cookies-
Heaven has everything to do with the way I feel
and I say Heaven! what you doin
down there, making like youse out
to beat hell- Heaven! How come

How come you got sixteen-year-old beauties

with lips parted open , in the moonlight
Italian balcony of me heart! Heaven.'
Ope up them crazy open portal gates
an d let the people pass, people pass

Revoke the Harrison Act! It is a Barbaric

act- I t will cause desperate criminals
and gunmen to arise from our midst,
for evidential reasons-Ope nope-
It's like Prohibition , it won t, work,
-If the people wan t alcohol and dope
let em have alcohol and dope an d all

101
the poison they can get if poison they want
-you cant tell the people what
to take in themselves-you can t stop
the people - ! say this in the name of Peace
and I am not a Communist I ' m a Dove

0 ope them gordol golden gates

Buddha was not a medicine man ,

he was a beyond-partition man,­
nor did he "limp for duty
and crawl
for charity"
- Chuangtse'

Buddha is God, the Father ofjesus Christ

A N D G o D I s G oD

1 02
 lADY

The universe is a lady

Holding within her the unborn light­
Our Lady, Nostre Dame .
It is fitting that Nostradamus could predict the future.
That is a function of our lady,
We the tealeaves.

1 03
 CARI TAS

Ah charity,-a little boy of eight or

seven, came up to sell little basket
flower candies in the teenage jukebox
soda saloon- nope, nobody buy­
and he walked barefoot in the rain

' Pas'd' Zapatas? ' I think, No Shoes?

and I think ' I ' ll take out ten pesos
and give him for the shoes, say,
'Por usted, por tu zapatas'
and even show him how to hide the money

A sad song is playing, a harmonica,

as I first see his sad feet padding by
in the puddles of the sidewalk, 0
the world is full of marvels-

Nostalgia, and I go after him to give

him his money, he goes into a huge
apartment house and there 's the man
standing reading the floor-numbers
quietly, as little boy waits, -both facing me

that's across the street with money in hand,

both stare , movingless, wait, the drape falls,

1 04
Aztec shrouds her mystery, & up they go
as grawmim e levator door closes
on both their heavenly chagrins

I think "Is he gone up there , he lives

up there with his folks and sells bonbons
barefoot, or is just hitting the joint
door to door to sell among the government
employee families of Childe Mexico"

And think "And it was said in the

Diamond Sutra so holy and so high,
practice generosity without entertaining
in mind any limited conceptions of the
reality of the feeling of generosity, or

what'll it accomplish for you, pard,

this is the word from old Buddha-hard
and he's spoken by a diamond tree,
and thousands-a people go barefoot,
it's written in every hemisphere

song of every sphere

Song of every sphere from every Child Revere

-Song of any morning waters blue with dream
by the. broken Coney Island Staten statue
with no Medusa Snakehead arms and
no stone afoot, 0 Marva my foot

1 05
And we drive along in an insane dream
with our mouths distorted and eyes gleaming
crookedly every way, driving by iron rusty
steerages belonging to Babylonian Old
Zapoteca Arabian Neolithic
apathetic

old somervance, prance, hand me the foot,

we come di-vowing down the planks
and hit the water's admirable edge
and there 's a ten t and Side-Show
that I go to, to see girls

1 06
 POEM

Old hornet me
Would woo thee
Fair, soft Sara
Of the flowers;
But bee 's not kind
That seeks to find,
Peers too deep
Shares no sleep;
And anyway,
Who woos bees?

1 07
 LIL POEM ON LOUIS FERDINAND C E LINE

Where the madman plays with his ferti lizers,

Where the mad priest comes in the window covered with mud,
Where the submarine knocks down the walls of the publisher,
Celine, Celine, Celine.

1 08
 SKID ROW WINE

I coulda done a lot worse than sit

in Skid Row drinkin wine

To know that nothing matters after all

To know there 's no real difference
between the rich and the poor
To know that eternity is neither drunk
nor sober, to know it young
and be a poet

Coulda gone into business and ranted

And believed that God was concerned

Instead I squatted in lonesome alleys

And nobody saw me , just my bottle
and what they saw of it was empty

And I did it in cornfields & graveyards

To know that the dead dont make noise

To know that the cornstalks talk (among
one another with raspy old arms)

1 09
Sittin in alleys diggin the neons
And watching cathedral custodians
Wring out their rags neath the church steps

Sittin and drinkin wine

And in railyards being divine

To be a millionaire & yet to prefer

Curlin up with a poorboy of tokay
In a warehouse door, facing long sunse ts
On railroad fields of grass

To know that the sleepers in the river

are dreaming vain dreams, to squat
in the night and know it well

To be dark solitary eye-nerve watcher

of the world's whirling diamond

110
 THE MOON

The moon her magic be, big sad face

Of infinity An illuminated clay ball
Manifesting many gentlemanly remarks

She kicks a star, clouds foregather

In Scimitar shape, to round her
Cradle out, upsidedown any old time

You can also let the moon fool you

With imaginary orange-balls
Of blazing imaginary light in fright

As eyeballs, hurt & foregathered,

Wink to the wince of the seeing
Of a little sprightly otay

Which projects spikes of light

Out the round smooth blue balloon
Ball full of mountains and moons

Deep as the ocean, high as the moon,

Low as the lowliest river lagoon
Fish in the Tar and pull in the Spar

111
Billy de Bud and Hanshan Emperor
And all wall moongazers since
Daniel Machree, Yeats see

Gaze at the moon ocean marking

the face-

I n some cases
The moon is you

I n any case ·

The moon

POEM

Told him all about Minoan Civilization

in front of Father Duffy's statue
Told hi1n all about
Minoan Civilization
In Father Duffy's statue
Told him all about portals
Gotta be holy high

1 12
 THE THRASHING DOV ES

In the back of the dark Chinese store

in a wooden jailhouse bibbet box,
with dust of hay on the floor, rice
where the rice bags are leaned,
beyond the doomed peekokoos in the box
cage

All the little doves'll die .

As well as the Peekotoos- eels
- they'll bend chickens' necks back
oer barrels and slice at Samsara
the world of eternal suffering with silver
blades as thin as the ice in Peking

As thick & penetrable as the Wall of China

the rice darkness of that store, beans,
tea, boxes of dried fish , doodle bones,
pieces of sea-weed, dry, pieces of eight,
all the balloon of the shroud on the floor

And the lights from little tin kly Washington St.

Behung, dim, opium pipes and gong wars,
Tong, the rice and the card game-and
Tibbet de tibbet the tink tink tink
them Chinese cooks do in the kitchen
Jazz

1 13
The thrashing doves in the dark, white fear,
my eyes reflect that liquidly
and I no understand Buddha-fear?
awakener's fear? So I give warnings
' bout 1nidnigh t round about midnigh t

And tell all the children the little otay

story of magic, multiple madness, maya
otay, magic tree-sitters and little girl
bitters, and littlest lil brothers
in crib made of clay (blue in the n1oon ) .

For the doves.

1 14
 THE SEA-SHROUD

The Sea-Shroud comes out of a slip

of water in Brooklyn Harbor, night,
it emerges from a submerged tug
right from the enamel underwear
of the pilot's cabin

Right th rough up comes the shroud head,

a draining drape of wet weedy
watery sea net spray, ephemeral,
climbing to knock knees against the bow
and make the bit on the dock

And come on vanishing in stead

reappearing as a Man
with a briefcase , on Borough Hall,
saying nothing wi th a watery face
saying nothing with an ogoo mouth

Saying nothing with a listening nose,

saying nothing with a questionmark mouth ,
saying nothing, the briefcase full
of seaweed -what happens to floating
bonds when they ge t in the hand of the drape

1 15
Sea-shroud, turning Chinese Food to seaweed
in his all-abominable bag, Shroud
the taker of widows' rnonies in red allies
of shame & stagedoors, purple lagoon ,
Goon Shroud departs gloving the money

Earlier in the day he'd perched atop a

flagpole in a parking lot
on the waterfron t, and looked around
to see which way Borough Hall
which wav the little white .doves
I

1 16
 MY GANG

I
Many people have been frighted & died in cemeteries
since the days of my gang, the night
Ninip Houde came up & talked to me
on the block and I rowed the imaginary
horse on the rowel of the porch rail

Where I killed 700,000 flies or more

while Ma and Beatrice gossiped
in the kitchen, and while drape sheets
we airing on the line that's connected
to midnight by midnight riding roses

Oy- the one bad time that Zaggo

got home from school late, dark
in the streets, the sisters majestico
blooming in the alley retreat, beat,
'Your gang is upstairs' says my mother

And I go up to my closed smoky door

and open it to a miniature poolhall
where all the gang is smoking & yakking
with little cue sticks and blue chalk
around a miniature table on stilts

117
Bets being made, spittings out the window,
cold out there, old murder magoon
the winter man in my tree has seen
to it that inhalator autumn
prestidigitate on time & in ripe form,
to wit cold

To wit cold, to wit you, to wit win ter

To wit time, to wit bird, to wit dust­
That was some game ole Salvey blanged
When he beat GJ. that time,.
and Rondeau roared

II
Rondeau was the cookie that was always
in my hair, a ripe screaming tight
brother with heinous helling neck-veins
who liked to riddle my fantasms
with yaks of mocksqueak joy

"Why dont you like young Rondeau? "

always I ' m asked, because he boasts
and boasts, brags, brags, ya, ya, ya,
because he's crazy because he's mad
and because he never gives us a chance to talk

1 18
Awright- 1 ' d like to know what
Bobby's got against me -But he wont
tell, and it's brother deep-In the room
they're shooting the break, clack,
the little balls break, scatter di mania,

They take aim on little balls and break

em up to fall, in plicky pockpockets
for little children's names drawing
pictures in the games in the whistle
of the old corant tree splashing

In the mighty mu Missouri lame image

of time and again the bride & groom,
boom & again the bidal hood, oo,
too -too and rumble o mumble thunder
bow, ole Salvey is in my alley

Ole Salvey's my alley I ' ll lay it on me

I ' ll shoot fourteen farthings for Father Machree
and if ole Hotsatots dont footsie
down here bring my gruel, I ' ll
be cruel, I ' ll be cruel

1 19
 PAX

I demand that the human race

ceases multiplying its kind
and bow out
I advise it

And as punishment & reward

for making this plea I know
I 'll be reborn
the last human

Everybody else dead and I ' m

an old woman roaming the earth
groaning In caves
. .

sleeping on mats_

And sometimes I ' ll cackle, sometimes

pray, sometimes cry, eat & cook
at my little stove
in the corner
"Always knew it anyway, "
I ' ll say
And one morning wont get up from my mat

1 20
 HAIKU

The moon,
the falling star­
Look elsewhere

PRAYER

0 Lord, what have you hoarded up

for me
In your great free treasure?

POEM

You start off by suckin in

milk
And you end up suckin in
smoke

And you know

What milk and smoke
Denote

1 21
 ANG EL MINE

Angel mine be you fine

Angel divine

Angel milk what's your ilk

Angel bilk

Angel cash Angel Smash

Angel hash

P ERM

The world goes on

The junkey <)rops his butt
Children yell ' Hallelujah
praise God! '
in the streets of sorrow parade

122
P O E MS OF THE BU DDHAS OF OLD

by Jean-Louis

I
The boys were sittin
In a grove of trees
Listenin to Buddy
Explainin the keys.

"Boys, I say the keys

Cause there 's lots a keys
But only one door,
One hive for the bees.

So listen to me
And I' 11 try to te 11 all
As I heard it long ago
In the Pure Land Hall.

Life is like a dream,

You only think it's real
Cause you ' re born a sucker
For that kind of deal;

But if the Truth was known

You ain ' t here nohow

1 23
And neither am I
Nor that cow and sow

You see across the field

One standing silently
The other rutting ragefully
In essence so quietly.

For you good boys

With winesoaked tee th
That can 't understand
.

These words on a heath

I ' ll make it simpler

Like a bottle a wine
And a good woodfire
Under the stars divine.

Now listen to me
And when you have learned
The Dharma of the Buddhas
Of old and y� arned

To sit down with the truth

Under a lonesome tree
In Yuma Arizony
Or anywhere you might be

1 24
Don ' t thank me for telling
What was told me ,
This is the Wheel I ' m turning,
This is the reason I be.

Mind is the maker

For no reason at all
Of all this creation
Created to fall.

II
"Who played this cruel joke
On bloke after bloke
Packing like a rat
Across the desert flat? "

Asked Montana Slim

Gesturing to him
The buddy of the men
In this lion 's den .

"Was it God got mad

Like the Indian cad
Who was only a giver
Crooked like the river?

1 25
Gave you a garden ,
Let the fruit harden,
Then comes the flood
And the loss of your blood?

Pray tell us, good buddy

And don 't make it n1uddy
Who played this trick
On Harry and Dick

And why is so mean

The Eternal sce ri e ,
__

Just what's the point

Of this whole joint? "

III
Replied the good buddy:
"So now the bird's asleep
And that air plane gone
Let's all listen deep.

Everybody silent
Includin me
To catch the roar
Of eternity

126
That's ringin in our ears
N ever-endingly.
You hear it Tom , Dick
And Harry Lee?

You hear it Slim

From Old Montan ' ?
You hear i t Big Daddy
And Raggedy Dan?

You know what I mean

When I say eternity?
You heard it in your crib­
Shhh- Infinity. "

IV

Up spoke Big Daddy

From Baltimore
An enormous Negro
Forevermore:

"You mean that shushin

And that fussin
A-slushin in my ears
For all these years?

1 27
When I was so high
Jess a little guy
I thought it was me
In the whisperin sea.

I asked my Mam
About that j am,
She didn't say nothin,
She sewed the button .

It was quiet and late

'
At the afternoon grate.
Her face showed no ·sign
Of that whisperin line

But as we sat waitin

Instead of abatin
The noise got to roar
Like an openin door

That opened my haid

Like if it was daid
And the only thing alive
Was that boomin jive

And we looked at each other

Child and mother
Like wakin from a dream
In a spiri t stream. "

1 28
 v

'Well spoken, Big Daddy! "

Cried the buddy real glad.
"This proves that you know
And you' ll never be sad.

For that was the sound

That we all hear now
And I want you to know
It's no sound nohow

But the absence of sound

Clear and pure,
The silence now heard
In heaven for sure.

What's heaven?
By Nirvana mean I?
This selfsame no-sound
Silence sigh

Eternal and empty

Of sounds and things
And all thievin rivers
Complainin brings.

For if we can si t here

In this riverbottom sand

1 29
And come to see
And understand

That we got in us
Ability to hear
Holy Emptiness
Beyond the ear

And block our ears

And hear inside
And know t'aint here
Nor there, the tide,

But everywhere, inside,

Outside, all throughout
Mind's dream, Slim?
What you gripin about?

Imaginary rivers
And gardens too,
A movie in the mind
Of me and you.

The point
Of this whole joint
Is stop, sit,
And thee anoint

1 30
With teachings such
As these , and more ,
To find the key
Out this dark corridor.

The effulgent door,

The mysterious knob,
The bright room gained
Is the only job. "

The boys was pleased

And rested up for more
And jack cooked mush
In honor of the Door.

1 31
 MORPHINE

The magic instance of the parriot tree

Nothing like a shot of junk for sheer
Heavenly contact
Oh yah , clear as a bell the mind
On morphine

I got all e ternity to do everything

you want me to do
So there 's no rush

1 32
 SILLY GOOFBALL POM ES

SONG OF THE NEW CHINESE

I
The Moose is a n oble dolt.
The Elk is a fool.
The Rhinoceros is the biggest bore
of them all.
The Hippopotamus is a Giant River Pig.
The Hyena is a striped dog
who thought he was a Laughing Horse.
The Lion is a Queer Cat
who by the Power of his Queerness
became a great jowled Cat.
The Tiger is pure cat.
The Panther hates cats.
The Cheetah is a dog
who thought he was a Fast Cat.
The Giraffe is a Horse
who grew fond of Tree-Top Leaves.
The Snake has a body beautiful,
And the Elephan t is the Lord,
the Hook & Curl of his trunk,
the long-lashed Eye.
The Sloth is a Chinese Poet upsidedown .

1 33
 The Ant-Eater is a long-nosed
investigator of Villages.
The Scorpion is a Sea-Spider trapped
on land.
The Whale is More so.
The Man is very strange .

II
The Spider monkey is a little f9ol.
The Pekinese Doll is a dog.
The Dachshund is a snake full of Love .
The Siamese Cat is an Angry Monkey.
The Woman is a cellular mesh of lies
as well as a Scratcher.
The Woman has a dark blossom
between her Thighs.
The Buddha is Known .
The Messiah is Unborn .
The Boll Weevil is a pants rotter.
The an t a Warrior.
The worm is a long history
oozing out of Who?
Who !
Mu !
Wu !
The dog is a god.
The dog is a balker.

1 34
 The Leopard is Incontinent, said Dante,
free from the Severity of Leopard.
The Angel Rules the Jungle.
Blake is Blake.
The Cow has its own way with water.
And the Tick sticks in your hair
& swells-
The Shark I never Saw

The purple ass baboon is Insane

The Sparrow is a little grey bird
The Chimpanzee is Wise
The American a Sniper
The Gull a bringer of Snail Shells
The Parrot I love
The sn ail knows the Unborn Void
of Tao
and that's why he left his house
for Gull
The Sea Bird is all Belly
Crows are Dawn Singers
The Bee hums busily
The Frog leaped out of Water
The Abominable Snowman is not abominable at all,
he doesn t hurt anybody-
The Rat has many theories-
The Spider means money-
The Fly has Seven Million
brothers-

1 35
 The Seal
is on my Roof

The Goose goes north

The Robin wins the spring
The caterpillar waits
The Nigh tin gale I have been
The mockingbird loves 1V aerials
The Rabbit
The vulture trails the Puma
The wolf snaps the Bear
The Lizard
The Eel
The Octopus
The Tapeworm
The Finger
The Cock
The Germ
The Fingernail
The Wall

The Swordfish has a Beak of Wood.

The Lobster is friendly.
The Flea leaps,
The Cockroach is Reverenced,
The Bedbug rolls.

1 36
 POM E

Be me bespangled dotted-hat fool?

Jump upsidedown Pandora? leap above?
- make burping Kings laugh for Ide?
-remember? -
! ' d rather piss on Scroll
than parch this

1 37
 3 POEMS ABOU T
TI TLES OF NOV ELS

Whi te Story
Story in White
Never Be Mean
Some Ending
No Red Eye in Heaven
White Legs
A Few Years
.

More Boloqey
More of the Same
Rest and Be Kind
Kindness is All
All One Way
To Heaven
Only Looking
Story
A Story
Book Movie
Story in Words
S tory Line
*

1 38
 Words Cawn ' t Tell
Holy Violinists
Violin
Rabbit Violin
There 's a Rabbit in Heaven
One Means Not Two
One
One, Not Two
Not Two
Three
Thirty Three
Eleven
Seven Times Seven
Seven come Eleven
Seventy Seven

Follow the Lamb

Follow
Heaven Followed
Heaven Follows
*

1 39
 Plenty Room in the Inn
Bright Room
Plenty Room
Sheol
Gadster

Bing Bang
Ding Dong
Bing Bong
Dreamers Alive

No TITLE
Not Even
Never
No
Quack Quack
Pa Drift

1 40
 TO LOU LIT TLE

Lou, my father thought you put him down

and said he didnt like you

He thought he was too shabby for your

office; his coat had got so

And his hair he'd comb and come

into an employment office with me

And have me speak alone with the man

for the two of us, then sigh

And repen ted we home; where

sweet mother put out the pie

anyway

In my first game I ran like mad

at Rutgers, Cliff wasnt there;

He didnt believe what he read

in the Spectator, 'Who's this Jack? '

So I come in on the St Benedicts game

not willing to be caugh t by them bums

1 41
I took off the kickoff right straight at
the gang, and lalooza' d around

To the pastafazoola five yard line,

you were there, you remember

We didnt make first down; and I

took the punt and broke my leg

And never said anything, and ate hot

fudge sundaes & stea�s in the
Lion 's Den

1 42
 AIRAPE TIANZ

Airapetianz, that's his name, connected

with the invention of brainwashing, if
not the inven tor himself, a Pavlovian
issue taking place in science whereas
ulcer patients feel no pain
but mind pain

As outside chloroformeters take in

the reading of the pain sensitation,
and prove there is no body pain,
inside his mind he's struggling with numbers
that tell him he's alright or not

Drinks that in, that info, and registers

no body pain-Suddenly it reads 5!
it means he 's having an attack!
Immediately the meter goes up ( in
his mind) but on the board no reading
is made

Because pain sensi tation not coming in

So Airape tianz proves that pain

has men tal sources

1 43
Mind over matter and mind over pain

Pavlovian instrument, determinism

And brainwash it's called

Which doesnt matter

In a mindmatter world
The dog that barks
The wick that falls
The soul that goes to heaven
The hand that writes
.

1 44
 IF I WERE JES US, GOD

0 tender hearted sweet usurper of my

vines, fox, do not crawl too near

0 marble hearted faun of antiquity,

what can I say of thee?

0 people of Carthage ! Oh Rome !

0 Northside Chicaga! 0 Tome !

0 listen to me in the park­

Whenever you have a question
con1e to me

Otherwise I ' ll be in the Tree Grove

resting up

1 45
 I DIOT

Them Hindu temples in Hoopastan

Hoo ! them Hindu temples'd a made
Fool ! outa me if I laffed like that
Hyah ! hyah hyoo hya hya hoo-a
Thee! marvelous parvelous pairvening
Raive ! ening of this ard-parturying­
Spring? - they give i t that name in Ego 's
Ed! cave, in Spatn , latn, you know,
Piss! tayola manaya tap aya you
Know! ho ! - the lark's fat fran t
Mar! -jesty hit the seapebble Homeric
Good ! -fragrance I descried in gulls'
Art! fly majesty, known as then mad,
Read ! Sherwood's Anderson Ohio Ville
Story! of epic O -hand, -Yippee !
Yell! the Madman in the next room
Amazed ! the doctor with a crazed
Jump? in the air, I 'm mad?

Well I only - said

You were an idiot

Idiots have Kings, were Kings, have necks

to be cut off, gibbets to spin rope of,
Twisted pants to sweep blond hair

1 46
Of HomoSexual Heroes testifying testes
In courts of Conelrad Behavious otay­
Otay!

Sneak out of it with jazz

Hey! Ole Idiot's still on the corner

Ready for all comers

1 47
 OLD W ESTERN MOV I ES

AJedge in the West comin from the South

with ruby sideburns, boy-
Always usin flowery ]anguij -
The grim fightin hero's troubles
are always private -
He wants to know where "I fit in"
in herd wars -
Sometimes you see villains so �ncient
you saw them in infancy
exaggerating in snow
their mustaches looking older
than yr father's grave ­
"Thanks Marshall "-"I reckon "
-I guess I better run on back
to Whisky Row, Colorada,
& marry an old Tim McCoy Gal
or turn off the tele vision, one
-

-You gotta go a long way in the West

to find a good mari­
So close the book,
The Courier, run by Steve, is a paper
wearing a sunbonnet.
Drive the cattle thru that silver wall,
help ladies to their hearse,
mouth in the sun,

1 48
That ough ta do till Mexican Drygulcher
finds Redwing in the Shack
And Kwakiutls menstruate .
Old horses' necks by broken fences,
guns gone rust,
I guess the gang got shot.

Kid Dream
Hid
In the leaves.

April 1958, Northport

1 49
 WOMAL'l

A woman is beautiful
but
you have to swing
and swing and swing
and swing like
a handkerchief in the
wind

1 50
 HY MN

And when you showed me Brooklyn Bridge

in the morning,
Ah God,

And the people slipping on ice in the street,

twice,
twice,
two different people
came over, goin to work,
so earnest and tryful,
clutching their pitiful
morning Daily News
slip on the ice & fall
both inside 5 minutes
and I cried I cried

That's when you taught me tears, Ah

God in the morning,
Ah Thee

And me leaning on the lamppost wiping

eyes,
eyes,
nobody's know I 'd cried
or woulda cared anyway

151
 but 0 I saw my father
and my grandfather� s mother
and the long lines of chairs
and tear-sitters and dead,
Ah me, I knew God You
had better plans than that

So whatever plan you have for me

Splitter of majesty
Make it short
brief
Make it snappy .
bring me home to the Etern(!l Mother
.

�d�

At your service anyway,

( and until)

1 52
 GOOF BALL BLUES

I ' m just a human being with a lot of

shit on my heart

My ambition was not to be a great

lover,
but that's what I am
Even in dreams, fiancees
of other men
ball on my joint
And I am the Flying Horse
of Mien Mo
When I am an old man
my grave will rot me
The ones I loved were crazy
without knowing why
When I am old I ' ll yawn
in the Flannel Grave

1 53
 GOOFBALL SILLYPOMES

These Englishers know more madness

Than Nonsense Poems know,
For Tom 0' Bedlam never dreamed
What's dream 'd in mattress now,
Enow, MJ.E. ,
En ow

Those who die

go to coffins
That never get wet

The old years

on the dock
- Blue air

The wind is late

-Already this gate
Has not been swept

jan, 1960

1 54
 DRUNKEN SCRIBBLING POEM

I got no language left in me heart

I ' m a triple trombone fool
The Three Vehicles are a drag on my ass

Ah Sad America your cluster of girlies-AJl of a High School

afternoon waiting for the bass drum Master with his Golden Fish
Pole "Hike ! " he yells "Realize ! " don t amble just bramble in my
flying airplane bushes wi th me dont let ornery old hometown
friends in cars go C' cree-acking (Runnin Wild) yair, go ahead
home is soon -If my own kid did true be damned hummmmmm
tnto each rain the righ t rain poured ah h and go blue you River
Yair reaning calling more 0 Rooder you downed yair Oh
Yess Og nobody tree ah alone they ain t nobody home
Figure that out if you will, Drop
Milton is back
Dread dre ad dread dread dread dread is dead oh
the sorrowful twap of that tirler
Let no honest (let no oneset englishman ) twirl
Onest

1959, Northport

1 55
 RUNNING THROUGH­
CHINESE POEM SONG

0 I today
sad as Chu Yuan
stumbled to the store
in broiling Florida October
morning heat cursing
for my wine, sweating
like rain, & came to my chair
weak & trembling
Wondering if 1 ' 1n cra:y at last
-0 Chu Yuan ! No!
No suicide ! Wine please wine !
What shall we all do
all knowing we 're dying
without wine to guide us
to winking at death
& life too --

My heart belongs
to Chinese poets
& their scrolls-
We cantjust - die
-Men need wine
& poetry
at least

1 56
 0 Mao, poet Mao,
not Boss Mao,
here in America
wine is laughed at
& poetry a joke
-Death ' s a grim reminder
to everybody already dead
crashing in cars all around here ­
Here men & women dryly scowl
at poets' sad attempts
to make our lot
a whole lot
lesser-
I, a poet, suffer
even for bugs
I find upsidedown
dying in the grass­
So I drink wine
alone-
I shudder to think
how dead
the astronauts
are
going to a dead
moon
of no wine

1 57
 All our best men
are laughed at
in this nightmare land
but the newspapers preen
in virtue -Throughout
the world the left & right,
the east & west, are both vicious­
The happy old winebibber is gone-
1 want him to reappear-
For Modern China preens
in virtue too
for no better reason
than �America­
Nobody has respect for the cat
asleep, and I am hopelessly
inadequate in this poem
-Nobody has respect
for the self centered
irresponsible wine invalid
-Everybody wants to be strapped
in a hopeless space suit
where they can t move
-1 urge you, China,
- go back
to Li Po &
Tao Yuan Ming

1 58
 VVhat am I talking about?
I dont know,
I ' m sick today-
I didn t sleep all night,
Walked stumbling in the field
to get wine, now I ' m drinking it,
I feel better and worse -
! have something to say to Mao
& the poets of China
that won t come out-
I t's all about how America
ignores poetry & wine,
& so does China,
& I ' m a fool
without a river & a boat
& a flower suit-
without a wineshop at dawn
-- without self respect-

-Without the truth­

but I'm a better man
than all of you­
that's what I
wan ted to say

1961

1 59
 SKEN 3

Radiations of Akshobya
Blinding my eye in the
water in the claypot
pan-pot, the rainbow
of the sun 's reflection
there causing painful
imaginary blossoms to
arise in my eyeball
and I see silver daggers
& swords mingled with
red or rather roe-pink
rowing fires, shot by
quivers & Arch Bows of
Tampleton Hokshaw
HighRide Chariot Ear
the saint_ of England,
Wozzit, turning pools
of oil rainbow Dedalus
-Buddhalands without
number & Van Gogh swirl
agog rows -of em endless
emptiness in that little
pot, & bug flies-

1 60
 COGNAC BLUES

You gets your just dues in

Heaven Heaven 'll
be indifferent to this
indifferent dog

(Yet, honest indifference

were better than cant)

. . . really

When I hear pious

bullshit about justice
& Democracy and I know
the hypocri tes are lying
in their false teeth

I'm not indifferent to God,

I ' m indifferen t to
me-on-earth

I cant think of anything

n1ore ridiculous than me
on earth­
Really!

161
 , ,

BEAU BEBE

And the dreams-of me & Lousy & GJ

sitting on Moody St looking up the
bridge to P'Ville where vistas
of vast sunny cloud boulevard
Buddhalands open, I tell
Lousy "This is a dream"­
big rivers, lake---

I tell Lousy that, he gives

me the thin Kasyapa's Smile­
GJ too bored to commen t­
--
Like holding up a flo_wer,
as Ma says: "The Beginning"­
Later after being jacked off in
the NY subway by stealer
blondes with pimps in background
(Ah the Ecstasy) I
stole over well remembered
other-people roofs -

1961, Orlando, Fla.

1 62
 THE SHACK OF DESOLATION

The shack of Desolation is dirty, with broken boxes of wood

gathered by me like a Japanese old woman gathers
driftwood on the beach or on the mountainside,

Full of mice, fat drops, chips, ancient chewed up fragments

of religious tracts, crap, dust, old letters of other lookouts
and general unsweepable debris too infinitude to assemble
and sweep

Paniaw Powder Olympic Pawmanow

And Mt Hozomeen - most beautiful mountain I ever see n­

frigh ts me acme out the morning coffee window,
blue Chinese void of Friday morning,

And I have an old wash tub covered with a wood door of sheds
that wh en I saw it made me think of old time baths
of bathnigh t New England when Pa was pink-

Patiat rock mounts snow spomona ·d that I drew at ten

for Kuku and Coco everywhere, hundreds a miles of,
and clouds pass thru my ink

163
 POOR SOT TISH KEROUAC

Poor sottish Kerouac with his thumb in his eye

Getting interested in literature again
Though a mote of dust just flew by

How should I know that the dead were born?

Does Master cry?

The weeds Ophelia wound with

and Chatterton measured in the moon
are the weeds of Goethe, Wang Wei,
and the Golden Courtesans -- .

Imagining recommending a prefecture

for a man in the madhouse
--- rain ---

Sleep well, my angel

Make some eggs
The house in the moor
Is the house in the moor
The house is a monument
In the moor of the grave
--- Whatever that means ---

The white dove descended in disguise?

1 64
 LONG ISLAN D CHINESE POEM RAIN

The years are hurrying

Autumn rains fall on my awning
My accomplishments mean nothing to me
My girl no longer visits me

Maybe because I got warts on my cock

Or she found a younger man with a smooth cock
I can look up anything in my wine bottle

Whitman was happy about something around here

Followed by millions sick
What, Whitman, say?

The headlines of ten days ago no longer interest me

Rugs woven lovingly end on garage crates

The white dove desecrated in desuetude

And who wants wisdom?

The world is an eraser for these words

Oh sad Bodhidharma you were right

Everything we loved disappeared

1 65
 Nobody in the chair
Nobody in the books
Nobody in the rain

1 961

POME

If I don t use the cork

I may spill the wine­
But if I do?

1 66
 POM E ON DOCTOR SAX

In his declining years Doctor Sax was an old bum living in Skid
Row hotel rooms in the bligh ted area of SF around 3rd
Street-He was a madhaired old genius now with hair
growing out of his nose, like the hair growing out of
the nose of Aristadamis Kaldis the pain ter, and had
eyebrows growing out an inch long, like the eyebrows
of Daisetz Suzuki the Zen Master of whom
it has been said, of which, eyebrows like that
take a lifetime to grow so long &
therefore resemble the bush of the
Dharma which once rooted
is too tough to be
pulled out by hand
or horse -

Let that be a lesso n to all you young

girls plucking your eyebrows & you
:also) young choir singers jacking off
behind the marechal 's hilt
in St Paul 's
Cathedral
( & yelling home to Mother
"Mater Mine, b' ome
for Easter")

1 67
Dr Sax the master knower of
Easter was now reduced to penury
& looking at Stained glass windows
in old churches-His only 2
last friends in this life, this impossibly
hard life no matter under what
conditions it appears, were Bela
Lugosi & Boris Karloff, who visited
him annually in his room on 3rd Street
& cut thru the fogs of evening with
their heads ben t as the bells of St Simon
.

tolled a heartbroken "Kathleen" across

the rooftops of old hotels where similar old
men like Doctor Sax sat ben t headed
on beds of woe with prayerbeads between
their feet, Oh moaning, homes for
lost pigeons or time 's immemorial
white dove
of the roses
of the unborn
astonished bliss-

And there they'd sit in the little

room, Sax on the edge of the bed with a
bottle of rotgut Tokay in his hand, Bela
in the old rocking chair, Boris standing by
the sink, & sigh
---

& then Sax wd always say

1 68
 "Please play the monster for me " & of course
the old actors, who loved him dearly & came to
see him for human tender sentimentality not
monstrous reasons protested but he always
got drunk & cried so that Boris first had
to get up & extend his arms do
Frankenstein go uck! then Bela
wd stand & arm cape & leer &
approach Sax, who squealed

1 961

1 69
A CURSE AT THE DEV IL

ror Charleen Whisnant

Lucifer Sansfoi
Varlet Sansfoi

Orner Perdieu
I .B. Perdie
Billy Perdy

I ' ll unwind your

guts from Durham
to Dover
and bury em
in Clover-

Your psalms I 'll 'ave

engraved
in your toothbone-

Your victories -
nilled-
You jailed under
a woman 's skirt
of stone-

1 70
Stone blind woman
with no guts
and only a scale-

Your thoughts & letters

Shandy' d about
in Beth
(Gaelic for grave) .

Your philosophies
run up your nose
agatn -
.

Your confidences
and essays bandied
in ballrooms
from switchblade
to switchblade

-Your final
duel with
sledge hammers­
Your essential
secret twinned
to buttercups
& dying-

Your guide to 32
European cities

171
scabbed in Isaiah
-Your red beard
snobbed in
Dolmen ruins
in the edi tions
of the Bleak-

Your sain ts and

Consolations bereft
-Your handy volume
rolled into
an urn -

An d your father
and mother besmeared
at thought of you
th ' unspent begotless
crop of worms
-You lay
there, you
queen for a
day, wait
for the "fen- -
sucked fogs"
to carp at you

Your sweety beauty

discovered by No N arne
in its hidingplace

1 72
 till burrs
part from you
from lack
of issue,
sinew, all
the rest­
Gibbering quiver
graveyard Hoo!

The hospital
that buries
you
be Baal,
the digger
Yorick,
& the shoveler
groom -

My rosy tomatoes
pop squirting
from your awful
rotten grave -

Your profile,
erstwhile
Garboesque,
mistook by earth­
eels for some
fjord to
Sheol-

1 73
And your timid
voice box
strangled
by lie-hating
earth
forever.

May the plighted

Noah-clouds
dissolve in grief
of you-

May Red clay

be your center,
& woven into necks,
of hogs, boars,
hooters & pilferers
& burned down
with Stalin, Hitler
& the rest-

May you bite

your lip that
you cannot
meet wi th God-
or
Beat me to a pub
-Amen

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The Almoner,
his cup hath
no bottom,
nor I
a brim.

Devil, get thee

back
to russet caves.

August 31, 1965, Florida

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