Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 17

As to knowledge of death:

and life itself as without

consummation foreseeable

in ideal joy or passion

(have I exaggerated the

terror of catastrophe?

reality can be joy or terror—

and have I exaggerated the joy?):

life as vile, as painful,

as wretched (this pessimism

which was X’s jewel),

as grim, not merely bleak:

the grimness of chance. Or as

Carl wrote, after bughouse,

  “How often have I

  had occasion to see

  existence display

  the affectations

  of a bloodthirsty

  negro homosexual.”

December 1951

Walking home at night,

reaching my own block

     I saw the Port Authority

Building hovering over

     the old ghetto side

of the street I tenement

     in company with obscure

Bartlebys and Judes,

     cadaverous men,

shrouded men, soft white

fleshed failures creeping

in and out of rooms like

     myself. Remembering

     my attic, I reached

my hands to my head and hissed,

“Oh, God how horrible!”

New York, December 1951

I learned a world from each

     one whom I loved;

so many worlds without

     a Zodiac.

New York, December 1951

     I made love to myself

in the mirror, kissing my own lips,

     saying, “I love myself,

I love you more than anybody.”

New York, December 30, 1951

A Ghost May Come

Elements on my table—

     the clock.

All life reduced to this—

     its tick.

Dusty’s modern lamp,

all shape, space and curve.

Last attempts at speech.

     And the carved

serpentine knife of Mexico,

with the childish

eagle head on the handle.

New York, December 30, 1951

I feel as if I am at a dead

end and so I am finished.

All spiritual facts I realize

are true but I never escape

the feeling of being closed in

and the sordidness of self,

the futility of all that I

have seen and done and said.

Maybe if I continued things

would please me more but now

I have no hope and I am tired.

New York, Early 1952

An Atypical Affair

—Long enough to remember the girl

who proposed love to me in the neon

light of the Park Avenue Drugstore

(while her girl friends walked

giggling in the night) who had

such eerie mental insight into my

coldness, coupled with what seemed

to me an untrustworthy character,

and who died a few months later,

perhaps a month after I ceased

thinking of her, of an unforeseen

brain malignancy. By hindsight,

I should have known that only such

a state of deathliness could bare

in a local girl such a luminous

candor. I wish I had been kinder.

This hindsight is the opposite,

after all, of believing that even

in the face of death man can be

no more than ordinary man.

New York, January 1952

345 W. 15th St.

I came home from the movies with nothing on my mind,

Trudging up 8th Avenue to 15th almost blind,

Waiting for a passenger ship to go to sea.

I live in a roominghouse attic near the Port Authority,

An enormous City warehouse slowly turning brown

Across from which old brownstones’ fire escapes hang down

On a street which should be Russia outside the Golden gates

Or back in the middle ages not in United States.

I thought of my home in the suburbs, my father who wanted me home,

My aunts in the asylum myself in Nome or Rome.

I opened the door downstairs & Creaked up the first flight.

A Puerto Rican in the front room was laughing in the night.

I saw from the second stairway the homosexual pair

That lived in different cubicles playing solitaire,

And I stopped on the third landing and said hello to Ned,

A crooked old man like Father Time who drank all night in bed.

I made it up to the attic room I paid $4.50 for.

There was a solitary cockroach on my door.

It passed me by. I entered. Nothing of much worth

Was hung up under the skylight. I saw what I had on earth.