Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 29

ah drunkenness!

I’ll see your eyes again.

Hopeless comedown!

Traveling thru the dark void

over Kansas yet moving nowhere

in the dark void of the soul.

Angel woke me to see

—past my own reflection,

bald businessman with hornrims

sleepy in round window view—

spectral skeleton of electricity

illuminated nervous system

floating on the void out

of central brainplant powerhouse

running into heaven’s starlight

overhead. ’Twas over Hutchinson.

Engine passed over lights,

          view gone.

Gorgeous George on my plane.

And Chicago, the first time,

smoking winter city

—shivering in my tweed jacket

walking by the airport

around the block on Cicero

under the fogged flat

supersky of heaven—

another project for the heart,

six months for here someday

to make Chicago natural,

pick up a few strange images.

Far-off red signs

on the orphan highway

glimmer at the trucks of home.

Who rides that lone road now?

What heart? Who smokes and loves

in Kansas auto now?

Who’s talking magic

under the night? Who walks

downtown and drinks black beer

in his eternity? Whose eyes

collect the streets and mountain tops

for storage in his memory?

What sage in the darkness?

Someone who should collect

my insurance!

          Better I make

a thornful pilgrimage on theory

feet to suffer the total

isolation of the bum,

than this hipster

business family journey

—crossing U.S. at night—

in a sudden glimpse

me being no one in the air

nothing but clouds in the moonlight

with humans fucking

underneath… .

San Francisco-New York, December 1954

III

HOWL, BEFORE & AFTER: SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA

(1955–1956)

Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo

I’m happy, Kerouac, your madman Allen’s

finally made it: discovered a new young cat,

and my imagination of an eternal boy

walks on the streets of San Francisco,

handsome, and meets me in cafeterias

and loves me. Ah don’t think I’m sickening.

You’re angry at me. For all of my lovers?

It’s hard to eat shit, without having visions;

when they have eyes for me it’s like Heaven.

San Francisco, 1955

Dream Record: June 8, 1955

A drunken night in my house with a

boy, San Francisco: I lay asleep:

darkness:

          I went back to Mexico City

and saw Joan Burroughs leaning

forward in a garden chair, arms

on her knees. She studied me with

clear eyes and downcast smile, her

face restored to a fine beauty

tequila and salt had made strange

before the bullet in her brow.

We talked of the life since then.

Well, what’s Burroughs doing now?

Bill on earth, he’s in North Africa.

Oh, and Kerouac? Jack still jumps

with the same beat genius as before,

notebooks filled with Buddha.

I hope he makes it, she laughed.

Is Huncke still in the can? No,

last time I saw him on Times Square.

And how is Kenney? Married, drunk

and golden in the East. You? New

loves in the West—

          Then I knew

she was a dream: and questioned her

—Joan, what kind of knowledge have

the dead? can you still love

your mortal acquaintances?

What do you remember of us?

          She

faded in front of me— The next instant

I saw her rain-stained tombstone

rear an illegible epitaph

under the gnarled branch of a small

tree in the wild grass

of an unvisited garden in Mexico.

Blessed be the Muses

for their descent,

dancing round my desk,

crowning my balding head

with Laurel.

1955

Howl

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,