Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 164
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Putting my palm on the neck of an 18 year old boy fingering my back pocket crying “Where’s the money”
“Om Ah Hu? there isn’t any”
My card Chief Boo-Hoo Neo American Chruch New Jersey & Lower East Side
Om Ah Hu?—what not forgotten crowded wallet—Mobil Credit, Shell? old lovers addresses on cardboard pieces, booksellers calling cards—
—“Shut up or we’ll murder you”—“Om Ah Hu? take it easy”
Lying on the floor shall I shout more loud?—the metal door closed on blackness
one boy felt my broken healed ankle, looking for hundred dollar bills behind my stocking weren’t even there—a third boy untied my Seiko Hong Kong watch rough from right wrist leaving a clasp-prick skin tiny bruise
“Shut up and we’ll get out of here”—and so they left,
as I rose from the cardboard mattress thinking Om Ah Hu? didn’t stop em enough,
the tone of voice too loud—my shoulder bag with 10,000 dollars full of poetry left on the broken floor—
November 2, 1974
II
Went out the door dim eyed, bent down & picked up my glasses from step edge I placed them while dragged in the store—looked out—
Whole street a bombed-out face, building rows’ eyes & teeth missing
burned apartments half the long block, gutted cellars, hallways’ charred beams
hanging over trash plaster mounded entrances, couches & bedsprings rusty after sunset
Nobody home, but scattered stoopfuls of scared kids frozen in black hair
chatted giggling at house doors in black shoes, families cooked For Rent some six story houses mid the street’s wreckage
Nextdoor Bodega, a phone, the police? “I just got mugged” I said
to the man’s face under fluorescent grocery light tin ceiling—
puffy, eyes blank & watery, sickness of beer kidney and language tongue
thick lips stunned as my own eyes, poor drunken Uncle minding the store!
O hopeless city of idiots empty eyed staring afraid, red beam top’d car at street curb arrived—
“Hey maybe my wallet’s still on the ground got a flashlight?”
Back into the burnt-doored cave, & the policeman’s gray flashlight broken no eyebeam—
“My partner all he wants is sit in the car never gets out Hey Joe bring your flashlight—”
a tiny throwaway beam, dim as a match in the criminal dark
“No I can’t see anything here” … “Fill out this form”
Neighborhood street crowd behind a car “We didn’t see nothing”
Stoop young girls, kids laughing “Listen man last time I messed with them see this—”
rolled up his skinny arm shirt, a white knife scar on his brown shoulder
“Besides we help you the cops come don’t know anybody we all get arrested
go to jail I never help no more mind my business everytime”
“Agh!” upstreet think “Gee I don’t know anybody here ten years lived half block crost Avenue C
and who knows who?”—passing empty apartments, old lady with frayed paper bags
sitting in the tin-boarded doorframe of a dead house.
December 10, 1974
Who Runs America?
Oil brown smog over Denver
Oil red dung colored smoke
level to level across the horizon
blue tainted sky above
Oil car smog gasoline
hazing red Denver’s day
December bare trees
sticking up from housetop streets
Plane lands rumbling, planes rise over
radar wheels, black smoke
drifts wobbly from tailfins
Oil millions of cars speeding the cracked plains
Oil from Texas, Bahrain, Venezuela Mexico
Oil that turns General Motors
revs up Ford
lights up General Electric, oil that crackles
thru International Business Machine computers,
charges dynamos for ITT
sparks Western Electric
runs thru Amer Telephone & Telegraph wires
Oil that flows thru Exxon New Jersey hoses,
rings in Mobil gas tank cranks, rumbles
Chrysler engines
shoots thru Texaco pipelines,
blackens ocean from broken Gulf tankers
spills onto Santa Barbara beaches from
Standard of California derricks offshore.
Braniff Air, Denver-Dallas, December 3, 1974
Thoughts on a Breath
Cars slide minute down asphalt lanes in front of
Dallas Hilton Inn
Trees brown bare in December’s smog-mist roll up
to the city’s squared towers
beneath electric wire grids trestled toward country water tanks
distanced under cloud streak crossed with fading
vapor trails.
Majestic in a skirt of human fog, building blocks
rise at sky edge,
Branches and house roofs march to horizon.
I sat again to complete the cycle, eyes open seeing
dust motes in the eye screen
like birds over telephone wires, curve of the eyeball
where Dallas and I meet—
white motel wall of the senses—ear roar
oil exhaust, snuffle and bone growl
motors rolling North Central freeway
Energy playing over Concrete, energy
hymning itself in emptiness—
What’ve I learned since I sat here four years ago?
In the halls of the head or out thru the halls of the senses,
same space
Trucks rolling toward Dallas skyscrapers
or mind thoughts floating thru my head
vanish on a breath—What was it I began
my meditation on?
Police state, Students, Poetry open tongue,
anger and fear of Cops,
oil Cops, Rockefeller Cops, Oswald Cops,
Johnson Cops Nixon Cops
president Cops
SMU Cops Trustee Cops CIA Cops
FBI Cops Goon Squads of Dope
Cops busted Stony Burns and sent him to
Jail 10 years and a day
for less than a joint of Grass, a Citizen
under republic, under Constitution, of Texas?
We sit here in police state and sigh, knowing
we’re trapped in our bodies,
our fear of No meat, no oil, no money, airplanes
sex love kisses jobs no
work
Massive metal bars about, monster machines
eat us, Controlled by army
Cops, the Secret Police, our own thoughts!
Punishment! Punish me! Punish me! we scream
in our hearts, cocks spurting alone
in our fists!
What thoughts more flowed thru our hearts alone
in Dallas? Flowed thru our hearts like oil
thru Hilton’s faucets?
Where shall we house our minds, pay
rent for Selves, how
protect our bodies
from inflation, starvation, old age, smoking
Cancer, Coughing Death?
Where get money to buy off the
skeleton? If we work with Kissinger
Can we buy time, get off on parole? Does
Rockefeller want Underground
Newspapers printing his subsconscious mind’s
nuclear oil wars?
Will 92nd Armored Division be sent to seize
Arabia oilfields
as threatened December’s US News &
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