Some of my personal favorite poems:

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo

Questa fiamma staria sensa piu scosse.

Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo

Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero

Sensa tema d'infamia ti rispondo.*

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .

Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?'

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair-

[They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!']

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin-

[They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!']

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all-

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all-

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all-

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?

. . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

. . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter

I am no prophet-and here's no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'-

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: 'That is not what I meant at all.

That is not it, at all.'

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor-

And this, and so much more?-

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

'That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant at all.'

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous-

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Lament for the Moths

A plague has stricken the moths, the moths are dying,

thier bodies are flakes of bronze on the carpet lying.

Enemies of the delicate everywhere

have breathed a pestilent mist into the air.

Lament for the velvety moths, for the moths were lovely.

Often their tender thoughts, for they thought of me,

eased the neurotic ills that haunt the day.

Now an invisible evil takes them away.

I move through the shadowy rooms, I cannot be still,

I must find where the treacherous killer is concealed.

Feverishly I search and still they fall

as fragile as ashes broken against a wall.

Now that the plague has taken the moths away,

who will be cooler than curtains against the day,

who will come early and softly to ease my lot

as I move through the shadowy rooms with a troubled heart?

Give them, O mother of moths and mother of men,

strength to enter the heavy world again,

for delicate were the moths and badly wanted

here in a world by mammoth figures haunted!

<a name=”keywest”>The Idea of Order at Key West</a>

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

The water never formed to mind or voice,

Like a body wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion

Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,

That was not ours although we understood,

Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.

The song and water were not medleyed sound

Even if what she sang was what she heard,

Since what she sang was uttered word by word.

It may be that in all her phrases stirred

The grinding water and the gasping wind;

But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew

It was the spirit that we sought and knew

That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea

That rose, or even colored by many waves;

If it was only the outer voice of sky

And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,

However clear, it would have been deep air,

The heaving speech of air, a summer sound

Repeated in a summer without end

And sound alone. But it was more than that,

More even than her voice, and ours, among

The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,

Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped

On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres

Of sky and sea.

It was her voice that made

The sky acutest at its vanishing.

She measured to the hour its solitude.

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,

Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,

As we beheld her striding there alone,

Knew that there never was a world for her

Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,

Why, when the singing ended and we turned

Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,

The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,

As the night descended, tilting in the air,

Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,

Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,

Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,

The maker's rage to order words of the sea,

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins,

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds

<a name=”season”>A Season In Hell</a>

"ONCE, IF MY MEMORY SERVES ME WELL"

Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.

One evening I took Beauty in my arms-- and I thought her bitter-- and I insulted her.

I steeled myself against justice.

I fled. O witches, O misery, O hate, my treasure was left in your care...

I have withered within me all human hope. With the silent leap of a sullen beast, I have downed and strangled every joy.

I have called for executioners; I want to perish chewing on their gun butts. I have called for plagues, to suffocate in sand and blood. Unhappiness has been my god. I have lain down in the mud, and dried myself off in the crime-infested air. I have played the fool to the point of madness.

And springtime brought me the frightful laugh of an idiot.

Now recently, when I found myself ready to croak! I thought to seek the key to the banquet of old, where I might find an appetite again.

That key is Charity. (This idea proves I was dreaming!)

"You will stay a hyena, etc....," shouts the demon who once crowned me with such pretty poppies. "Seek death with all your desires, and all selfishness, and all the Seven Deadly Sins."

Ah, I've taken too much of that; still, dear Satan, don't look so annoyed, I beg you! And while waiting for a few belated cowardices, since you value in a writer all lack of descriptive or didactic flair, I pass you these few foul pages from the diary of a Damned Soul.

BAD BLOOD

From my ancestors the Gauls I have pale blue eyes, a narrow brain, and awkwardness in competition. I think my clothes are as barbaric as theirs. But I don't butter my hair.

The Gauls were the most stupid hide-flayers and hay-burners of their time.

From them I inherit: idolatry, and love of sacrelige-- oh, all sorts of vice; anger, lechery-- terrific stuff, lechery-- lying, above all, and laziness.

I have a horror of all trades and crafts. Bosses and workers, all of them peasants, and common. The hand that holds the pen is as good as the one that holds the plow. (What a century for hands!) I'll never learn to use my hands. And then, domesticity goes too far. The propriety of beggary shames me. Criminals are as disgusting as men without balls; I'm intact, and I don't care.

But who has made my tongue so treacherous, that until now it has counseled and kept me in idleness? I have not used even my body to get along. Out-idling the sleepy toad, I have lived everywhere. There's not one family in Europe that I don't know. Families, I mean, like mine, who owe their existence to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. I have known each family's eldest son!

If only I had a link to some point in the history of France!

But instead, nothing.

I am well aware that I have always been of an inferior race. I cannot understand revolt. My race has never risen, except to plunder; to devour like wolves a beast they did not kill.

I remember the history of France, the Eldest Daughter of the Church. I would have gone, a village serf, crusading to the Holy Land; my head is full of roads in the Swabian plains, of the sight of Byzantium, of the ramparts of Jerusalem; the cult of Mary, the pitiful thought of Christ crucified, turns in my head with a thousand profane enchantments-- I sit like a leper among broken pots and nettles, at the foot of a wall eaten away by the sun. ?And later, a wandering mercenary, I would have bivouacked under German nighttimes.

Ah! one thing more: I dance the Sabbath in a scarlet clearing, with old women and children.

I don't remember much beyond this land, and Christianity. I will see myself forever in its past. But always alone, without a family; what language, in fact, did I used to speak? I never see myself in the councils of Christ; nor in the councils of the Lords, Christ's representatives. What was I in the century past? I only find myself today. The vagabonds, the hazy wars are gone. The inferior race has swept over all-- the People (as they put it), Reason; Nation and Science.

Ah, Science! Everything is taken from the past. For the body and the soul-- the last sacrament-- we have Medicine and Philosophy, household remedies and folk songs rearrainged. And royal entertainments, and games that kings forbid. Geography, Cosmography, Mechanics, Chemistry!...

Science, the new nobility! Progress! The world moves!... And why shouldn't it?

We have visions of numbers. We are moving toward the Spirit. What I say is oracular and absolutely right. I

understand... and since I cannot express myself except in pagan terms, I would rather keep quiet.

Pagan blood returns! The Spirit is at hand... why does Christ not help me, and grant my soul nobility and freedom? Ah, but the Gospel belongs to the past! The Gospel. The Gospel...

I wait gluttinously for God. I have been of an inferior race for ever and ever.

And now I am on the beaches of Brittany.... Let cities light their lamps in the evening; my daytime is done, I am leaving Europe. The air of the sea will burn my lungs; lost climates will turn my skin to leather. To swim, to pulverize grass, to hunt, above all to smoke; to drink strong drinks, as strong as molten ore, as did those dear ancestors around their fires.

I will come back with limbs of iron, with dark skin, and angry eyes; in this mask, they will think I belong to a strong race. I will have gold; I will be brutal and indolent. Women nurse these ferocious invalids come back from the tropics. I will become involved in politics. Saved.

Now I am accursed, I detest my native land. The best thing is a drunken sleep, stretched out on some strip of

shore.

But no one leaves. Let us set out once more on our native roads, burdened with my vice-- that vice that since the age of reason has driven roots of suffering into my side-- that towers to heaven, beats me, hurls me down, drags me on.

Ultimate innocence, final timidity. All's said. Carry no more my loathing and treacheries before the world.

Come on! Marching, burdens, the desert, boredom and anger.

Hire myself to whom? What beasts adore? What sacred images destroy? What hearts shall I break? What lie

maintain? Through what blood wade?

Better to keep away from justice. A hard life, outright stupor-- with a dried-out fist to lift the coffin lid, lie down, and suffocate. No old age this way-- no danger: terror is very un-French.

--Ah! I am so forsaken I will offer at any shrine impulses toward perfection.

Oh, my self-denial, my marvelous Charity, my Selfless love! And still here below!

De profundis, Dominie... what an ass I am!

When I was still a little child, I admired the hardened convict on whom the prison door will always close; I used to visit the bars and the rented rooms his presence had consecrated; I saw with his eyes the blue sky and the flower-filled work of the fields; I followed his fatal scent through city streets. He had more strength than the saints, more sense than any explorer-- and he, he alone! was witness to his glory and his rightness.

Along the open road on winter nights, homeless, cold, and hungry, one voice gripped my frozen heart: "Weakness or strength: you exist, that is strength.... You don't know where you are going or why you are going; go in everywhere, answer everyone. No one will kill you, any more than if you were a corpse." In the morning my eyes were so vacant and my face so dead that the people I met may not even have seen me.

In cities, mud went suddenly red and black, like a mirror when a lamp in the next room moves, like treasure in the forest! Good luck, I cried, and I saw a sea of flames and smoke rise to heaven, and left and right all wealth exploded like a billion thunderbolts.

But orgies and the companionship of women were impossible for me. Not even a friend. I saw myself before an angry mob, facing a firing squad, weeping out sorrows they could not understand, and pardoning-- like Joan of Arc!-- "Priests, professors and doctors, you are mistaken in delivering me into the hands of the law. I have never been one of you; I have never been a Christian; I belong to the race that sang on the scaffold; I do not understand your laws; I have no moral sense; I am a brute; you are making a mistake...."

Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am an animal, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are fake niggers;

maniacs, savages, misers, all of you. Businessman, you're a nigger; judge, you're a nigger; general, you're a

nigger; emperor, old scratch-head, you're a nigger: you've drunk a liquor no one taxes, from Satan's still. This nation is inspired by fever and cancer. Invalids and old men are so respectable that they ask to be boiled. The best thing is to quit this continent where madness prowls, out to supply hostages for these wretches. I will enter the true kingdom of the sons of Ham.

Do I understand nature? Do I understand myself? No more words! I shroud dead men in my stomach.... Shouts, drums, dance, dance, dance! I can't even imagine the hour when the white men land, and I will fall into nothingness.

Thirst and hunger, shouts, dance, dance, dance!

The white men are landing! Cannons! Now we must be baptized, get dressed, and go to work.

My heart has been stabbed by grace. Ah! I hadn't thought this would happen.

But I haven't done anything wrong. My days will be easy, and I will be spared repentance. I will not have had the torments of the soul half-dead to the Good, where austere light rises again like funeral candles. The fate of a first-born son, a premature coffin covered with shining tears. No doubt, perversion is stupid, vice is stupid; rottenness must always be cast away. But the clock must learn to strike more than hours of pure pain! Am I to be carried away like a child, to play in paradise, forgetting all this misery?

Quick! Are there any other lives? Sleep for the rich is impossible. Wealth has always lived openly. Divine love alone confers the keys of knowledge. I see that nature is only a show of kindness. Farewell chimeras, ideals and errors.

The reasonable song of angels rises from the rescue ship: it is divine love. Two loves! I may die of earthly love, die of devotion. I have left behind creatures whose grief will grow at my going. You choose me from among the castaways; aren't those who remain my friends?

Save them!

I am reborn in reason. The world is good. I will bless life. I will love my brothers. There are no longer childhood promises. Nor the hope of escaping old age and death. God is my strength, and I praise God.

Boredom is no longer my love. Rage, perversion, madness, whose every impulse and disaster I know-- my burden is set down entire. Let us appraise with clear heads the extent of my innocence. I am no longer able to ask for the consolation of a beating. I don't imagine I'm off on a honeymoon with Jesus Christ as my father-in-law.

I am no prisoner of my own reason. I have said: God. I want freedom, within salvation: how shall I go about it? A taste for frivolity has left me. No further need for divine love or for devotion to duty. I do not regret the age of emotion and feeling. To each his own reason, contempt, Charity: I keep my place at the top of the angelic ladder of good sense.

As for settled happiness, domestic or not... no, I can't. I am too dissipated, too weak. Work makes life blossom, an old idea, not mine; my life doesn't weigh enough, it drifts off and floats far beyond action, that third pole of the world.

What an old maid I'm turning into, to lack the courage to love death!

If only God would grant me that celestial calm, ethereal calm, and prayer-- like the saints of old. --The Saints! They were strong! Anchorites, artists of a kind we no longer need....

Does this farce have no end? My innocence is enough to make me cry. Life is the farce we all must play.

Stop it! This is your punishment.... Forward march!

Ah! my lungs burn, my temples roar! Night rolls in my eyes, beneath this sun! My heart... my arms and legs....

Where are we going? To battle? I am weak! the others go on ahead... tools, weapons... give me time!

Fire! Fire at me! Here! or I'll give myself up! --Cowards! --I'll kill myself! I'll throw myself beneath the horses' hooves!

Ah!...

--I'll get used to it.

That would be the French way, the path of honor!

NIGHT IN HELL

I have just swallowed a terrific mouthful of poison. --Blessed, blessed, blessed the advice I was given!

--My guts are on fire. The power of the poison twists my arms and legs, cripples me, drives me to the ground. I die of thirst, I suffocate, I cannot cry. This is Hell, eternal torment! See how the flames rise! I burn as I ought to. Go on, Devil!

I once came close to a conversion to the good and to felicity, salvation. How can I describe my vision; the air of Hell is too thick for hymns! There were millions of delightful creatures in smooth spiritual harmony, strength and peace, noble ambitions, I don't know what all.

Noble ambitions!

But I am still alive! Suppose damnation is eternal! A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn't he? I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am. This is the catechism at work. I am the slave of my baptism. You, my parents, have ruined my life, and your own. Poor child! --Hell is powerless against pagans. --I am still alive! Later on, the delights of damnation will become more profound. A crime, quick, and let me fall to nothingness, condemned by human law.

Shut up, will you shut up! Everything here is shame and reproach-- Satan saying that the fire is worthless, that my anger is ridiculous and silly. --Ah, stop! ...those mistakes someone whispered-- magic spells, deceptive odors, childish music-- and to think that I possess the truth, that I can have a vision of justice: my judgment is sound and firm, I am prime for perfection.... Pride. --My scalp begins to tighten. Have mercy! Lord, I am afraid! Water, I thirst, I thirst! Ah, childhood, grass and rain, the puddle on the paving stones, Moonlight when the clock strikes twelve.... The devil is in the clock tower, right now! Mary! Holy Virgin!... --Horrible stupidity.

Look there, are those not honorable men, who wish me well? Come on... a pillow over my mouth, they cannot hear me, they are only ghosts. Anyway, no one ever thinks of anyone else. Don't let them come closer. I must surely stink of burning flesh....

My hallucinations are endless. This is what I've always gone through: the end of my faith in history, the neglect of my principles. I shall say no more about this; poets and visionaries would be jealous. I am the richest one of all, a thousand times, and I will hoard it like the sea.

O God-- the clock of life stopped but a moment ago. I am no longer within the world. --Theology is accurate; hell is certainly down below-- and heaven is up on high. Ecstasy, nightmare, sleep, in a nest of flames.

How the mind wanders idly in the country... Satan, Ferdinand, blows with the wild seed. .. Jesus walks on purple thorns but doesn't bend them... Jesus used to walk on troubled waters. In the light of the lantern we saw him there, all white, with long brown hair, standing in the curve of an emerald wave....

I will tear the veils from every mystery-- mysteries of religion or of nature, death, birth, the future, the past,

cosmogony, and nothingness. I am a master of phantasmagoria.

Listen!

Every talent is mine! --There is no one here, and there is someone: I wouldn't want to waste my treasure. --Shall I give you Afric chants, belly dancers? Shall I disappear, shall I begin an attempt to discover the Ring? Shall I? I will manufacture gold, and medicines.

Put your faith in me, then; faith comforts, it guides and heals. Come unto me all of you-- even the little children?let me console you, let me pour out my heart for you-- my miraculous heart! --Poor men, poor laborers! I do not ask for prayers; give me only your trust, and I will be happy.

Think of me, now. All this doesn't make me miss the world much. I'm lucky not to suffer more. My life was nothing but sweet stupidities, unfortunately.

Bah! I'll make all the ugly faces I can! We are out of the world, that's sure. Not a single sound. My sense of touch is gone. Ah, my château, my Saxony, my willow woods! Evenings and mornings, nights and days.... How tired I am!

I ought to have a special hell for my anger, a hell for my pride-- and a hell for sex; a whole symphony of hells!

I am weary, I die. This is the grave and I'm turning into worms, horror of horrors! Satan, you clown, you want to dissolve me with your charms. Well, I want it. I want it! Stab me with a pitchfork, sprinkle me with fire!

Ah! To return to life! To stare at our deformities. And this poison, this eternally accursed embrace! My weakness, and the world's cruelty! My God, have pity, hide me, I can't control myself at all! I am hidden, and I am not.

And as the Damned soul rises, so does the fire.

FIRST DELIRIUM: THE FOOLISH VIRGIN

THE INFERNAL BRIDEGROOM

Let us hear the confession of an old friend in Hell:

"O Lord, O Celestial Bridegroom, do not turn thy face from the confession of the most pitiful of thy handmaidens. I am lost. I'm drunk. I'm impure. What a life!

"Pardon, Lord in Heaven, pardon! Ah, pardon! All these tears! And all the tears to come later on, I hope!

"Later on, I will meet the Celestial Bridegroom! I was born to be His slave. --That other one can beat me now!

"Right now, it's the end of the world! Oh, girls... my friends... no, not my friends... I've never gone through anything like this; delirium, torments, anything.... It's so silly!

"Oh, I cry, I'm suffering! I really am suffering! And still I've got a right to do whatever I want, now that I am covered with contempt by the most contemptible hearts.

"Well, let me make my confession anyway, though I may have to repeat it twenty times again-- so dull, and so insignificant!

"I am a slave of the Infernal Bridegroom; the one who seduced the foolish virgins. That's exactly the devil he is. He's no phantom, he's no ghost. But I, who have lost my wits, damned and dead to the world-- no one will be able to kill me-- how can I describe him to you? I can't even talk anymore! I'm all dressed in mourning, I'm crying, I'm afraid. Please, dear Lord, a little fresh air, if you don't mind, please!

"I am a widow-- I used to be a widow-- oh, yes, I used to be very serious in those days; I wasn't born to become a skeleton! He was a child-- or almost.... His delicate, mysterious ways enchanted me. I forgot all my duties in order to follow him. What a life we lead! True life is lacking. We are exiles from this world, really-- I go where he goes; I have to. And lots of times he gets mad at me-- at me, poor sinner! That Devil! (He really is a Devil, you know, and not a man.)

"He says: `I don't love women. Love has to be reinvented, we know that. The only thing women can ultimately imagine is security. Once they get that, love, beauty, everything else goes out the window. All they have left is cold disdain; that's what marriages live on nowadays. Sometimes I see women who ought to be happy, with whom I could have found companionship, already swallowed up by brutes with as much feeling as an old log....'

"I listen to him turn infamy into glory, cruelty into charm. `I belong to an ancient race: my ancestors were

Norsemen: they slashed their own bodies, drank their own blood. I'll slash my body all over, I'll tattoo myself, I want to be as ugly as a Mongol; you'll see, I'll scream in the streets. I want to get really mad with anger. Don't show me jewels; I'll get down on all fours and writhe on the carpet. I want my wealth stained all over with blood. I will never do any work....' Several times, at night, his demon seized me, and we rolled about wrestling! --Sometimes at night when he's drunk he hangs around street corners or behind doors, to scare me to death. `I'll get my throat cut for sure, won't that be disgusting.' And, oh, those days when he wants to go around pretending he's a criminal!

"Sometimes he talks, in his backcountry words, full of emotion, about death, and how it makes us repent, and how surely there are miserable people in the world, about exhausting work, and about saying goodbye and how it tears your heart. In the dives where we used to get drunk, he would cry when he looked at the people around us?cattle of the slums. He used to pick up drunks in the dark streets. He had the pity of a brutal mother for little children. He went around with all the sweetness of a little girl on her way to Sunday school. He pretended to know all about everything-- business, art, medicine-- and I always went along with him; I had to!

"I used to see clearly all the trappings that he hung up in his imagination; costumes, fabric, furniture.... It was I who lent him weapons, and a change of face. I could visualize everything that affected him, exactly as he would have imagined it for himself. Whenever he seemed depressed, I would follow him into strange, complicated adventures, on and on, into good and evil; but I always knew I could never be a part of his world. Beside his dear body, as he slept, I lay awake hour after hour, night after night, trying to imagine why he wanted so much to escape from reality. No man before ever had such a desire. I was aware-- without being afraid for him-- that he could become a serious menace to society. Did he, perhaps, have secrets that would remake life? No, I told myself, he was only looking for them. But of course, his charity is under a spell, and I am its prisoner. No one else could have the strength-- the strength of despair!-- to stand it, to stand being cared for and loved by him. Besides, I could never imagine him with anybody else-- we all have eyes for our own Dark Angel, never other people's Angels-- at least I think so. I lived in his soul as if it were a palace that had been cleared out so that the most unworthy person in it would be you, that's all. Ah, really, I used to depend on him terribly. But what did he want with my dull, my cowardly existence? He couldn't improve me, though he never managed to kill me! I get so sad and disappointed; sometimes I say to him `I understand you.' He just shrugs his shoulders.

"And so my heartaches kept growing and growing, and I saw myself going more and more to pieces (and everyone else would have seen it, too, if I hadn't been so miserable that no one even looked at me anymore!), and still more and more I craved his affection.... His kisses and his friendly arms around me were just like heaven-- a dark heaven, that I could go into, and where I wanted only to be left-- poor, deaf, dumb, and blind. Already, I was getting to depend on it. And I used to imagine that we were two happy children free to wander in a Paradise of sadness. We were in absolute harmony. Deeply moved, we labored side by side. But then, after a piercing embrace, he would say: `How funny it will all seem, all you've gone through, when I'm not here anymore. When you no longer feel my arms around your shoulders, nor my heart beneath you, nor this mouth on your eyes. Because I will have to go away someday, far away. Besides, I've got to help out others too; that's what I'm here for. Although I won't really like it... dear heart...' And in that instant I could feel myself, with him gone, dizzy with fear, sinking down into the most horrible blackness-- into death. I made him promise that he would never leave me. And he promised, twenty times; promised like a lover. It was as meaningless as my saying to him: `I understand you.'

"Oh, I've never been jealous of him. He'll never leave me, I'm sure of it. What will he do? He doesn't know a soul; he'll never work; he wants to live like a sleepwalker. Can his kindness and his charity by themselves give him his place in the real world? There are moments when I forget the wretched mess I've fallen into.... He will give me strength; we'll travel, we'll go hunting in the desert, we'll sleep on the sidewalks of unknown cities, carefree and happy. Or else some day I'll wake up and his magic power will have changed all laws and morals, but the world will still be the same and leave me my desires and my joys and my lack of concern. Oh, that wonderful world of adventures that we found in children's books-- won't you give me that world? I've suffered so much; I deserve a reward.... He can't. I don't know what he really wants. He says he has hopes and regrets: but they have nothing to do with me. Does he talk to God? Maybe I should talk to God myself. I am in the depths of an abyss, and I have forgotten how to pray.

"Suppose he did explain his sadness to me-- would I understand it any better than his jokes and insults? He

attacks me, he spends hours making me ashamed of everything in the world that has ever meant anything to me, and then he gets mad if I cry.

"... `Do you see that lovely young man going into that beautiful, peaceful house? His name is Duval, Dufour;

...Armand, Maurice, whatever you please. There is a woman who has spent her life loving that evil creature; she died. I'm sure she's a saint in heaven right now. You are going to kill me the way he killed that woman. That's what's in store for all of us who have unselfish hearts....' Oh, dear! There were days when all men of action seemed to him like the toys of some grotesque raving. He would laugh, horribly, on and on. Then he would go back to acting like a young mother, or an older sister.... If he were not such a wild thing, we would be saved! But even his sweetness is mortal.... I am his slave....

"Oh, I've lost my mind!

"Some day maybe he'll just disappear miraculously, but I absolutely must be told about it, I mean if he's going to go back up into heaven or someplace, so that I can go and watch for just a minute the Assumption of my darling boy...."

One hell of a household!

SECOND DELERIUM: THE ALCHEMY OF THE WORD

My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.

For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes-- and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.

What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards,

bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly old songs, the naïve rhythms of country rimes.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic.

I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.

I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

Far from flocks, from birds and country girls,

What did I drink within that leafy screen

Surrounded by tender hazelnut trees

In the warm green mist of afternoon?

What could I drink from this young Oise

--Toungeless trees, flowerless grass, dark skies--

Drink from these yellow gourds, far from the hut

I loved? Some golden draught that made me sweat.

I would have made a doubtful sign for an inn.

Later, toward evening, the sky filled with clouds...

Water from the woods runs out on virgin sands,

And heavenly winds cast ice thick on the ponds;

Then I saw gold, and wept, but could not drink.

* * *

At four in the morning, in summertime,

Love's drowsiness still lasts...

The bushes blow away the odor

Of the night's feast.

Beyond the bright Hesperides,

Within the western workshop of the Sun,

Carpenters scramble-- in shirtsleeves--

Work is begun.

And in desolate, moss-grown isles

They raise their precious panels

Where the city

Will paint a hollow sky.

For these charming dabblers in the arts

Who labor for a King in Babylon,

Venus! Leave for a moment

Lovers' haloed hearts...

O Queen of Shepherds!

Carry the purest eau-de-vie

To these workmen while they rest

And take their bath at noonday, in the sea.

The worn-out ideas of old-fashioned poetry played an important part in my alchemy of the word.

I got used to elementary hallucination: I could very precisely see a mosque instead of a factory, a drum corps of angels, horse carts on the highways of the sky, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake; monsters and mysteries. A vaudeville's title filled me with awe.

And so I explained my magical sophistries by turning words into visions!

At last, I began to consider my mind's disorder a sacred thing. I lay about idle, consumed by an oppressive fever: I envied the bliss of animals-- caterpillars, who portray the innocence of a second childhood; moles, the slumber of virginity!

My mind turned sour. I said farewell to the world in poems something like ballads:

A SONG FROM THE HIGHEST TOWER

Let it come, let it come,

The season we can love!

I have waited so long

That at length I forget,

And leave unto heaven

My fear and regret;

A sick thirst

Darkens my veins.

Let it come, let it come,

the season we can love!

So the green field

To oblivion falls,

Overgrown, flowering,

With incense and weeds.

And the cruel noise

Of dirty flies.

Let it come, let it come,

the season we can love!

I loved the desert, burnt orchards, tired old shops, warm drinks. I dragged myself through stinking alleys, and with my eyes closed I offered myself to the sun, the god of fire.

"General: If on your ruined ramparts one cannon still remains, shell us with clods of dried-up earth. Shatter the mirrors of expensive shops! And the drawing rooms! Make the city swallow its dust! Turn gargoyles to rust. Stuff boudoirs with rubies' fiery powder...."

Oh, the little fly! Drunk at the urinal of a country inn, in love with rotting weeds; a ray of light dissolves him!

I only find within my bones

A taste for eating earth and stones.

When I feed, I feed on air,

Rocks and coals and iron ore.

My hunger, turn. Hunger, feed:

A field of bran.

Gather as you can the bright

Poison weed.

Eat the rocks a beggar breaks,

The stones of ancient churches' walls,

Pebbles, children of the flood,

Loaves left lying in the mud.

* * *

Beneath the bush a wolf will howl,

Spitting bright feathers

From his feast of fowl:

Like him, I devour myself.

Waiting to be gathered

Fruits and grasses spend their hours;

The spider spinning in the hedge

Eats only flowers.

Let me sleep! Let me boil

On the altars of Solomon;

Let me soak the rusty soil

And flow into Kendron.

Finally, O reason, O happiness, I cleared from the sky the blue which is darkness, and I lived as a golden spark of this light, Nature. In my delight, I made my face look as comic and as wild as I could:

It is recovered.

What? Eternity.

In the whirling light

Of the sun in the sea.

O my eternal soul,

Hold fast to desire

In spite of the night

And the day on fire.

You must set yourself free

From the striving of Man

And the applause of the World!

You must fly as you can...

No hope, forever;

No _orietur._

Science and patience,

The torment is sure.

The fire within you,

Soft silken embers,

Is our whole duty--

But no one remembers.

It is recovered.

What? Eternity.

In the whirling light

Of the sun in the sea.

I became a fabulous opera. I saw that everyone in the world was doomed to happiness. Action isn't life; it's merely a way of ruining a kind of strength, a means of destroying nerves. Morality is water on the brain.

It seemed to me that everyone should have had several other lives as well. This gentleman doesn't know what he's doing; he's an angel. That family is a litter of puppy dogs. With some men, I often talked out loud with a moment from one of their other lives-- that's how I happened to love a pig.

Not a single one of the brilliant arguments of madness-- the madness that gets locked up-- did I forget; I could go through them all again, I've got the system down by heart.

It affected my health. Terror loomed ahead. I would fall again and again into a heavy sleep, which lasted several days at a time, and when I woke up, my sorrowful dreams continued. I was ripe for fatal harvest, and my weakness led me down dangerous roads to the edge of the world, to the Cimmerian shore, the haven of whirlwinds and darkness.

I had to travel, to dissipate the enchantments that crowded my brain. On the sea, which I loved as if it were to wash away my impurity, I watched the compassionate cross arise. I had been damned by the rainbow. Felicity was my doom, my gnawing remorse, my worm. My life would forever be too large to devote to strength and to beauty.

Felicity! The deadly sweetness of its sting would wake me at cockcrow-- ad matutinum, at the Christus venit?in the somberest of cities.

O seasons, O chateaus!

Where is the flawless soul?

I learned the magic of

Felicity. It enchants us all.

To Felicity, sing life and praise

Whenever Gaul's cock crows.

Now all desire has gone--

It has made my life its own.

That spell has caught heart and soul

And scattered every trial.

O seasons, O chateaus!

And, oh, the day it disappears

Will be the day I die.

O seasons, O chateaus!

All that is over. Today, I know how to celebrate beauty.

THE IMPOSSIBLE

Ah! My life as a child, the open road in every weather; I was unnaturally abstinent, more detached than the best of beggars, proud to have no country, no friends-- what stupidity that was!-- and only now I realize it!

I was right to distrust old men who never lost a chance for a caress, parasites on the health and cleanliness of our women-- today when women are so much a race apart from us.

I was right in everything I distrusted... because I am running away!

I am running away!

I'll explain.

Even yesterday, I kept sighing: "God! There are enough of us damned down here! I've done time enough already in their ranks. I know them all. We always recognize each other; we disgust each other. Charity is unheard of among us. Still, we're polite; our relations with the world are quite correct." Is that surprising? The world! Businessmen and idiots!-- there's no dishonor in being here-- but the company of the elect; how would they receive us? For there are surely people, happy people, the false elect, since we must be bold or humble to approach them. These are the real elect. No saintly hypocrites, these!

Since I've got back two cents' worth of reason-- how quickly it goes!-- I can see that my troubles come from not realizing soon enough that this is the Western World. These Western swamps! Not that light has paled, form worn out, or movement been misguided.... All right! Now my mind wants absolutely to take on itself all the cruel developments that mind has undergone since the Orient collapsed.... My mind demands it!

...And that's the end of my two cents' worth of reason! The mind is in control, it insists that I remain in the West. It will have to be silenced if I expect it to end as I always wanted to.

I used to say, to hell with martyrs' palms, all beacons of art, the inventor's pride, the plunderer's frenzy; I expected to return to the Orient and to original, eternal wisdom. But this is evidently a dream of depraved laziness!

And yet I had no intention of trying to escape from modern suffering-- I have no high regard for the bastard wisdom of the Koran. But isn't there a very real torment in knowing that since the dawn of that scientific discovery, Christianity, Man has been making a fool of himself, proving what is obvious, puffing with pride as he repeats his proofs... and living on that alone? This is a subtle, stupid torment-- and this is the source of my spiritual ramblings. Nature may well be bored with it all! Prudhomme was born with Christ.

Isn't it because we cultivate the fog? We swallow fever with our watery vegetables. And drunkenness! And tobacco! And ignorance! And blind faith! Isn't this all a bit far from the thought, the wisdom of the Orient, the original fatherland? Why have a modern world, if such poisons are invented?

Priests and preachers will say: Of course. But you are really referring to Eden. There is nothing for you in the past history of Oriental races.... True enough. It was Eden I meant! How can this purity of ancient races affect my dream? Philosophers will say: The world has no ages; humanity moves from place to place, that's all. You are a Western man, but quite free to live in your Orient, as old a one as you want. .. and to live in it as you like. Don't be a defeatist. Philosophers, you are part and parcel of your Western world!

Careful, mind. Don't rush madly after salvation. Train yourself! Ah, science never goes fast enough for us!

But I see that my mind is asleep.

--If it stays wide awake from this moment on, we would soon reach the truth, which may even now surround us with its weeping angels!...

--If it had been wide awake until this moment, I would have never given in to degenerate instincts, long ago!...

--If it had always been wide awake, I would be floating in wisdom!...

O Purity! Purity!

In this moment of awakening, I had a vision of purity! Through the mind we go to God!

What a crippling misfortune!

LIGHTNING

Human labor! That explosion lights up my abyss from time to time.

"Nothing is vanity; on toward knowledge!" cries the modern Ecclesiastes, which is Everyone. And still the bodies of the wicked and the idle fall upon the hearts of all the rest.... Ah, quick, quick, quick! there, beyond the night... that future reward, that eternal reward... will we escape it?

What more can I do? Labor I know, and science is too slow. That praying gallops and that light roars; I'm well aware of it. It's too simple, and the weather's too hot; you can all do without me. I have my duty; but I will be proud, as others have been, to set it aside.

My life is worn out. Well, let's pretend, let's do nothing; oh, pitiful! And we will exist, and amuse ourselves,

dreaming of monstrous loves and fantastic worlds, complaining and quarreling with the appearances of the world, acrobat, beggar, artist, bandit-- priest! ...on my hospital bed, the odor of incense came so strongly back to me... guardian of the holy aromatics, confessor, martyr....

There I recognize my filthy childhood education. Then what? ...turn twenty: I'll do my twenty years, if everyone else does.

No! No! Now I rise up against death! Labor seems too easy for pride like mine: To betray me to the world would be too slight a punishment. At the last moment I would attack, to the right, to the left....

Oh! poor dear soul, eternity then might not be lost!

MORNING

Hadn't I once a youth that was lovely, heroic, fabulous-- something to write down on pages of gold?... I was too lucky! Through what crime, by what fault did I deserve my present weakness? You who imagine that animals sob with sorrow, that the sick despair, that the dead have bad dreams, try now to relate my fall and my sleep. I can explain myself no better than the beggar with his endless Aves and Pater Nosters. I no longer know how to talk!

And yet, today, I think I have finished this account of my Hell. And it was Hell; the old one, whose gates were opened by the Son of Man.

From the same desert, toward the same dark sky, my tired eyes forever open on the silver star, forever; but the three wise men never stir, the Kings of life, the heart, the soul, the mind. When will we go, over mountains and shores, to hail the birth of new labor, new wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition, to be the first to adore... Christmas on earth!

The song of the heavens, the marching of nations! We are slaves; let us not curse life!

FAREWELL

Autumn already!... But why regret the everlasting sun, if we are sworn to a search for divine brightness-- far from

those who die as seasons turn....

Autumn. Our boat, risen out of a hanging fog, turns toward poverty's harbor, the monstrous city, its sky stained

with fire and mud. Ah! Those stinking rags, bread soaked with rain, drunkenness, and the thousands of loves who

nailed me to the cross! Will there never, ever be an end to that ghoulish queen of a million dead souls and bodies

and who will all be judged!, I can see myself again, my skin corroded by dirt and disease, hair and armpits

crawling with worms, and worms still larger crawling in my heart, stretched out among ageless, heartless,

unknown figures.... I could easily have died there.... What a horrible memory! I detest poverty.

And I dread winter because it's so cozy!

--Sometimes in the sky I see endless sandy shores covered with white rejoicing nations. A great golden ship,

above me, flutters many-colored pennants in the morning breeze. I was the creator of every feast, every triumph,

every drama. I tried to invent new flowers, new planets, new flesh, new languages. I thought I had acquired

supernatural powers. Ha! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! What an end to a splendid career as an

artist and storyteller!

I! I called myself a magician, an angel, free from all moral constraint.... I am sent back to the soil to seek some

obligation, to wrap gnarled reality in my arms. A peasant!

Am I deceived? Would Charity be the sister of death, for me?

Well, I shall ask forgiveness for having lived on lies. And that's that.

But not one friendly hand... and where can I look for help?

True; the new era is nothing if not harsh.

For I can say that I have gained a victory; the gnashing of teeth, the hissing of hellfire, the stinking sighs subside.

All my monstrous memories are fading. My last longings depart-- jealousy of beggars, bandits, friends of death, all

those that the world passed by-- Damned souls, if I were to take vengeance!

One must be absolutely modern.

Never mind hymns of thanksgiving: hold on to a step once taken. A hard night! Dried blood smokes on my face,

and nothing lies behind me but that repulsive little tree! The battle for the soul is as brutal as the battles of men;

but the sight of justice is the pleasure of God alone.

Yet this is the watch by night. Let us all accept new strength, and real tenderness. And at dawn, armed with

glowing patience, we will enter the cities of glory.

Why did I talk about a friendly hand! My great advantage is that I can laugh at old love affairs full of falsehood, and

stamp with shame such deceitful couples-- I went through women's Hell over there-- and I will be able now to

possess the truth within one body and one soul.

April-August, 1873

<a name=”nobody”>Nobody Loses All the Time</a>

i had an uncle named

Sol who was a born failure and

nearly everybody said he should have gone

into vaudeville perhaps because my Uncle Sol could

sing McCann He Was A Diver on Xmas Eve like Hell Itself which

may or may not account for the fact that my Uncle

Sol indulged in that possibly most inexcusable

of all to use a highfalootin phrase

luxuries that is or to

wit farming and be

it needlessly

added

my Uncle Sol's farm

failed because the chickens

ate the vegetables so

my Uncle Sol had a

chicken farm till the

skunks ate the chickens when

my Uncle Sol

had a skunk farm but

the skunks caught cold and

died and so

my Uncle Sol imitated the

skunks in a subtle manner

or by drowning himself in the water tank

but somebody who'd given my Uncle Sol a Victor

Victrola and records while he lived presented to

him upon the auspicious occasion of his decease a

scruptious not to mention splendiferous funeral with

tall boys in black gloves and flowers and everything and

i remember we all cried like the Missouri

when my Uncle Sol's coffin lurched because

somebody pressed a button

(and down went

my Uncle

Sol

and started a worm farm)

<a name=”light”>There’s a certain slant of light</a>

There's a certain slant of light,

Winter afternoons,

That oppresses like the heft

Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us.

We can find no scar

But internal difference

Where the meanings are.

None may teach it any-

'Tis the seal despair,

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the air.

When it comes the landscape listens,

Shadow hold their breath.

When it goes 'tis like the distance

On the look of death.

<a name=”sculptor”>Sculptor</a>

To his house the bodiless

Come to barter endlessly

Vision, wisdom, for bodies

Palpable as his, and weighty.

Hands moving move priestlier

Than priest's hands, invoke no

vain

Images of light and air

But sure stations in bronze,

wood, stone.

Obdurate, in dense-grained

wood,

A bald angel blocks and shapes

The flimsy light; arms folded

Watches his cumbrous world

eclipse

Inane worlds of wind and cloud.

Bronze dead dominate the floor,

Resistive, ruddy-bodied,

Dwarfing us. Our bodies flicker

Toward extinction in those eyes

Which, without him, were beg-

gared

Of place, time, and their bodies.

Emulous spirits make discord,

Try entry, enter nightmares

Until his chisel bequeaths

Them life livelier than ours,

A solider response than death's.

<a name=”west”> Facing west from California's shores</a>

Facing west from California's shores,

Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,

I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity,

the land of migrations, look afar,

Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;

For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kash-

mere

From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,

From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,

Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wander'd,

Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous,

(But where is what I started for so long ago?

And why is it yet unfound?)

<a name=”dance”>The Dance</a>

In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,

the dancers go round, they go round and

around, the squeal and the blare and the

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

tipping their bellies (round as the thick-

sided glasses whose wash they impound)

their hips and their bellies off balance

to turn them. Kicking and rolling about

the Fair Grounds, swinging thir butts, those

shanks must be sound to bear up under such

rollicking measures, prance as they dance

in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.

All all and all the dry worlds lever,

Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,

All from the oil, the pound of lava.

City of spring, the governed flower,

Turns in the earth that turns the ashen

Towns around on a wheel of fire.

How now my flesh, my naked fellow,

Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,

Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.

All all and all, the corpse's lover,

Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,

All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever.

Fear not the waking world, my mortal,

Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,

Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.

Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,

The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,

Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.

Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven,

Know now the flesh's lock and vice,

And the cage for the scythe-eyed raver.

Know, O my bone, the jointed lever,

Fear not the screws that turn the voice,

And the face to the driven lover.

III

All all and all the dry worlds couple,

Ghost with her ghost, contagious man

With the womb of his shapeless people.

All that shapes from the caul and suckle,

Stroke of mechanical flesh on mine,

Square in these worlds the mortal circle.

Flower, flower the people's fusion,

O light in zenith, the coupled bud,

And the flame in the flesh's vision.

Out of the sea, the drive of oil,

Socket and grave, the brassy blood,

Flower, flower, all all and all.

<a name=”sing”>I, Too Sing America</A>

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I'll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody'll dare

Say to me,

"Eat in the kitchen,"

Then.

Besides,

They'll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

For Carl Solomon

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,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly

connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-

ery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat

up smoking in the supernatural darkness of

cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities

contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and

saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-

ment roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes

hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy

among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy &

publishing obscene odes on the windows of the

skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-

ing their money in wastebaskets and listening

to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through

Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in

Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their

torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-

cohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and

lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of

Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-

tionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery

dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,

storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon

blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree

vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-

lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless

ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine

until the noise of wheels and children brought

them down shuddering mouth-wracked and

battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance

in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's

floated out and sat through the stale beer after

noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack

of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to

pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-

lyn Bridge,

lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping

down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills

off Empire State out of the moon,

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts

and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks

and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days

and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the

Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a

trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic

City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-

ings and migraines of China under junk-with-

drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the

railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,

leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing

through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-

father night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-

athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-

stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-

ionary indian angels who were visionary indian

angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore

gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-

homa on the impulse of winter midnight street

light smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston

seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the

brilliant Spaniard to converse about America

and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship

to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving

behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees

and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire

place Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the

F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist

eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-

prehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting

the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,

who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union

Square weeping and undressing while the sirens

of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed

down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also

wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked

and trembling before the machinery of other

skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight

in policecars for committing no crime but their

own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were

dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-

scripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly

motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,

the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean

love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose

gardens and the grass of public parks and

cemeteries scattering their semen freely to

whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up

with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath

when the blond & naked angel came to pierce

them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate

the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar

the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb

and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but

sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden

threads of the craftsman's loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of

beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-

dle and fell off the bed, and continued along

the floor and down the hall and ended fainting

on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and

come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling

in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning

but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun

rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked

in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad

stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these

poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy

to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls

in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'

rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with

gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-

ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station

solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in

dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and

picked themselves up out of basements hung

over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third

Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-

ment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on

the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the

East River to open to a room full of steamheat

and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment

cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime

blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall

be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested

the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of

Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their

pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the

bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in

their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned

with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded

by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty

incantations which in the yellow morning were

stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht

& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable

kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for

an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot

for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks

fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-

fully, gave up and were forced to open antique

stores where they thought they were growing

old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits

on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse

& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments

of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the

fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-

ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the

drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-

pened and walked away unknown and forgotten

into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley

ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of

the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-

saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,

danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed

phonograph records of nostalgic European

1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and

threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans

in their ears and the blast of colossal steam

whistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying

to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude

watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out

if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had

a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who

came back to Denver & waited in vain, who

watched over Denver & brooded & loned in

Denver and finally went away to find out the

Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying

for each other's salvation and light and breasts,

until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for

impossible criminals with golden heads and the

charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet

blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky

Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys

or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or

Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the

daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp

notism & were left with their insanity & their

hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism

and subsequently presented themselves on the

granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads

and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-

stantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin

Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-

therapy occupational therapy pingpong &

amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic

pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of

blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad

man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the

East,

Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid

halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-

ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench

dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-

mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the

moon,

with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book

flung out of the tenement window, and the last

door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone

slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-

nished room emptied down to the last piece of

mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted

on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that

imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of

hallucination

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and

now you're really in the total animal soup of

time

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed

with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use

of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-

ing plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space

through images juxtaposed, and trapped the

archangel of the soul between 2 visual images

and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun

and dash of consciousness together jumping

with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna

Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human

prose and stand before you speechless and intel-

ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-

fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm

of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,

yet putting down here what might be left to say

in time come after death,

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in

the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the

suffering of America's naked mind for love into

an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone

cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered

out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand

years.

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open

their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-

nation?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob

tainable dollars! Children screaming under the

stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men

weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the

loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy

judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the

crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of

sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!

Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-

ned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose

blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers

are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-

bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking

tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!

Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long

streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-

tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose

smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch

whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch

whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch

whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!

Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream

Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in

Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom

I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch

who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!

Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!

Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!

skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic

industries! spectral nations! invincible mad

houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-

ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to

Heaven which exists and is everywhere about

us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!

gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole

boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!

gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-

spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!

Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on

the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the

wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!

They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!

carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the

street!

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland

where you're madder than I am

I'm with you in Rockland

where you must feel very strange

I'm with you in Rockland

where you imitate the shade of my mother

I'm with you in Rockland

where you've murdered your twelve secretaries

I'm with you in Rockland

where you laugh at this invisible humor

I'm with you in Rockland

where we are great writers on the same dreadful

typewriter

I'm with you in Rockland

where your condition has become serious and

is reported on the radio

I'm with you in Rockland

where the faculties of the skull no longer admit

the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland

where you drink the tea of the breasts of the

spinsters of Utica

I'm with you in Rockland

where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the

harpies of the Bronx

I'm with you in Rockland

where you scream in a straightjacket that you're

losing the game of the actual pingpong of the

abyss

I'm with you in Rockland

where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul

is innocent and immortal it should never die

ungodly in an armed madhouse

I'm with you in Rockland

where fifty more shocks will never return your

soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a

cross in the void

I'm with you in Rockland

where you accuse your doctors of insanity and

plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the

fascist national Golgotha

I'm with you in Rockland

where you will split the heavens of Long Island

and resurrect your living human Jesus from the

superhuman tomb

I'm with you in Rockland

where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-

rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I'm with you in Rockland

where we hug and kiss the United States under

our bedsheets the United States that coughs all

night and won't let us sleep

I'm with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma

by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the

roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the

hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-

lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry

spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is

here O victory forget your underwear we're

free

I'm with you in Rockland

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-

journey on the highway across America in tears

to the door of my cottage in the Western night

13. TREAD lightly, she is near

Under the snow,

Speak gently, she can hear

The daisies grow.

<a name=”requiescat”>Requiescat</a>

All her bright golden hair

Tarnished with rust,

She that was young and fair

Fallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,

She hardly knew

She was a woman, so

Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,

Lie on her breast,

I vex my heart alone

She is at rest.

Peace, Peace, she cannot hear

Lyre or sonnet,

All my life's buried here,

Heap earth upon it.

<a name=”aubade”>Aubade</a>

I work all day, and get half drunk at night.

Making at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain edges will grow light.

Till then I see what's really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

- The good not used, the love not given, time

Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never:

But at the total emptiness forever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says no rational being

Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing

that this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no-one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can't escape

Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.