REALITY SANDWICHES 1953 - 60
ALLEN GINSBERG
'Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy'
Dedicated to
the Pure Imaginary
POET Gregory Corso
Acknowledgement
Anyone who asked for writings I sent them -- the Needle,
Provincetown Review, Mattachine Review, Beatitude, Yugen,
Evergreen Review, Swank, Partisan Review, White Dove,
Chicago Review, i.e. Cambridge Review, New Directions 16,
Grecourt Review, Combustion, Folio, Isis, Nomad, Venture,
The Beat Scene, Rhinozerous, Hasty Papers, & Between Worlds.
Contents:
My Alba
Sakyamuni Coming out from the Mountain
The Green Automobile
Havana
Siesta in Xbalba
On Burroughs' Work
Love Poem on Theme By Whitman
Over Kansas
Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo
Dream Record
Blessed be the muses
Fragment 1956
A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley
Sather Gate Illumination
Scribble
Afternoon Seattle
Psalm III
Tears
Ready To Roll
Wrote This Last Night
Squeal
American Change
'Back on Times Square, Dreaming of Times Square'
My Sad Self
Funny Death
Battleship Newsreel
I Beg You Come Back & Be Cheerful
To An Old Poet in Peru
Aether
MY ALBA
Now that I've wasted
five years in Manhattan
life decaying
talent a blank
talking disconnected
patient and mental
sliderule and number
machine on a desk
autographed triplicate
synopsis and taxes
obedient prompt
poorly paid
stayed on the market
youth of my twenties
fainted in offices
wept on typewriters
deceived multitudes
in vast conspiracies
deodorant battleships
serious business industry
every six weeks whoever
drank my blood bank
innocent evil now
part of my system
five years unhappy labor
22 to 27 working
not a dime in the bank
to show for it anyway
dawn breaks it's only the sun
the East smokes O my bedroom
I am damned to Hell what
alarmclock is ringing
NY 1953
SAKYAMUNI COMING OUT FROM THE MOUNTAIN
Liang Kai, Southern Sung
He drags his bare feet
out of a cave
under a tree,
eyebrows
grown long with weeping
and hooknosed woe,
in ragged soft robes
wearing a fine beard,
unhappy hands
clasped to his naked breast --
humility is beatness
humility is beatness --
faltering
into the bushes by a stream,
all things inanimate
but his intelligence --
stands upright there
tho trembling:
Arhat
who sought Heaven
under a mountain of stone,
sat thinking
till he realized
the land of blessedness exists
in the imagination --
the flash come:
empty mirror --
how painful to be born again
wearing a fine beard,
reentering the world
a bitter wreck of a sage:
earth before him his only path.
We can see his soul,
he knows nothing
like a god:
shaken
meek wretch --
humility is beatness
before the absolute World.
NY Public Library 1953
THE GREEN AUTOMOBILE
If I had a Green Automobile
I'd go find my old companion
in his house on the Western ocean.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
I'd honk my horn at his manly gate,
inside his wife and three
children sprawl naked
on the living room floor.
He'd come running out
to my car full of heroic beer
and jump screaming at the wheel
for he is the greater driver.
We'd pilgrimage to the highest mount
of our earlier Rocky Mountain visions
laughing in each others arms,
delight surpassing the highest Rockies,
and after old agony, drunk with new years,
bounding toward the snowy horizon
blasting the dashboard with original bop
hot rod on the mountain
we'd batter up the cloudy highway
where angels of anxiety
careen through the trees
and scream out of the engine.
We'd burn all night on the jackpine peak
seen from Denver in the summer dark,
forestlike unnatural radiance
illuminating the mountaintop:
childhood youthtime age & eternity
would open like sweet trees
in the nights of another spring
and dumbfound us with love,
for we can see together
the beauty of souls
hidden like diamonds
in the clock of the world,
like Chinese magicians can
confound the immortals
with our intellectuality
hidden in the mist,
in the Green Automobile
which I have invented
imagined and visioned
on the roads of the world
more real than the engine
on a track in the desert
purer than Greyhound and
swifter than physical jetplane.
Denver! Denver! we'll return
roaring across the City & County Building lawn
which catches the pure emerald flame
streaming in the wake of our auto.
This time we'll buy up the city!
I cashed a great check in my skull bank
to found a miraculous college of the body
up on the bus terminal roof.
But first we'll drive the stations of downtown,
poolhall flophouse jazzjoint jail
whorehouse down Folsom
to the darkest alleys of Larimer
paying respects to Denver's father
lost on the railroad tracks,
stupor of wine and silence
hallowing the slum of his decades,
salute him and his saintly suitcase
of dark muscatel, drink
and smash the sweet bottles
on Diesels in allegiance.
Then we go driving drunk on boulevards
where armies march and still parade
staggering under the invisible
banner of Reality --
hurtling through the street
in the auto of our fate
we share an archangelic cigarette
and tell each others' fortunes:
fames of supernatural illum
ination,
bleak rainy gaps of time,
great art learned in desolation
and we beat apart after six decades. . . .
and on an asphalt crossroad,
deal with each other in princely
gentleness once more, recalling
famous dead talks of other cities.
The windshield's full of tears,
rain wets our naked breasts,
we kneel together in the shade
amid the traffic of night in paradise
and now renew the solitary vow
we made each other take
in Texas, once:
I can't inscribe here. . . .
. . . . . .
. . . . . .
How many Saturday nights will be
made drunken by this legend?
How will young Denver come to mourn
her forgotten sexual angel?
How many boys will strike the black piano
in imitation of the excess of a native saint?
Or girls fall wanton under his spectre in the high
schools of melancholy night?
While all the time in Eternity
in the wan light of this poem's radio
we'll sit behind forgotten shades
hearkening the lost jazz of all Saturdays.
Neal, we'll be real heroes now
in a war between our cocks and time:
let's be the angels of the world's desire
and take the world to bed with us before
we die.
Sleeping alone, or with companion,
girl or fairy sheep or dream,
I'll fail of lacklove, you, satiety:
all men fall, our fathers fell before,
is but a moment's work of mind:
an ageless monument to love
in the imagination:
memorial built out of our own bodies
consumed by the invisible poem --
We'll shudder in Denver and endure
though blood and wrinkles blind our eyes.
So this Green Automobile:
I give you in flight
a present, a present
from my imagination.
We will go riding
over the Rockies,
we'll go on riding
all night long until dawn,
then back to your railroad, the SP
your house and your children
and broken leg destiny
you'll ride down the plains
in the morning: and back
to my visions, my office
and eastern apartment
I'll return to New York.
NY 1953
HAVANA 1953
I
The night cafe -- 4AM
Cuba Libre 20c:
white tiled squares,
triangular neon lights,
long wooden bar on one side,
a great delicatessen booth
on the other facing the street.
In the center
among the great city midnight drinkers,
by Aedama Palace
on Gomez corner,
white men and women
with standing drums,
mariachis, voices, guitars --
drumming on tables,
knives on bottles,
banging on the floor
and on each other,
with wooden clacks,
whistling, howling,
fat women in strapless silk.
Cop talking to the fat nosed girl
in a flashy black dress.
In walks a weird Cezanne
vision of the nowhere hip Cuban:
tall, thin, check grey suit,
grey felt shoes,
blaring gambler's hat,
Cab Calloway pimp's mustachio
-- it comes down to a point in the center --
rushing up generations late talking Cuban,
pointing a gold ringed finger
up toward the yellowed ceiling,
other cigarette hand pointing
stiff-armed down at his side,
effeminate: -- he sees the cop --
they rush together -- they're embracing
like long lost brothers --
fatnose forgotten.
Delicate chords
from the negro guitarino
-- singers at El Rancho Grande,
drunken burlesque
screams of agony,
VIVA JALISCO!
I eat a catfish sandwich
with onions and red sauce
20c.
II
A truly romantic spot,
more guitars, Columbus Square
across from Columbus Cathedral
-- I'm in the Paris Restaurant
adjacent, best in town,
Cuba Libres 30c --
weatherbeaten tropical antiquity,
as if rock decayed,
unlike the pure
Chinese drummers of black stone
whose polished harmony can still be heard
(Procession of Musicians) at the Freer,
this with its blunt cornucopias and horns
of conquest made of stone --
a great dumb rotting church.
Night, lights from windows,
high stone balconies
on the antique square,
green rooms
paled by florescent houselighting,
a modern convenience.
I feel rotten.
I would sit down with my servants and be dumb.
I spent too much money.
White electricity
in the gaslamp fixtures of the alley.
Bullet holes and nails in the stone wall.
The worried headwaiter
standing amid the potted palms in cans
in the fifteen foot wooden door looking at me.
Mariachi harmonica artists inside
getting around to Banjo on My Knee yet.
They dress in wornout sharpie clothes.
Ancient streetlights down the narrow Calle I face,
the arch, the square,
palms, drunkenness, solitude;
voices across the street,
baby wail, girl's squeak,
waiters nudging each other,
grumble and cackle of young boys' laughter
in streetcorner waits,
perro barking off-stage,
banjo and harmonica,
auto rattle and a cool breeze --
Sudden paranoid notion the waiters are watching me:
Well they might,
four gathered in the doorway
and I alone at a table
on the patio in the dark
observing the square, drunk.
25c for them
and I asked for "Jalisco" --
at the end of the song
oxcart rolls by
obtruding its wheels
o'er the music o' the night.
SIESTA IN XBALBA and
RETURN TO THE STATES
dedicated to Karena Shields
I.
Late sun opening the book,
blank page like light,
invisible words unscrawled,
impossible syntax
of apocalypse --
Uxmal: Noble Ruins
No construction --
let the mind fall down.
-- One could pass valuable months
and years perhaps a lifetime
doing nothing but lying in a hammock
reading prose with the white doves
copulating underneath
and monkeys barking in the interior
of the mountain
and I have succumbed to this
temptation --
'They go mad in the Selva --'
the madman read
; and laughed in his hammock
eyes watching me:
unease not of the jungle
the poor dear,
can tire one --
all that mud
and all those bugs . . .
ugh. . . .
Dreaming back I saw
an eternal kodachrome
souvenir of a gathering
of souls at a party,
crowded in an oval flash:
cigarettes, suggestions,
laughter in drunkenness,
broken sweet conversation,
acquaintance in the halls,
faces posed together,
stylized gestures,
odd familiar visages
and singular recognitions
that registered indifferent
greeting across time:
Anson reading Horace
with a rolling head,
white-handed Hohnsbean
camping gravely
with an absent glance,
bald Kingsland drinking
out of a huge glass,
Dusty in a party dress,
Durgin in white shoes
gesturing from a chair,
Keck in a corner waiting
for subterranean music,
Helen Parker lifting
her hands in surprise:
all posturing in one frame,
superficially gay
or tragic as may be,
illumed with the fatal
character and intelligent
actions of their lives.
And I in a concrete room
above the abandoned
labyrinth of Palenque
measuring my fate,
wandering solitary in the wild
-- blinking singleminded
at a bleak idea --
until exhausted with
its action and contemplation
my soul might shatter
at one primal moment's
sensation of the vast
movement of divinity.
As I leaned against a tree
inside the forest
expiring of self-begotten love,
I looked up at the stars absently,
as if looking for
something else in the blue night
through the boughs,
and for a moment saw myself
leaning against a tree . . .
. . . back there the noise of a great party
in the apartments of New York,
half-created paintings on the walls, fame,
cocksucking and tears,
money and arguments of great affairs,
the culture of my generation . . .
my own crude night imaginings,
my own crude soul notes taken down
in moments of isolation, dreams,
piercings, sequences of nocturnal thought
and primitive illuminations
-- uncanny feeling the white cat