Rigaut with a letter of introduction to Death
and Gide praised the telephone and other remarkable inventions
we agreed in principle though he gossiped of lavender underwear
but for all that he drank deeply of the grass of Whitman and was intrigued by all lovers named Colorado
princes of America arriving with their armfuls of shrapnel and baseball
Oh Guillaume the world so easy to fight seemed so easy
did you know the great political classicists would invade Montparnasse
with not one sprig of prophetic laurel to green their foreheads
not one pulse of green in their pillows no leaf left from their wars—Mayakovsky arrived and revolted
III
Came back sat on a tomb and stared at your rough menhir
a piece of thin granite like an unfinished phallus
a cross fading into the rock 2 poems on the stone one Coeur Renversée
other Habituez-vous comme moi A ces prodiges que j’annonce Guillaume Apollinaire de Kostrowitsky
someone placed a jam bottle filled with daisies and a 5&10¢ surrealist typist ceramic rose
happy little tomb with flowers and overturned heart
under a fine mossy tree beneath which I sat snaky trunk
summer boughs and leaves umbrella over the menhir and nobody there
Et quelle voix sinistre ulule Guillaume qu’es-tu devenu
his nextdoor neighbor is a tree
there underneath the crossed bones heaped and yellow cranium perhaps
and the printed poems Alcools in my pocket his voice in the museum
Now middleage footsteps walk the gravel
a man stares at the name and moves toward the crematory building
same sky rolls over thru clouds as Mediterranean days on the Riviera during war
drinking Apollo in love eating occasional opium he’d taken the light
One must have felt the shock in St. Germain when he went out Jacob & Picasso coughing in the dark
a bandage unrolled and the skull left still on a bed outstretched pudgy fingers the mystery and ego gone
a bell tolls in the steeple down the street birds warble in the chestnut trees
Famille Bremont sleeps nearby Christ hangs big chested and sexy in their tomb
my cigarette smokes in my lap and fills the page with smoke and flames
an ant runs over my corduroy sleeve the tree I lean on grows slowly
bushes and branches upstarting through the tombs one silky spiderweb gleaming on granite
I am buried here and sit by my grave beneath a tree
Paris, Winter – Spring 1958
The Lion for Real
‘Soyez muette pour moi, Idole contemplative …’
I came home and found a lion in my living room
Rushed out on the fire-escape screaming Lion! Lion!
Two stenographers pulled their brunette hair and banged the window shut
I hurried home to Paterson and stayed two days.
Called up my old Reichian analyst
who’d kicked me out of therapy for smoking marijuana
‘It’s happened’ I panted ‘There’s a Lion in my room’
‘I’m afraid any discussion would have no value’ he hung up.
I went to my old boyfriend we got drunk with his girlfriend
I kissed him and announced I had a lion with a mad gleam in my eye
We wound up fighting on the floor I bit his eyebrow & he kicked me out
I ended masturbating in his jeep parked in the street moaning ‘Lion.’
Found Joey my novelist friend and roared at him ‘Lion!’
He looked at me interested and read me his spontaneous ignu high poetries
I listened for lions all I heard was Elephant Tiglon Hippogryph Unicorn Ants
But figured he really understood me when we made it in Ignaz Wisdom’s bathroom.
But next day he sent me a leaf from his Smokey Mountain retreat
‘I love you little Bo-Bo with your delicate golden lions
But there being no Self and No Bars therefore the Zoo of your dear Father hath no Lion
You said your mother was mad don’t expect me to produce the Monster for your Bridegroom.’
Confused dazed and exalted bethought me of real lion starved in his stink in Harlem
Opened the door the room was filled with the bomb blast of his anger
He roaring hungrily at the plaster walls but nobody could hear him outside thru the window
My eye caught the edge of the red neighbor apartment building standing in deafening stillness
We gazed at each other his implacable yellow eye in the red halo of fur
Waxed rheumy on my own but he stopped roaring and bared a fang greeting.
I turned my back and cooked broccoli for supper on an iron gas stove
He didn’t eat me, tho I regretted him starving in my presence.
Next week he wasted away a sick rug full of bones wheaten hair falling out
enraged and reddening eye as he lay aching huge hairy head on his paws
by the egg-crate bookcase filled up with thin volumes of Plato, & Buddha.
Sat by his side every night averting my eyes from his hungry motheaten face
stopped eating myself he got weaker and roared at night while I had nightmares
Eaten by lion in bookstore on Cosmic Campus, a lion myself starved by Professor Kandisky, dying in a lion’s flophouse circus,
I woke up mornings the lion still added dying on the floor—‘Terrible Presence!’ I cried ‘Eat me or die!’
It got up that afternoon—walked to the door with its paw on the wall to steady its trembling body
Let out a soul rending creak from the bottomless roof of his mouth
thundering from my floor to heaven heavier than a volcano at night in Mexico
Pushed the door open and said in a gravelly voice ‘Not this time Baby—but I will be back again.’
Lion that eats my mind now for a decade knowing only your hunger
Not the bliss of your satisfaction O roar of the Universe how am I chosen
In this life I have heard your promise I am ready to die I have served
Your starved and ancient Presence O Lord I wait in my room at your Mercy.
Paris, March 1958
Ignu
On top of that if you know me I pronounce you an ignu
Ignu knows nothing of the world
a great ignoramus in factories though he may own or inspire them or even be production manager
Ignu has knowledge of the angel indeed ignu is angel in comical form
W. C. Fields Harpo Marx ignus Whitman an ignu
Rimbaud a natural ignu in his boy pants
The ignu may be queer though like not kind ignu blows archangels for the strange thrill
a gnostic women love him Christ overflowed with trembling semen for many a dead aunt
He’s a great cocksman most beautiful girls are worshipped by ignu
Hollywood dolls or lone Marys of Idaho long-legged publicity women and secret housewives
have known ignu in another lifetime and remember their lover
Husbands also are secretly tender to ignu their buddy
oldtime friendship can do anything cuckold bugger drunk trembling and happy
Ignu lives only once and eternally and knows it
he sleeps in everybody’s bed everyone’s lonesome for ignu ignu knew solitude early
So ignu’s a primitive of cock and mind
equally the ignu has written liverish tomes personal metaphysics abstract
images that scratch the moon ‘lightningflash-flintspark’ naked lunch fried shoes adios king
The shadow of the angel is waving in the opposite direction
dawn of intelligence turns the telephones into strange animals
he attacks the ros
e garden with his mystical shears snip snip snip
Ignu has painted Park Avenue with his own long melancholy
and ignu giggles in a hard chair over tea in Paris bald in his decaying room a black hotel
Ignu with his wild mop walks by Colosseum weeping
he plucks a clover from Keats’ grave & Shelley’s a blade of grass
knew Coleridge they had slow hung-up talks at midnight over tables of mahogany in London
sidestreet rooms in wintertime rain outside fog the cabman blows his hand
Charles Dickens is born ignu hears the wail of the babe
Ignu goofs nights under bridges and laughs at battleships
ignu is a battleship without guns in the North Sea lost O the flowerness of the moment
he knows geography he was there before he’ll get out and die already
reborn a bearded humming Jew of Arabian mournful jokes
man with a star on his forehead and halo over his cranium
listening to music musing happy at the fall of a leaf the moonlight of immortality in his hair
table-hopping most elegant comrade of all most delicate mannered in the Sufi court
he wasn’t even there at all
wearing zodiacal blue sleeves and the long peaked conehat of a magician
harkening to the silence of a well at midnight under a red star
in the lobby of Rockefeller Center attentive courteous bare-eyed enthusiastic with or without pants
he listens to jazz as if he were a negro afflicted with jewish melancholy and white divinity
Ignu’s a natural you can see it when he pays the cabfare abstracted
pulling off the money from an impossible saintly roll
or counting his disappearing pennies to give to the strange bus-driver whom he admires
Ignu has sought you out he’s the seeker of God
and God breaks down the world for him every ten years
he sees lightning flash in empty daylight when the sky is blue
he hears Blake’s disembodied Voice recite the Sunflower in a room in Harlem
No woe on him surrounded by 700 thousand mad scholars moths fly out of his sleeve
He wants to die give up go mad break through into Eternity
live on and teach an aged saint or break down to an eyebrow clown
All ignus know each other in a moment’s talk and measure each other up at once
as lifetime friends romantic winks and giggles across continents
sad moment paying the cab goodby and speeding away uptown
One or two grim ignus in the pack
one laughing monk in dungarees
one delighted by cracking his eggs in an egg cup
one chews gum to music all night long rock and roll
one anthropologist cookoo in the Petén Rainforest
one sits in jail all year and bets karmaic racetrack
one chases girls down East Broadway into the horror movie
one pulls out withered grapes and rotten onions from his pants
one has a nannygoat under his bed to amuse visitors plasters the wall with his crap
collects scorpions whiskies skies etc. would steal the moon if he could find it
That would set fire to America but none of these make ignu
it’s the soul that makes the style the tender firecracker of his thought
the amity of letters from strange cities to old friends
and the new radiance of morning on a foreign bed
A comedy of personal being his grubby divinity
Eliot probably an ignu one of the few who’s funny when he eats
Williams of Paterson a dying American ignu
Burroughs a purest ignu his haircut is a cream his left finger
pinkey chopped off for early ignu reasons metaphysical spells love spells with psychoanalysts
his very junkhood an accomplishment beyond a million dollars
Céline himself an old ignu over prose
I saw him in Paris dirty old gentleman of ratty talk
with longhaired cough three wormy sweaters round his neck
brown mould under historic fingernails
pure genius his giving morphine all night to 1400 passengers on a sinking ship
‘because they were all getting emotional’
Who’s amazing you is ignu communicate with me
by mail post telegraph phone street accusation or scratching at my window
and send me a true sign I’ll reply special delivery
DEATH IS A LETTER THAT WAS NEVER SENT
Knowledge born of stamps words coins pricks jails seasons sweet ambition laughing gas
history with a gold halo photographs of the sea painting a celestial din in the bright window
one eye in a black cloud
and the lone vulture on a sand plain seen from the window of a Turkish bus
It must be a trick. Two diamonds in the hand one Poetry one Charity
proves we have dreamed and the long sword of intelligence
over which I constantly stumble like my pants at the age six— embarrassed.
New York, November, 1958
Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!
POET is Priest
Money has reckoned the soul of America
Congress broken thru to the precipice of Eternity
the President built a War machine which will vomit and rear up Russia out of Kansas
The American Century betrayed by a mad Senate which no longer sleeps with its wife
Franco has murdered Lorca the fairy son of Whitman
just as Mayakovsky committed suicide to avoid Russia
Hart Crane distinguished Platonist committed suicide to cave in the wrong America
just as millions of tons of human wheat were burned in secret caverns under the White House
while India starved and screamed and ate mad dogs full of rain
and mountains of eggs were reduced to white powder in the halls of Congress
no godfearing man will walk there again because of the stink of the rotten eggs of America
and the Indians of Chiapas continue to gnaw their vitaminless tortillas
aborigines of Australia perhaps gibber in the eggless wilderness
and I rarely have an egg for breakfast tho my work requires infinite eggs to come to birth in Eternity
eggs should be eaten or given to their mothers
and the grief of the countless chickens of America is expressed
in the screaming of her comedians over the radio
Detroit has built a million automobiles of rubber trees and phantoms
but I walk, I walk, and the Orient walks with me, and all Africa walks
and sooner or later North America will walk
for as we have driven the Chinese Angel from our door he will drive us from the Golden Door of the future
we have not cherished pity on Tanganyika
Einstein alive was mocked for his heavenly politics
Bertrand Russell driven from New York for getting laid
immortal Chaplin driven from our shores with the rose in his teeth
a secret conspiracy by Catholic Church in the lavatories of Congress has denied contraceptives to the unceasing masses of India.
Nobody publishes a word that is not the cowardly robot ravings of a depraved mentality
the day of the publication of the true literature of the American body will be day of Revolution
the revolution of the sexy lamb
the only bloodless revolution that gives away corn
poor Genet will illuminate the harvesters of Ohio
Marijuana is a benevolent narcotic but J. Edgar Hoover prefers his deathly scotch
And the heroin of Lao-Tze & the Sixth Patriarch is punished by the electric chair
but the poor sick junkies have nowhere to lay their heads
fiends in our government have invented a cold-turkey cure for addiction as obsolete as the Defense Early Warning Rad
ar System.
I am the defense early warning radar system
I see nothing but bombs
I am not interested in preventing Asia from being Asia
and the governments of Russia and Asia will rise and fall but Asia and Russia will not fall
the government of America also will fall but how can America fall
I doubt if anyone will ever fall anymore except governments
fortunately all the governments will fall
the only ones which won’t fall are the good ones
and the good ones don’t yet exist
But they have to begin existing they exist in my poems
they exist in the death of the Russian and American governments
they exist in the death of Hart Crane & Mayakovsky
Now is the time for prophecy without death as a consequence
the universe will ultimately disappear
Hollywood will rot on the windmills of Eternity
Hollywood whose movies stick in the throat of God
Yes Hollywood will get what it deserves
Time
Seepage of nerve-gas over the radio
History will make this poem prophetic and its awful silliness a hideous spiritual music
I have the moan of doves and the feather of ecstasy
Man cannot long endure the hunger of the cannibal abstract
War is abstract
the world will be destroyed
but I will die only for poetry, that will save the world
Monument to Sacco & Vanzetti not yet financed to ennoble Boston
natives of Kenya tormented by idiot con-men from England
South Africa in the grip of the white fool
Vachel Lindsay Secretary of the Interior
Poe Secretary of Imagination
Pound Secty. Economics
and Kra belongs to Kra, and Pukti to Pukti
crossfertilization of Blok and Artaud
Van Gogh’s Ear on the currency
no more propaganda for monsters
and poets should stay out of politics or become monsters
I have become monsterous with politics
the Russian poet undoubtedly monsterous in his secret notebook
Tibet should be left alone
These are obvious prophecies
America will be destroyed
Russian poets will struggle with Russia
Whitman warned against this ‘fabled Damned of nations’