Red-hot Pegasus of my restless yearnings,
Uncertain end of my motorized destiny!
Jump, leap, drape yourself with flags,
Mark the nocturnal vastness with your trail in blood,
In hot blood stretching far behind you,
In fresh blood stretching far behind you,
In cold, living blood through the air I dynamically feel!
Jump, hurdle, leap,
Alley-oop, keep jumping . . . . .
My cavalcade-prayer!
My forward charge-salutation!
Who besides you felt the individual life in each thing?
Who besides you felt himself, and life and us
to exhaustion?
Who besides you always preferred the spare part to the
regular one
And made it his norm to violate Life’s norms and
forms?
My happiness is a rage,
My forward charge a collision
(Bam!)
In me . . .
In you, O Master of my healthful disease,
I salute the first classic case of universalitis,
The “Whitman syndrome,” which is what afflicts me!
St. Walt of Shrieking Deliriums and Rage!
Gateway to everything!
Bridge to everything!
Road to everything!
Your omnivorous soul . . . . .
Your soul that’s bird, fish, beast, man, woman,
Your soul the two where there are two,
Your soul the one that’s two where two are one.
Your soul that’s arrow, lightning, space,
Embrace, nexus, sex, Texas, Carolina, New York,
Brooklyn Ferry in the evening,
Brooklyn Ferry coming and going,
Libertad! Democracy! The twentieth century up ahead!
Boom! boom! boom! boom! boom!
BOOM!
You, what you were, what you saw, what you heard,
Subject and object, active and passive,
Here and there, everywhere you,
A circle encompassing all ways of feeling,
Milestone of all things possible,
God-Boundary of all objects imaginable—that’s you!
You the Hour,
You the Minute,
You the Second!
You interspersed, liberated, unfurled, departed,
Interspersion, liberation, departure, unfurlment,
Intersperser, liberator, unfurler, sender,
Postmark on all letters,
Name in all addresses,
Merchandise delivered, returned, in transit . . .
Train of sensations moving at soul-miles per hour,
Per hour, per minute, per second. BOOM!
And all these natural, human and machine noises
Go together, a sum tumult of everything,
Full of me to you, saluting you—
Human shouts and earthly cries,
Echoes from hills,
The burbling of waters,
The loud blasts of war,
The weeping clamor of suffering peoples,
The muffled sounds of sighs in the darkness.
And closer to life, surrounding me
(And it’s my finest prize for saluting you),
There are the whistles, chugging and screeching of trains,
The modern noises, factory noises,
Steady hum,
Motor wheels,
Flywheels,
Propellers
Boom . . .
In a great all-cities-of-Europe marche aux flambeaux,
In a great war march of industry, commerce and leisure,
In a great race, in a great rise, in a great fall,
Howling, jumping, and everything jumping with me,
I leap up and salute you,
I salute you with loud shouts,
I salute you with a burst of somersaults, handstands and
hoorays!
Hey-la!
(...)
Hey-la, I’m going to summon
All the human swarming of the Universe,
All types of all thoughts,
All wheels, all gears and all pistons of the soul
To the blaring, deafening privilege of saluting you.
Hup-hup! I shout,
And in a procession of Me to you they all rumble
In a metaphysical and real gibberish,
In an uproar of things clashing within me . . . . .
Ave, hail, hurrah, O great bastard of Apollo,
Passionate, impotent lover of the nine Muses and three
Graces,
Funicular from Olympus to us and from us to Olympus,
Rage of the modern materialized in me,
Transparent spasm of being,
Flower of other people’s actions,
Joyous feasting because there’s Life,
Mad fury because no one has enough life to be all men,
Since being means being a bastard, and only God could
satisfy us.
Ah, you sang everything and yet left everything unsung.
Who in his body can throb harder than his body throbs?
Who can feel more feelings than there are to feel?
Who can be sufficient when nothing suffices?
Who can be complete as long as one blade of grass
Has its root outside his heart?
Open all the doors!
Break all the windows!
Remove the locks from this enclosing life!
Remove this enclosing life from this enclosing life!
Let closing be openness, with no locks as reminders,
Let “stopping” be the ignorant term for continuing,
Let the end be an always abstract thing,
Fluidly connected to every end ever reached.
I want to breathe!
Strip my body of all its weight!
Replace my soul with abstract wings attached to nothing!
No, not wings, just the enormous Wing of Flight itself!
No, not even Flight, just the speed that remains when ceasing
becomes flying
And there’s no body to weigh down the soul of Going!
I want to be the heat of living things, the fever
Of saps, the rhythm of waves and the . . . . .
Gap in Being that allows Being to be . . . !
No boundaries anywhere!
No divisions in anything!
Just Me.
Where I’m not the first, I prefer to be nothing, to not be
there.
Where I can’t be the first to act, I prefer to watch others act.
Where I can’t rule, I refuse even to obey.
I ardently yearn for everything, so ardently that I never miss
out,
And I don’t miss out because I don’t try.
“All or nothing” has a special relevance for me.
But I can’t be universal, because I’m individual.
I can’t be all men, because I’m One, just one, just me.
I can’t be first in anything, because there is no first.
And so I prefer the nothing of being nothing but that
nothing.
When does the last train leave, Walt?
I want to leave this city known as Earth,
I want to emigrate from the country of Me once and for all,
To leave the world like a man who realizes he’s bankrupt,
Like a traveling salesman who sells ships to people from the
interior.
To the junk heap with broken motors!
What was my entire being? An enormous, useless yearning,
A sterile pursuit of an impossible goal,
A madman’s machine to achieve perpetual motion,
An absurd theorem to prove that a circle is square,
An attempt to swim across the Atlantic that f
ailed
Before I ever entered the water, just by looking at it and
calculating,
A hail of stones at the moon,
An absurd desire for the two parallels of God and life to
meet.
My nerves’ megalomania,
My rigid body’s yearning for elasticity,
My physical self’s rage because it’s not the sovereign axis,
The sensual vehicle of abstract enthusiasm,
The world’s dynamic void!
Let’s leave Being behind us.
Let’s leave for good this small town called Life,
This suburb-World of God,
And let’s venture into the city headlong,
Without stopping, just madly Going . . .
Let’s go away once and for all.
When does the last train leave for where you are, Walt?
What God was I that my nostalgia should arouse such
yearnings?
Perhaps by departing I’ll return. Perhaps by ending I’ll
arrive—
Who knows? Any time is the right time. Let’s leave,
Come on! The road is waiting for us. To leave is to have
already gone.
Let’s leave for where everything stays put.
O road to no-more-roads!
The last stop of No-Stopping!
In my poems I sing of trains, I sing of cars, I sing of steamers,
But however high I hoist my poem, it has only rhythms
and ideas,
It has no steel, iron or wheels, it has no wood, no ropes,
It lacks the reality of a road’s most negligible stone,
The stone people step on without ever looking at it
But which may be looked at, picked up, stepped on.
Whereas my poems are like ideas that may or may not be
understood.
What I want is iron, not just to sing of iron.
What I think gives only the idea of steel, not the steel.
What infuriates me in all my mind’s emotions
Is that I can’t swap my rhythm that mimics rippling water
For the real coolness of water on my hands,
For the visible sound of the river where I can enter and
get wet,
Which can make my suit drip,
Where I can drown myself, if I like,
And which has the natural divinity of being there without
literature.
Shit! A thousand times shit for everything I can’t do.
But what, Walt (can you hear me?), is everything, everything,
everything?
Damn the bad luck of our not being God
Such that our flesh could write poems in Universes and
Realities,
And our ideas be things, our thoughts Infinity!
And I’d have real stars in my thinking-being,
Number-names in every corner of my emotion-Earth.
The true modern poem is life without poems,
It’s the train itself and not verses that sing of it,
It’s the iron of the rails, the hot rails, the iron of the wheels,
their actual spin,
And not my poems that talk about rails and wheels they don’t
have.
The wind-up or string-pulled train of a child
Has more real motion than our poems . . .
Our poems that don’t have wheels,
Our poems that go nowhere,
Our unread poems that never leave the page.
(I’m sick of life, sick of art,
Sick of not having things, either out of lack or out of fear—
My breathing like a practical joke to torment me,
My self-image like a ridiculous carnival puppet.
When does the last train leave?)
I know that the way I sing of you isn’t by singing of you,
but so what?
I know it’s by singing of everything, but to sing of
everything is to sing of you.
I know it’s by singing of me, but to sing of me is to sing
of you.
I know that even to say I can’t sing is to sing of you, Walt . . .
To sing of you,
To salute you,
I’d have to write the supreme poem
Which, more than any other supreme poem, would embrace
In a total synthesis (based on an exhaustive analysis)
The whole Universe of things, living beings and souls,
The whole Universe of men, women and children,
The whole Universe of acts, gestures, feelings, thoughts,
The whole Universe of the things mankind makes
And the things mankind experiences—
Professions, laws, norms, medical sciences, Fate,
Written this way and that, constantly crisscrossing
On the dynamic paper of Events,
On the quick papyrus of social groupings,
On the palimpsest of continuously renewed emotions.
For me to salute you,
To salute you as you should be saluted,
I need to make my verses into a steed,
Make my verses into a train,
Make my verses into an arrow,
Make my verses sheer speed,
Make my verses the things of the world.
You sang everything, and in you everything sang—
Magnificent whorish receptivity
Of your sensations with their legs wide open
To the outlines and details of the whole universe.
Hup-hup what, or why, or to where?
Hup-hup to what end?
Hup-hup to where, make-believe steed?
Hup-hup to where, imaginary train?
Hup-hup to where, O arrow, haste and speed
Which are all just me pining after you,
All just me feeling your absence in every last nerve?
Hup-hup to where, if there is no where or how?
Hup-hup to where, if I’m always where I am and
never up ahead,
Never ahead and never behind
But always irremediably in the place of my body,
All too humanly in the thinking center of my soul,
Always the same indivisible atom of the divine personality?
Hup-hup to where, O sadness of not achieving what I want?
Hup-hup to where and for what? Hup-hup what or without
what?
Hup-hup-hup, but where to, O my uncertainty?
If only I could stop writing verse on verse on verse about iron
And see, have and be iron instead, and have that be my
poetry,
Poetry-iron-poetry, psycho-physio-I circle!
(When does the last train leave?)
Time for our vitality to declare bankruptcy!
We write poetry, singing of the things we don’t live: our
bankruptcies.
If only there were a way to live all lives and all ages
And all forms of form
And all gestures of gestures!
What’s the writing of poetry but a confession that life isn’t
enough?
What’s art but a way to forget that life is just this?
Farewell, Walt, farewell!
Farewell until the indefinite that lies beyond the End.
Wait for me, if where you are you can wait.
When does the last train leave?
When do we leave?
Hup-hup? Hup what and hup why?
What do I get from hup-hup or from anything
Prompting me to think of hup-hup?
Decadents, old boy, that’s what we are . . .
Deep down in each of us there’s a Byzantium in flames,
And although I don’t feel the flames and don’t feel
Byzantium,
The Empire is dying out in our watery veins,
And Poetry was but
our incapacity to act . . .
You, singer of vigorous professions, You the Poet of the
Strong and the Extreme,
You, inspiration’s muscle, ruled by male muses,
You, finally, an innocent in a state of hysteria,
Finally just a “caresser of life,”
A shiftless idler, a pansy at least in spirit.
That was your business, nobody else’s, but where’s Life
in all that?
I, an engineer by profession, sick of everything and everyone,
I, absolutely superfluous, at war with things,
I, useless, worn-out, unproductive, pretentious and amoral,
Buoy of my sensations scattered by the storm,
Anchor in the depths that broke off from my ship,
I—can you believe it?—a singer of Life and Power,
I, healthy and vigorous like you in my poems,
And even sincere like you, burning with all Europe
in my brain,
In my explosive brain with no dikes to contain it,
In my dynamic master intelligence,
In my trademark, projector, bank-check, rubber-stamp
sensuality.
Why the devil do we live, and write verses?
Damn the sloth that makes us poets,
The degeneracy that fools us into thinking we’re artists,
The fundamental tedium that tries to pass us off as energetic
and modern
When all we really want is to amuse ourselves, to savor an
idea of life,
Since we do nothing and are nothing, life limply flowing
through our veins.
Let’s at least see things as they really are, Walt . . .
Let’s swallow all this like a bitter pill
And agree to send life and the world to hell
Because we’re tired of looking at it, not because we abhor or
disdain it.
Is this any way to salute you?