America

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
America I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
When will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Christs?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When will you re-invent the heart?
When will you manufacture land?
When will your cowboys read Spengler?
When will your dams release the flood of eastern tears?
When will your technicians get drunk and abolish money?
When will you institute religions of perception in your legislature?
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
I don’t want to work for a living.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
I don’t want to die young
I want to die old and unhappy.
I don’t mind dying so long as it’s not sordid.
Now Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back and it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of playing a practical joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
America I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on

trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get – only two dollars and twenty-seven cents.
I don’t want to work, maybe too good looking for the job.
I can’t study anymore. I’ll never teach for a living.
I sit in my house for days on end without going out.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
The American flag is absolutely meaningless to me still just as it was in the

thirties.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I pass the corner of North West Street and

Montgomery Street
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
Time Magazine is always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious.

Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my natural resources.
My natural resources consist of two sticks of marijuana, millions of genitals,
an atom bomb, twothousandfivehundred mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots.
I have very few bordellos and that’s all there is.
I have abolished my whorehouses in France and Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they’re all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes at $2,500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
as trade in and the rest of your life to pay.
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven my mother took me to a Communist Cell meeting they
sold us [inaudible] a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw [inaudible] plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don’t really want to go to war.
America it’s them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians
The Russia’s power mad. The Russia wants to eat us alive. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages
Her wants to take our factories.
Her wants to corrupt our college girls.
Her wants to put us all in slave labour camps
Her wants to emaciate us like skeletons
Her wants Malenko or Buganin or somebody to be our boss.
Her wants to dictify us.
Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Hah. Him need niggers.
Huh. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from reading the newspapers.
America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I am putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! – and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refridgerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Which way are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel obsurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up
their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Garbage heap
of eyebrows and brains. 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 stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running
money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Molch whose breast
is a cannibal 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
factories 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 burns down the love of the world
Moloch whom I abandon! Woke up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries!
demonic mills! blind capitals! ghostley bureaucracies! spectral nations!
invincible mad-houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, 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! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! 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!