In his travels he comes to a bridge made entirely of bones. Before crossing he writes a letter to his mother: Dear mother, guess what? the ape accidentally bit off one of his hands while eating a banana. Just now I am at the foot of a bone bridge. I shall be crossing it shortly. I don’t know if I shall find hills and valleys made of flesh on the other side, or simply constant night, villages of sleep. The ape is scolding me for not teaching him better. I am letting him wear my pith helmet for consolation. The bridge looks like one of those skeletal reconstructions of a huge dinosaur one sees in a museum. The ape is looking at the stump of his wrist and scolding me again. I offer him another banana and he gets very furious, as though I’d insulted him. Tomorrow we cross the bridge. I’ll write to you from the other side if I can; if not, look for a sign . . .
Toad, hog, assassin, mirror. Some of its favorite words, which are breath. Or handwriting: the long tail of the ‘y’ disappearing into a barn like a rodent’s, and suddenly it is winter after all. After all what? After the ponds dry up in mid-August and the children drop pins down each canyon and listen for an echo. Next question, please. What sex is it, if it has any? It’s a male. It’s a white male Caucasian. No distinguishing birthmarks, the usual mole above the chin. Last seen crossing against a light in Omaha. Looks intelligent. But haven’t most Americans seen this poem at least once by now? At least once. Then, how is the disease being . . . communicated? As far as we can determine, it is communicated entirely by doubt. As soon as the poets reach their mid-twenties they begin living behind hedgerows. At the other end of the hedgerows someone attractive is laughing, either at them, or with a lover during sexual intercourse. So it is like prom night. Yes. But what is the end of prom night? The end of prom night is inside the rodent; it is the barn collapsing on a summer day. It is inside the guts of a rodent. Then, at least, you are permitted an unobstructed view of the plain? Yes. And what will be out there, then, on the plain? A rider approaching with a tense face, who can’t see that this horse has white roses instead of eyes. You mean . . . the whole thing all over again. Unfortunately, yes, at least as far as we are permitted to see.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.
people think
Satan is a mythic beast
breathing doom and fire
laughing rapaciously as he
plucks your eyes out
a comic book ghoulie
with bad breath and a skin problem
Satan is a bus station
Satan is a cold fried egg
on a plastic plate
a cup of week coffee beside it
while the telephone rings
Satan is the bland smile of
the cashier at the bank
when he tells you you’re overdrawn
or the glittering one
on the face of the angel in the blue dress
on the tv show
making you an offer you can’t believe
at terms you’re unable to resist
Satan is when you
run out of cigarettes and out of money
at the same time
when every part of your body hurts
and you’re only 36
when the miles you’ve logged
start showing up in the way
you laugh
in the way you count your change
when the whiskey bottle’s dry
Satan is the crackle of the police radio
just after they’ve put the cuffs on
as they laugh about the baseball game
the color of the walls
in a county hospital emergency room
the papers they make you sign
before they’ll give you medicine
the bad food you eat when you’re poor
a cough that won’t go away
the kind of hopes
that get pinned on a lottery
Bike Messenger Leading the People An Anarchy Poem. It’s Devil’s Night in Detroit
I burn my own house down cause it ain’t my house
it’s your house
your shit your shit your shit
incitement to riot
burn it down burn it down burn it down burn it
down burn it down
there’s so much paper
burn it down burn it down burn it down
the kindling’s there the fuel for the fire
it would glow burn beautiful orange licking flames
paper paper paper paper
it’s all just fuel for the fire
the big bonfire
violence against buildings
violence against property
the ultimate act of rebellion
and I’m gonna build me a guillotine
at One Sansome
right by The Wall
right where it says “The Sharper Image”
grab these ####### by the hair
drag em by their power nooses
and chop their lousy heads off
it’s French Revolution time
burn it down
and there’ll be a huge famous painting of me
bike messenger leading the people
yeah
43 years she said
43 years I was chained to a desk
43 years I pushed around rubber bands and paper
clips and xerox memos
43 years and I hated every goddamn minute of it
now I drink in cheap bars
now I wait for my landlord to sell my building so he
can toss me on the street
43 years of all that paper paper
pushin pushin paper
of being an appliance part of the hardware the
interior decorating
43 years of being no one for a paycheck
well you know what I say
all these buildings the skyscrapers
all that chrome and glass filled with all that paper
well we could have ourselves
one hella Molotov cocktail
all we need is a little gasoline and
just one match
light the ####### match
what are we waiting for?
all these people in their starched white shirts
who act like they own the street and the sidewalk
and the ####### world
because they do
burn it down
burn it down burn it down burn it down burn it
down
goddamn peds
goddamn clogs
goddamn termites
goddamn ants
goddamn drones
in my way I am
lost in the forgotten guts
of dead office equipment souls
Jesus came to the marketplace
Jesus came to Market street and He said
burn it down
all you buyers and sellers He said
burn it down
you profane my world
I am riding my bicycle through the den of lepers
and I am trying to remain unscathed
and me well I’m a white slime maggot
I was fed television and twinkies
and the scroungy ethics
of depression children parents
one who can’t throw away a piece of wilted lettuce
one who buys crates of the finest just to watch it rot
we are the refuse of a decaying system
we are products of decay
but oh! the fragrant twisted beauty of death
the rollicking waltz to be danced
come on come on come on
light the match
there are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it’s too late
and there’s nothing worse
than
too late.
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go #### 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.
America 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 Trotskyites?
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 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.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of 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.
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 I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
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.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
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 slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s 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 national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour
and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live
in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, 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 $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
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 momma took me to Communist Cell meetings
they sold us garbanzos 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 the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry
I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter 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 wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black
niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
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’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candycanes and breakable stars
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and no tinsel Christmas trees
and no tinfoil Christmas trees
and no pink plastic Christmas trees
and no gold Christmas trees
and no black Christmas trees
and no powderblue Christmas trees
hung with electric candles
and encircled by tin electric trains
and clever cornball relatives
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesmen
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck creches
complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery
and where no televised Wise Men
praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no fat handshaking stranger
in a red flannel suit
and a fake white beard
went around passing himself off
as some sort of North Pole saint
crossing the desert to Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
in a Volkswagen sled
drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer
and German names
and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts
from Saks Fifth Avenue
for everybody’s imagined Christ child
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no Bing Crosby carollers
groaned of a tight Christmas
and where no Radio City angels
iceskated wingless
thru a winter wonderland
into a jinglebell heaven
daily at 8:30
with Midnight Mass matinees
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest of
Second Comings
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
*
Variations On A Theme By William Carlos Williams
Kenneth Koch
1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.
2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.
3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the
next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.
4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!
