Emerges in old maples
Goat bells near the house, not much in the
garden they can eat now anyway,
& cow got beet tops and mangles already—
What do dogs hear?
Birds squeak & chatter as Rooster call
echoes round house wall
Civilization’s breaking down! Freezertray’s
lukewarm, who knows why?
The year-old Toilet’s leaking at the heel—Wind
Charger’s so feeble batteries are almost down—
Hundreds of black spotted tomatoes
waiting near the kitchen wood stove
“Useless! useless! the heavy rain driving into the sea!”
Kerouac, Cassady, Olson ash & earth, Leary the Irish
coach on the lam,
Black Magicians screaming in anger Newark to Algiers,
How many bottles & cans piled up in our garbage pail?
Fall 1970
Guru Om
October 4, 1970
Car wheels roar over freeway concrete
Night falls on Dallas, two buildings shine under sickle moon
Many boys and girls in jail for their bodies poems and bitter thoughts
My belly’s hollow breath sighs up thru my heart
Guru Om Guru Om enlarges in the vast space of the breast
The Guru has a man’s brown belly and cock long hair white beard short hair orange hat no person
The bliss alone no business for my body but to make Guru Om dwell near my heart
shall I telephone New York and tell my fellows where I am silent
shall I ring my own head & order my own voice to be silent but
How giant, silent and feather-soft is the cave of my body eyes closed
To enter the body is difficult, the belly’s full of bad smelling wind
the body’s digesting last weekend’s meat thinking of Cigarettes, bright eyes of boys
What Acid eight hours equals eight hours’ Om continuous attention—
the Guru is equal to the Om of the Seeker
Guru Guru Guru Guru Guru Guru Guru Sitaram Omkar Das Thakur thin voic’d recommended “Give up desire for children”
Dehorahava Baba sat on the Ganges and described eat & drinking pranayam
Nityananda floated thru his giant photo body
Babaji’s hand the hand of a dead man in my dead man’s fingers
Out the plane window brown gas rises to heaven’s blue sea
—how end the poetry movie in the mind?
how tell Kabir Blake & Ginsberg shut their ears?
Folded in silence invisible Guru waits to fill his body with Emptiness
I am leaving the world, I will close my eyes & rest my tongue and hand.
October 5, 1970
To look in the City without hatred
the orange moon edge sunk into blue Cloud
a second night autos roar to and fro Downtown towers’ horizon
airplane moving between moon and white-lit bank towers
lightning haze above twinkling-bulbed man city flats
It is mind-City risen particularly solid.
What elder age grew such cities visioned from these far towers’ windows
Seraph armchaired in Babylonic Déjà Vu from Hilton Inn?
October 6, 1970
Dallas buildings’ heaped rock tangled steel electric lit under quarter moon
Cars crash at dusk at Mockingbird Lane, Drugstore Supermarket signs revolve with dumb beckoning persistence over North Central Freeway
Leary leaped over the wall with a sword, Errol Flynn’s in the grave, flags & bombs fly over Dallas’ stock exchange
oil flows thru the Hilton Faucets, gasoline fumes smother Neem trees in Ganeshpuri—
Maya revolves on rubber wheels, Samsara’s glass buildings light up with neon, Illusion’s doors open on aluminum hinges—
my mother should’ve done asanas & Kundalini not straightjackets & Electroshock in the birthdays of Roosevelt’s FBI—
Where in the body’s the white thumbsize subtle corpus, in the neck they say
where’s the half-thumbjoint black causal body, down in the heart hidden?
where’s the lentil-sized Cosmic Corpse, a tiny blue speck in the navel?
All beings at war in the Gross body, armor’d Cars & Napalm, rifles & grass huts burning, Mace on Wall Street, tear gas flooding the fallen stockmarket.
Look in halls of the head, nervous leg halls, universe inside Chest dark baby kingdom in the skull.
“Have You Seen This Movie?”
Old maple hairytrunks root asphalt grass marge, November branches rare leaved,
Giant woodlegged wiretowers’ threads stretch above pond woods highway, white sun fallen hills West.
Car rolling underpass, radio hornvoice “the sight of Bobby Seale bound & gagged at Trial” denied lawyer presum’d innocent?
MDA Love Drug Cure Junk Habit? Rochester Exit one mile flashing out Volkswagen window—
Blue sky fring’d with clouds’ whale-ghost-blue schools north drift—
High, high Manson sighed on Trial, how many folk in jail for grass Ask Congressman?
Highway Crash! Politics! Police! Dope! armed robbery Customary E. 10th street, no insurance possible.
—Brown deer tied neat footed dead eye horned across blue Car trunk, old folks Front seat, they’re gonna eat it!
Help! Hurrah! What’s Going on here? Samsara? Illusion? Reality?
What’re all these trailers row’d up hillside, more people? How can Lyca sleep?
Cows on Canandaigua fields lactate into rubber stainless steel plastic milk-house machinery vats ashine—
Revolutionary Suicide! Driving on Persian gasoline?
Kill Whale & ocean? Oh one American myself shits 1000 times more Chemical waste into freshwater & seas than any single Chinaman!
America Suicide Cure World Cancer! Myself included dependent on Chemicals, wheels, dollars,
metal Coke Cans Liquid propane batteries marijuana lettuce avocados cigarettes plastic pens & milkbottles—electric
in N.Y.C. heavy habit, cut airconditioners isolation from street nightmare smog heat study decentralized Power sources 10 years
not atomic thermopollutive monolith. Om. How many species poisoned biocided from Earth realms?
O bald Eagle & Blue Whale with giant piteous Cat Squeak—Oh Wailing whale ululating underocean’s sonic roar of Despair!
Sing thy Kingdom to Language deaf America! Scream thy black Cry thru Radio electric Aether—
Scream in Death America! Or did Captain Ahab not scream Curses as he hurled harpoon
into the body of the mother, great White Whale Nature Herself,
thrashing in intelligent agony innocent vast in the oil-can sick waters?
All Northvietnam bomb-Cratered ruined topsoil Laos in secrecy more bombs than many W W II’s!
Mekong swamp lethicided by Monsanto Pentagon Academy Death-brains!
What wisdom teaching this? What Mafia runs N.J.? What Mafia knew J. Edgar FBI?
What’s Schenley’s Whiskey trader Fleischmann’s Hoover Institute?
What opium’s passed thru CIA Agents’ airplane’s luggage in Saigon, Bangkok, Athens, Washington?
What narcotic agent’s not dependent on Shit for a living?
What Bank’s money created ex nihil serves orphan, widow, monk, philosopher?
or what Bank’s money serves real Estate Asphalt over widow’s garden? Serves old Nick in the Pentagon?
Old Indian prophecies believe Ghost Dance peace will Come restore prairie Buffalo or great White Father Honkie
be trampled to death in his dreams by returning herds’ thundering reincarnation!
Oh awful Man! What have we made the world! Oh man capitalist exploiter of Mother Planet!
Oh vain insect sized men with metal slaves by Great Lake Erie, tenderest Passaic & Hudson poisoned by dollars!
bid tampering probed in lackawanna Buffalo News
headline folded on rubber floor, car vibrating smooth to sun ruddy woods’ dusk quiet—
Radio hissing cough words dashboard noisemusic—Any minute Apocalypse Rock!
Brown Pelican eggs softened by DDT. Seal’s livers poisoned to Northman. Oceans Dead 2000 A.D.?
Television Citizen 6% Earths human Americans ingest half the planet’s raw matter as alchemized by Syracuse Gen. Electric Power brown robot palace near 8 Lane Thruway’s Exit before Ramada Inn.
HXL Trucks sleeping on brokenearthed embankment past Iron-strutted passages,
fields aglitter with damp metallic garbage under th’electricwire trestles—
And woods survive into another Thanksgiving’s brown sacred silence—
Lights on cars front Western Lane gray twilight falls on rolling robotland.
November 1970
Milarepa Taste
Who am I? Saliva,
vegetable soup,
empty mouth?
Hot roach, breathe smoke
suck in, hold, exhale—
light as ashes.
Over Laramie
Western Air boat bouncing
under rainclouds stippled
down gray Rockies
Springtime dusk,
Look out on Denver, Allen,
mourn Neal no more,
Old ghost loves departed
New lives whelm the plains, rains
wash Rocky mountainsides
World turns under sun eye
Man flies a moment Cheyenne’s
dry upland highways
A tiny fossil brachiapod in pocket
Precambrian limestone clam
fingernail small
four hundred fifty million years old
Brain gone, flesh passed thru myriad
phantom reincarnations,
the tiny-ridged shell’s delicate
as hardened thought.
—over Laramie, Front Range
pine gully snow pockets,
Monolith Cement plume smoke
casting dust gas over
the red plateau
into the New World.
April 12, 1971
Bixby Canyon to Jessore Road (1971)
Bixby Canyon Ocean Path Word Breeze
Tiny orange-wing-tipped butterfly
fluttering sunlit
from violet
blossom to violet
blossom
Ocean is private
you have to visit
her to see her
Garden undercliff
Dewey Pinks,
bitter Mint,
Sea Sage,
Orange flaming
Paintbrush
greenspiked fleurs,
Thick dainty stalked
Cow Parsley,
Starleaf’d violet bushes,
yelloweyed blue
Daisy clump—
red brambled mature sour
blackberry briars,
yellow budded
Lupine
nodding stalkheads
in Sunwarm’d
breezes
by the brooks tricklet
wash in the ravine
Bridged with cloud
Ruddy withwine morning
glory’s tiny tender
cowbells,
guarded by poison oak sprigs
oily hands
Green horned little
British chickweed,
waxlight-leafed black
seed stalk’s
lilac sweet budcluster
Ah fluted morning
glory bud
oped
& tickled to yellow
tubed stamen root
by a six legged
armed mite
deeping his head
into sweet pollened
crotches,
Crawls up yr veined
blossom wall
to petal lip in
sunshine clear
and dives again
to your tongue-stamen’s
foot-pipe, your
bloom unfolded
to light—
Above ye the
Spider’s left
his one strand
catgut silk
shining
bridge
between
cuckoospitted
mint leafheads
& newgreen leafsprig’d
seedy lilac
Granite Sagely
Browed above the Path’s
black pepper peapod marge—
Gray rock dropping
seed,
withered bush-fingers
tangled up
stoneface
—cracked with
green stalk
sprout—
Brooktrickle deep
below Airplane
Bridge
Concrete
arches balcony’d
Pendant over
Oceancrash
waves
falling empty eyed
breathing water
wash afar
Morning Night shade
in alder shadow’d
Pathside—Nettle plant
Leaf-shoulder
vegetable wing’d
baby faces,
green earmouths
sprouting
Celery handspread
Heal-All mudras
open asking why me.
Sunlight trembling
branch-leafy willow,
yellow haired wingy bee’s
black horn
bowed into threadpackt mauve
round thistle mouth,
dewey web throat
green needle collar’d,
Symmetric little
Cathead erect
electric thorn’d
under giant hogweed
stalked parasol blossoms—
Ash branch’s tender
pinecone cluster
proffered by leathery
sawtooth rib leafs
red browed beedle
perched on Egyptian
bridge of Spider fern’s
soft-jointed spike-sticks
Brown water
streaming
underbrush
sparrowsong
winged brown
whistling above
cold water pebble
silver pour …
Shrouded
under the
Ash spread, on
damp leafwither,
shield tubes
& condensers
of small Sony
TV machine enwired
rusty w/resistances
giant grass
leafspears
morning glory hillside
perched over clearing
All branches lifting up
papery seedhusks,
parasolspiked Fern
Tramping together
upright pushing
a thistle aside,
groundwheat leaned
by beach path—
Oh ocean white-
waved pouring
foamy noises over
rocky sandshore
Chevrolet writ
on radiatormouth
Set above
Private Land
Do Not Enter
incised wood
Sign-beams
Frying chickens from
Arkansas!
Musselshells’
Briared graveyard
footplot—
Dewey round bushes
guarding ocean
path with
myriad greenstar’d
leafarms
cradling white-walled
dewdrops
Telephone
pole trunk
stuck
out of old
landslide head
Covered with iceplant
green lobsterclaw
trefoil
solid
edged,
pinked with
hundredfingerpetaled
Sea vine blossoms
Dry brown kelp
ribs washed
in a heap at
streamside in
wet brown sand
to listen to
oceanroar
and wait the
slow moon
tide.
Stream water
rushing flat through
beachmound
Sand precipices,
tiny wet arizonas
flood lips
—cliffs
cradling the last
graysmooth boulders
shat by the rains
pissed out
by spring storm
from
the forests
bladder
hills
Small granite
blackpocked
hearthstones
washed to last rest
Ocean wavelet’s
salt tongue
touching
forward thru
sand throated
streambed
to lave foam &
pull back bubbles
from the iron
Car’s rusty
under carriage
kelp pipes
& brown chassis,
one rubber wheel
black poked from
Sand mattresses
rock wash
O Kerouac
thy broken
car Behold
Digested in
Saltwater
sandbottom
giant soulless
Chicken
sea gizzard filled
with unthinking
marble rocks—
Poured down
road in
avalanche!
to the granite
snout of the
seacliff
O see the great
Snake kelp’s
beet green head still lettuce-
haired
stretch forth
a fingerthick tailroot
above seaweed broider
wavelets
rushing foam
tongued—
Was that kelp
Intelligent
Einstein hairleafed
faceless bulbhead
Oh father
Welcome!
The seal’s
head lifted
above the wave,
eyes watching
from black
face
in waterfroth
floating!
Come back again!
Huge white
waves rolling
in gray mist