birds flocking
rocks foamed
floating above
the
horizon’s
watery
wrinkled
skin
grandmother
oceanskirt
rumbling
pebbles
silver hair ear to ear
May 28, 1971
Hum Bom!
I
Whom bomb?
We bomb them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb them!
Whom bomb?
You bomb you!
Whom bomb?
You bomb you!
Whom bomb?
You bomb you!
Whom Bomb?
You bomb you!
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
What do we do!
Who do we bomb?
What do we do?
You bomb! You bomb them!
What do we do?
You bomb! You bomb them!
What do we do?
We bomb! We bomb them!
What do we do?
We bomb! We bomb them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb you!
Whom bomb?
We bomb you!
Whom bomb?
You bomb you!
Whom bomb?
You bomb you!
May 1971
II
Why bomb?
We don’t want to bomb!
Why bomb?
We don’t want to bomb!
Why bomb?
You don’t want to bomb!
Why bomb?
You don’t want to bomb!
Who said bomb?
Who said we had to bomb?
Who said bomb?
Who said we had to bomb?
Who said bomb?
Who said you had to bomb?
Who said bomb?
Who said you had to bomb?
We don’t bomb!
We don’t bomb!
We don’t bomb!
We don’t bomb!
We don’t bomb!
We don’t bomb!
We don’t bomb!
We don’t bomb!
for Don Cherry and Elvin Jones
New York, June 16, 1984
September on Jessore Road
Copyright © 1972 by May King Poetry Music Inc., Allen Ginsberg
September on Jessore Road
Millions of babies watching the skies
Bellies swollen, with big round eyes
On Jessore Road—long bamboo huts
Noplace to shit but sand channel ruts
Millions of fathers in rain
Millions of mothers in pain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go
One Million aunts are dying for bread
One Million uncles lamenting the dead
Grandfather millions homeless and sad
Grandmother millions silently mad
Millions of daughters walk in the mud
Millions of children wash in the flood
Millions of families hopeless alone
Millions of souls Nineteenseventyone
homeless on Jessore road under gray sun
A million are dead, the millions who can
Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan
Taxi September along Jessore Road
Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load
past watery fields thru rain flood ruts
Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts
Wet processions Families walk
Stunted boys big heads dont talk
Look bony skulls & silent round eyes
Starving black angels in human disguise
Mother squats weeping & points to her sons
Standing thin legged like elderly nuns
small bodied hands to their mouths in prayer
Five months small food since they settled there
on one floor mat with a small empty pot
Father lifts up his hands at their lot
Tears come to their mother’s eye
Pain makes mother Maya cry
Two children together in palmroof shade
Stare at me no word is said
Rice ration, lentils one time a week
Milk powder for warweary infants meek
No vegetable money or work for the man
Rice lasts four days eat while they can
Then children starve three days in a row
and vomit their next food unless they eat slow.
On Jessore road Mother wept at my knees
Bengali tongue cried mister Please
Identity card torn up on the floor
Husband still waits at the camp office door
Baby at play I was washing the flood
Now they won’t give us any more food
The pieces are here in my celluloid purse
Innocent baby play our death curse
Two policemen surrounded by thousands of boys
Crowded waiting their daily bread joys
Carry big whistles & long bamboo sticks
to whack them in line They play hungry tricks
Breaking the line and jumping in front
Into the circle sneaks one skinny runt
Two brothers dance forward on the mud stage
The guards blow their whistles & chase them in rage
Why are these infants massed in this place
Laughing in play & pushing for space
Why do they wait here so cheerful & dread
Why this is the House where they give children bread
The man in the bread door Cries & comes out
Thousands of boys & girls Take up his shout
Is it joy? is it prayer? “No more bread today”
Thousands of Children at once scream “Hooray!”
Run home to tents where elders await
Messenger children with bread from the state
No bread more today! & no place to squat
Painful baby, sick shit he has got.
Malnutrition skulls thousands for months
Dysentery drains bowels all at once
Nurse shows disease card Enterostrep
Suspension is wanting or else chlorostrep
Refugee camps in hospital shacks
Newborn lay naked on mothers’ thin laps
Monkeysized week-old Rheumatic babe eye
Gastroenteritis Blood Poison thousands must die
September Jessore Road rickshaw
50,000 souls in one camp I saw
Rows of bamboo huts in the flood
Open drains, & wet families waiting for food
Border trucks flooded, food cant get past,
American Angel machine please come fast!
Where is Ambassador Bunker today?
Are his Helios machinegunning children at play?
Where are the helicopters of U.S. AID?
Smuggling dope in Bangkok’s green shade.
Where is America’s Air Force of Light?
Bombing North Laos all day and all night?
Where are the President’s Armies of Gold?
Billionaire Navies merciful Bold?
Bringing us medicine food and relief?
Napalming North Vietnam and causing more grief?
Where are our tears? Who weeps for this pain?
Where can these families go in the rain?
Jessore Road’s children close their big eyes
Where will we sleep when Our Father dies?
Whom shall we pray to for rice and for care?
Who can bring bread to this shit flood foul’d lair?
Millions of children alone in the rain!
Millions of children weeping in pain!
Ring O ye tongues of the world for their woe
Ring out ye voices for Love we dont know
Ring out ye bells of electrical pain
Ring in the conscious American brain
How many children are we who are lost
Whose are these daughters we see turn to ghost?
What are our souls that we have lost care?
Ring out ye musics and weep if you dare—
Cries in the mud by the thatch’d house sand drain
Sleeps in huge pipes in the wet shit-field rain
whose children still starve in their mothers’ arms curled.
Is this what I did to myself in the past?
What shall I do Sunil Poet I asked?
Move on and leave them without any coins?
What should I care for the love of my loins?
What should we care for our cities and cars?
What shall we buy with our Food Stamps on Mars?
How many millions sit down in New York
& sup this night’s table on bone & roast pork?
How many million beer cans are tossed
in Oceans of Mother? How much does She cost?
Cigar gasolines and asphalt car dreams
Stinking the world and dimming star beams—
Finish the war in your breast with a sigh
Come taste the tears in your own Human eye
Pity us millions of phantoms you see
Starved in Samsara on planet TV
How many millions of children die more
before our Good Mothers perceive the Great Lord?
How many good fathers pay tax to rebuild
Armed forces that boast the children they’ve killed?
How many souls walk through Maya in pain
How many babes in illusory rain?
How many families hollow eyed lost?
How many grandmothers turning to ghost?
How many loves who never get bread?
How many Aunts with holes in their head?
How many sisters skulls on the ground?
How many grandfathers make no more sound?
How many fathers in woe
How many sons nowhere to go?
How many daughters nothing to eat?
How many uncles with swollen sick feet?
Millions of babies in pain
Millions of mothers in rain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of children nowhere to go
New York, November 14–16, 1971
IX
MIND BREATHS ALL OVER THE PLACE
(1972–1977)
Sad Dust Glories (1972–1974)
Ego Confessions (1974–1977)
Sad Dust Glories
(1972–1974)
Ayers Rock / Uluru Song
When the red pond fills fish appear
When the red pond dries fish disappear.
Everything built on the desert crumbles to dust.
Electric cable transmission wires swept down.
The lizard people came out of the rock.
The red Kangaroo people forgot their own song.
Only a man with four sticks can cross the Simpson Desert.
One rain turns red dust green with leaves.
One raindrop begins the universe.
When the raindrop dries, worlds come to their end.
Central Australia, March 23, 1972
Voznesensky’s “Silent Tingling”
Must be thousands of sweet gourmets rustling through
leaf crowded branches, thrushes cracking seedling shells
all over America like crystalline carillon bells,
a really strange silent tingling.
Silent carillons, not to celebrate Main Street
but rustling up some food their only scene—
No miracle but millions of hungry souls
silently tingling.
This tingling silence heralds
an orgy of hermit thrushes eating
like thousands of song-men’s clapsticks clacking
or faraway Moscow’s million bells
—some dream collective—generational vogue.
Thrush communes don’t be afraid of the big Broom,
your flock continues an ancient tradition,
now all over America—collective marriage;
though some detractors put down your in-group, not big enough!
A silent Individualist in top hat & tails drest
coffinlike denounces your collective struggles in bed—
but his own wife wears rings on every finger,
as if she wound up in a group marriage.
This gentle gang’s only enemy’s insects,
Cleaning up bark parasites—silently, silently—
Anybody can crush bones and oink louder
but cant beat this silent tingling.
Fast New York Sydney chicks—
thanks Brisbane birds & Chicago thrushes
for your own silent tingling—your cities’ trees’
leaves tremble like golden curlicues on Byzantine crosses.
Maybe someday our descendants
’ll ask about this poet—What’d he sing about?
I didn’t ring Halleluiah bells, I didn’t clank leg-irons,
I was silently tingling.
Translated with Andrei Voznesensky
Darwin Land—Cairns, Australia, March 26–29, 1972
These States: to Miami Presidential Convention
I
Philadelphia city lights boiling under the clouds
green Babylon’s heat attracting rain,
lightning, smoke gathered
about the excited city—shouts, vibration
of trucks, radio antennae, streets’
solid electric glitter under sulphur waterfumes—
the plane glides to Miami Beach over Atlantic’s
Coast metropolis
red downtown sores of theater money,
bar sign pinprick bulbs under
Cloud curtain’d sunlit velvet horizon
To the political drama, march to
Auditorium thru tacky downtown
Cuban neons blinking angry language,
Yippies survived unto this Presidentiad!
Woe to the States, whoever’s the empty President
Nixon McGovern X or Caesar
Must decree end to matter habit,
America swallowing aluminum sleep pills
Cries of millions of trees travel thru TV
loudspeakers to the Athletic Club’s basement steamroom—
Millions of yellow faces call thru radio
Cries of the longhairs in the Rockies,
Choruses of American prophets in their graves
echo thru newspaper horns to the
Ear Consciousness Mind
Matter Consumption must end,
Dirty alchemy destroys the House—
Billion year old leaf plates become inert matter
Plastic particles mixed
with living cells in the Walleyed
pike’s retina—
Soaring over Atlantic’s lit-up electric
houses to the politics Warre
Ah! Shall be my mantra—America’s gasp of Awe—
Ah as Fireworks ascend & light glitters
faery shimmering in treetop darkness
sky over Eastside Park July 4th—Ah
As the enlightened Aborigine sighs his
soul-journey with birds to New Guinea
Ah! the madman screamed
to himself in the silence of the Ward
Ah as car owner collapsed into
his ruined heap of metal on his own
Front Yard
Ah! the divorcee steps off her plane onto Mexico City Airport—
Ah! as I ride spitting petrol i
nto the exquisite
Midnight Atmosphere
above cloud cities
toward another gateway of Police Boys
& State Powers convened
Clocks Ticking two centuries
now America
approaching the great Ah of all cities
burning under Clouds, Conscious
of Death Machines Downtown.
Ah, for the garden—
After conversation with Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, Boulder, Spring 1972
II
O Peaceful & Wrathful Dieties & Politicians Rejoice, Rejoice
left and right!
Ah! liberty—we here together conscious of
heart’s feeling ah!
Massacre ah! selling images in America
bellied meadow bombcrater photo mind
scream face skin afire
eyes penetrated by war needles
Ah! to the Heart from Heart ever Grateful
for mercy human understanding sigh—
Ah! for our loves dead & gone
Ah! for miseries we caused, youthful screaming
Pig Cop selves
Violence in other streets and nations
Heads of State
eyes flashing angry—
Ah! that we know ourselves better,
Ah! that America rise from
the dead matter
& transcend this body heavy asphalt usury
being with each other
Trembling with city hatred
dropping acid Death Fear
lovelessness alone on metal
planet floor—or
grass green meadow
among Equal Creatures, trees flourishing their Barken Kind leaf flared—
ah What Seek we in Miami Heaven Earth
But End to Fear
Ah! to rejoice in World Illusion
airplane sound street body under sky—
Apocatastasis Ah!
Release of our knowledge
our suffering in kind—
Ah! together, ah! make peace!
Ah What is this lightness that we know
body empty & the mind
Myriad Ah’d in Mid Metropolis zonked
& baffled by its own Being,
Angers, Loves & Wars—Great Politics shakes
planet tremors through our souls—
Ah! Great Consciousness Here
Salutations to the Great Self we come to know
Ah to All souls, Republican empty as