with your eyes of Aunt Elanor in an oxygen tent
with your eyes of starving India
with your eyes pissing in the park
with your eyes of America taking a fall
with your eyes of your failure at the piano
with your eyes of your relatives in California
with your eyes of Ma Rainey dying in an ambulance
with your eyes of Czechoslovakia attacked by robots
with your eyes going to painting class at night in the Bronx
with your eyes of the killer Grandma you see on the horizon from the Fire-Escape
with your eyes running naked out of the apartment screaming into the hall
with your eyes being led away by policemen to an ambulance
with your eyes strapped down on the operating table
with your eyes with the pancreas removed
with your eyes of appendix operation
with your eyes of abortion
with your eyes of ovaries removed
with your eyes of shock
with your eyes of lobotomy
with your eyes of divorce
with your eyes of stroke
with your eyes alone
with your eyes
with your eyes
with your Death full of Flowers
V
Caw caw caw crows shriek in the white sun over grave stones in Long Island
Lord Lord Lord Naomi underneath this grass my halflife and my own as hers
caw caw my eye be buried in the same Ground where I stand in Angel
Lord Lord great Eye that stares on All and moves in a black cloud
caw caw strange cry of Beings flung up into sky over the waving trees
Lord Lord O Grinder of giant Beyonds my voice in a boundless field in Sheol
Caw caw the call of Time rent out of foot and wing an instant in the universe
Lord Lord an echo in the sky the wind through ragged leaves the roar of memory
caw caw all years my birth a dream caw caw New York the bus the broken shoe the vast highschool caw caw all Visions of the Lord
Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord
Paris, December 1957 – New York 1959
Poem Rocket
‘Be a Star-screwer!’—Gregory Corso
Old moon my eyes are new moon with human footprint
no longer Romeo Sadface in drunken river Loony Pierre eyebrow, goof moon
O possible moon in Heaven we get to first of ageless constellations of names
as God is possible as All is possible so we’ll reach another life.
Moon politicians earth weeping and warring in eternity
the not one star disturbed by screaming madmen from Hollywood
oil tycoons from Romania making secret deals with flabby green Plutonians—
slave camps on Saturn Cuban revolutions on Mars?
Old life and new side by side, will Catholic church find Christ on Jupiter
Mohammed rave in Uranus will Buddha be acceptable on the stolid planets
or will we find Zoroastrian temples flowering on Neptune?
What monstrous new ecclesiastical design on the entire universe unfolds in the dying Pope’s brain?
Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon
he promises the stars he’ll make us a new universe if it comes to that
O Einstein I should have sent you my flaming mss.
O Einstein I should have pilgrimaged to your white hair!
O fellow travellers I write you a poem in Amsterdam in the Cosmos
where Spinoza ground his magic lenses long ago
I write you a poem long ago
already my feet are washed in death
Here I am naked without identity
with no more body than the fine black tracery of pen mark on soft paper
as star talks to star multiple beams of sunlight all the same myriad thought
in one fold of the universe where Whitman was
and Blake and Shelley saw Milton dwelling as in a starry temple
brooding in his blindness seeing all—
Now at last I can speak to you beloved brothers of an unknown moon
real Yous squatting in whatever form amidst Platonic Vapors of Eternity
I am another Star.
Will you eat my poems or read them
or gaze with aluminum blind plates on sunless pages?
do you dream or translate & accept data with indifferent droopings of antennae?
do I make sense to your flowery green receptor eyesockets? do you have visions of God?
Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?
This is my rocket my personal rocket I send up my message Beyond
Someone to hear me there
My immortality
without steel or cobalt basalt or diamond gold or mercurial fire
without passports filing cabinets bits of paper warheads
without myself finally
pure thought
message all and everywhere the same
I send up my rocket to land on whatever planet awaits it
preferably religious sweet planets no money
fourth dimensional planets where Death shows movies
plants speak (courteously) of ancient physics and poetry itself is manufactured by the trees
the final Planet where the Great Brain of the Universe sits waiting for a poem to land in His golden pocket
joining the other notes mash-notes love-sighs complaints-musical shrieks of despair and the million unutterable thoughts of frogs
I send you my rocket of amazing chemical
more than my hair my sperm or the cells of my body
the speeding thought that flies upward with my desire as instantaneous as the universe and faster than light
and leave all other questions unfinished for the moment to turn back to sleep in my dark bed on earth.
Amsterdam, October 4, 1957
Europe! Europe!
World world world
I sit in my room
imagine the future
sunlight falls on Paris
I am alone there is no
one whose love is perfect
man has been mad man’s
love is not perfect I
have not wept enough
my breast will be heavy
till death the cities
are specters of cranks
of war the cities are
work & brick & iron &
smoke of the furnace of
selfhood makes tearless
eyes red in London but
no eye meets the sun
Flashed out of sky it
hits Lord Beaverbrook’s
white modern solid
paper building leaned
in London’s street to
bear last yellow beams
old ladies absently gaze
thru fog toward heaven
poor pots on windowsills
snake flowers to street
Trafalgar’s fountains splash
on noon-warmed pigeons
Myself beaming in ecstatic
wilderness on St Paul’s dome
seeing the light on London
or here on a bed in Paris
sunglow through the high
window on plaster walls
Meek crowd underground
saints perish creeps
streetwomen meet lacklove
under gaslamp and neon
no woman in house loves
husband in flower unity
nor boy loves boy soft
fire in breast politics
electricity scares downtown
radio screams for money
police light on TV screens
laughs at dim lamps in
empty rooms tanks crash
thru bombshell no dream
of man’s joy is made movie
&nbs
p; think factory pushes junk
autos tin dreams of Eros
mind eats its flesh in
geekish starvation and no
man’s fuck is holy for
man’s work is most war
Bony China hungers brain
wash over power dam and
America hides mad meat
in refrigerator Britain
cooks Jerusalem too long
France eats oil and dead
salad arms & legs in Africa
loudmouth devours Arabia
negro and white warring
against the golden nuptial
Russia manufacture feeds
millions but no drunk can
dream Mayakovsky’s suicide
rainbow over machinery
and backtalk to the sun
I lie in bed in Europe
alone in old red under
wear symbolic of desire
for union with immortality
but man’s love’s not perfect
in February it rains
as once for Baudelaire
one hundred years ago
planes roar in the air
cars race thru streets
I know where they go
to death but that is OK
it is that death comes
before life that no man
has loved perfectly no one
gets bliss in time new
mankind is not born that
I weep for this antiquity
and herald the Millennium
for I saw the Atlantic sun
rayed down from a vast cloud
at Dover on the sea cliffs
tanker size of ant heaved
up on ocean under shining
cloud and seagull flying
thru sun light’s endless
ladders streaming in Eternity
to ants in the myriad fields
of England to sun flowers
bent up to eat infinity’s
minute gold dolphins leaping
thru Mediterranean rainbow
White smoke and steam in Andes
Asia’s rivers glittering
blind poets deep in lone
Apollonic radiance on hillsides
littered with empty tombs
Paris, February 29, 1958
To Lindsay
Vachel, the stars are out
dusk has fallen on the Colorado road
a car crawls slowly across the plain
in the dim light the radio blares its jazz
the heartbroken salesman lights another cigarette
In another city 27 years ago
I see your shadow on the wall
you’re sitting in your suspenders on the bed
the shadow hand lifts up a Lysol bottle to your head
your shade falls over on the floor
Paris, May 1958
Message
Since we had changed
rogered spun worked
wept and pissed together
I wake up in the morning
with a dream in my eyes
but you are gone in NY
remembering me Good
I love you I love you
& your brothers are crazy
I accept their drunk cases
It’s too long that I have been alone
it’s too long that I’ve sat up in bed
without anyone to touch on the knee, man
or woman I don’t care what anymore, I
want love I was born for I want you with me now
Ocean liners boiling over the Atlantic
Delicate steelwork of unfinished skyscrapers
Back end of the dirigible roaring over Lakehurst
Six women dancing together on a red stage naked
The leaves are green on all the trees in Paris now
I will be home in two months and look you in the eyes
Paris, May 1958
To Aunt Rose
Aunt Rose—now—might I see you
with your thin face and buck tooth smile and pain
of rheumatism—and a long black heavy shoe
for your bony left leg
limping down the long hall in Newark on the running carpet
past the black grand piano
in the day room
where the parties were
and I sang Spanish loyalist songs
in a high squeaky voice
(hysterical) the committee listening
while you limped around the room
collected the money—
Aunt Honey, Uncle Sam, a stranger with a cloth arm
in his pocket
and huge young bald head
of Abraham Lincoln Brigade
—your long sad face
your tears of sexual frustration
(what smothered sobs and bony hips
under the pillows of Osborne Terrace)
—the time I stood on the toilet seat naked
and you powdered my thighs with calamine
and shamed first black curled hairs
what were you thinking in secret heart then
knowing me a man already—
and I an ignorant girl of family silence on the thin pedestal
of my legs in the bathroom—Museum of Newark.
Aunt Rose
Hitler is dead, Hitler is in Eternity; Hitler is with
Tamburlane and Emily Brontë
Though I see you walking still, a ghost on Osborne Terrace
down the long dark hall to the front door
limping a little with a pinched smile
in what must have been a silken
flower dress
welcoming my father, the Poet, on his visit to Newark
—see you arriving in the living room
dancing on your crippled leg
and clapping hands his book
had been accepted by Liveright
Hitler is dead and Liveright’s gone out of business
The Attic of the Past and Everlasting Minute are out of print
Uncle Harry sold his last silk stocking
Claire quit interpretive dancing school
Buba sits a wrinkled monument in Old
Ladies Home blinking at new babies
last time I saw you was the hospital
pale skull protruding under ashen skin
blue veined unconscious girl
in an oxygen tent
the war in Spain has ended long ago
Aunt Rose
Paris, June 1958
At Apollinaire’s Grave
… voici le temps
Où l’on connaîtra l’avenir
Sans mourir de connaissance
I
I visited Père Lachaise to look for the remains of Apollinaire
the day the U.S. President appeared in France for the grand conference of heads of state
so let it be the airport at blue Orly a springtime clarity in the air over Paris
Eisenhower winging in from his American graveyard
and over the froggy graves at Père Lachaise an illusory mist as thick as marijuana smoke
Peter Orlovsky and I walked softly thru Père Lachaise we both knew we would die
and so held temporary hands tenderly in a citylike miniature eternity
roads and streetsigns rocks and hills and names on everybody’s house
looking for the lost address of a notable Frenchman of the Void
to pay our tender crime of homage to his helpless menhir
and lay my temporary American Howl on top of his silent Calligramme
for him to read between the lines with Xray eyes of Poet
as he by miracle had read his own death lyric in the Seine
I hope some wild kidmonk lay his pamphlet on my grave for God to read me on cold winter nights in heaven
already our hands have vanished from that place my hand write
s now in a room in Paris Git-Le-Coeur
Ah William what grit in the brain you had what’s death
I walked all over the cemetery and still couldn’t find your grave
what did you mean by that fantastic cranial bandage in your poems
O solemn stinking deathshead what’ve you got to say nothing and that’s barely an answer
You can’t drive autos into a sixfoot grave tho the universe is mausoleum big enough for anything
the universe is a graveyard and I walk around alone in here
knowing that Apollinaire was on the same street 50 years ago
his madness is only around the corner and Genet is with us stealing books
the West is at war again and whose lucid suicide will set it all right
Guillaume Guillaume how I envy your fame your accomplishment for American letters
your Zone with its long crazy line of bullshit about death
come out of the grave and talk thru the door of my mind
issue new series of images oceanic haikus blue taxicabs in Moscow negro statues of Buddha
pray for me on the phonograph record of your former existence with a long sad voice and strophes of deep sweet music sad and scratchy as World War I
I’ve eaten the blue carrots you sent out of the grave and Van Gogh’s ear and maniac peyote of Artaud
and will walk down the streets of New York in the black cloak of French poetry
improvising our conversation in Paris at Père Lachaise
and the future poem that takes its inspiration from the light bleeding into your grave
II
Here in Paris I am your guest O friendly shade
the absent hand of Max Jacob
Picasso in youth bearing me a tube of Mediterranean
myself attending Rousseau’s old red banquet I ate his violin
great party at the Bateau Lavoir not mentioned in the textbooks of Algeria
Tzara in the Bois de Boulogne explaining the alchemy of the machineguns of the cookoos
he weeps translating me into Swedish
well dressed in a violet tie and black pants
a sweet purple beard which emerged from his face like the moss hanging from the walls of Anarchism
he spoke endlessly of his quarrels with André Breton
whom he had helped one day trim his golden mustache
old Blaise Cendrars received me into his study and spoke wearily of the enormous length of Siberia
Jacques Vaché invited me to inspect his terrible collection of pistols
poor Cocteau saddened by the once marvellous Radiguet at his last thought I fainted