toward what wild city
jumping with jazz
on the Pacific Ocean!
Spring 1951
Marijuana Notation
How sick I am!
that thought
always comes to me
with horror.
Is it this strange
for everybody?
But such fugitive feelings
have always been
my métier.
Baudelaire—yet he had
great joyful moments
staring into space,
looking into the
middle distance,
contemplating his image
in Eternity.
They were his moments
of identity.
It is solitude that
produces these thoughts.
It is December
almost, they are singing
Christmas carols
in front of the department
stores down the block on
Fourteenth Street.
New York, November 1951
Gregory Corso’s Story
The first time I went
to the country to New Hampshire
when I was about eight
there was a girl
I always used to paddle with a plywood stick.
We were in love,
so the last night there
we undressed in the moonlight
and showed each other our bodies,
then we ran singing back to the house.
December 10, 1951
I Have Increased Power
over knowledge of death.
(See also Hemingway’s
preoccupation.) My
dreamworld and realworld
become more and more
distinct and apart.
I see now that what
I sought in X seven years
ago was mastery or
victimage played out
naked in the bed.
Renewal of nostalgia
for lost flair of those days,
lost passions …
Trouble with
me now, no active life
in realworld. And Time,
as realworld, appearing vile,
as Shakespeare says:
ruinous, vile, dirty Time.
As to knowledge of death:
and life itself as without
consummation foreseeable
in ideal joy or passion
(have I exaggerated the
terror of catastrophe?
reality can be joy or terror—
and have I exaggerated the joy?):
life as vile, as painful,
as wretched (this pessimism
which was X’s jewel),
as grim, not merely bleak:
the grimness of chance. Or as
Carl wrote, after bughouse,
“How often have I
had occasion to see
existence display
the affectations
of a bloodthirsty
negro homosexual.”
December 1951
Walking home at night,
reaching my own block
I saw the Port Authority
Building hovering over
the old ghetto side
of the street I tenement
in company with obscure
Bartlebys and Judes,
cadaverous men,
shrouded men, soft white
fleshed failures creeping
in and out of rooms like
myself. Remembering
my attic, I reached
my hands to my head and hissed,
“Oh, God how horrible!”
New York, December 1951
I learned a world from each
one whom I loved;
so many worlds without
a Zodiac.
New York, December 1951
I made love to myself
in the mirror, kissing my own lips,
saying, “I love myself,
I love you more than anybody.”
New York, December 30, 1951
A Ghost May Come
Elements on my table—
the clock.
All life reduced to this—
its tick.
Dusty’s modern lamp,
all shape, space and curve.
Last attempts at speech.
And the carved
serpentine knife of Mexico,
with the childish
eagle head on the handle.
New York, December 30, 1951
I feel as if I am at a dead
end and so I am finished.
All spiritual facts I realize
are true but I never escape
the feeling of being closed in
and the sordidness of self,
the futility of all that I
have seen and done and said.
Maybe if I continued things
would please me more but now
I have no hope and I am tired.
New York, Early 1952
An Atypical Affair
—Long enough to remember the girl
who proposed love to me in the neon
light of the Park Avenue Drugstore
(while her girl friends walked
giggling in the night) who had
such eerie mental insight into my
coldness, coupled with what seemed
to me an untrustworthy character,
and who died a few months later,
perhaps a month after I ceased
thinking of her, of an unforeseen
brain malignancy. By hindsight,
I should have known that only such
a state of deathliness could bare
in a local girl such a luminous
candor. I wish I had been kinder.
This hindsight is the opposite,
after all, of believing that even
in the face of death man can be
no more than ordinary man.
New York, January 1952
345 W. 15th St.
I came home from the movies with nothing on my mind,
Trudging up 8th Avenue to 15th almost blind,
Waiting for a passenger ship to go to sea.
I live in a roominghouse attic near the Port Authority,
An enormous City warehouse slowly turning brown
Across from which old brownstones’ fire escapes hang down
On a street which should be Russia outside the Golden gates
Or back in the middle ages not in United States.
I thought of my home in the suburbs, my father who wanted me home,
My aunts in the asylum myself in Nome or Rome.
I opened the door downstairs & Creaked up the first flight.
A Puerto Rican in the front room was laughing in the night.
I saw from the second stairway the homosexual pair
That lived in different cubicles playing solitaire,
And I stopped on the third landing and said hello to Ned,
A crooked old man like Father Time who drank all night in bed.
I made it up to the attic room I paid $4.50 for.
There was a solitary cockroach on my door.
It passed me by. I entered. Nothing of much worth
Was hung up under the skylight. I saw what I had on earth.
Bare elements of Solitude: table, chair & clock;
Two books on top of the bedspread, Jack Woodford and Paul de Kock.
I sat down at the table & read a holy book
About a super City whereon I cannot look.
What misery to be guided to an eternal clime
When I yearn for sixty minutes of actual time.
I turned on the Radio voices strong and clear
described the high fidelity of a set without a peer.
Then I heard great musicians
playing the Mahogany Hall
Up to the last high chorus. My neighbor beat on the wall.
I looked up at the Calendar it had a picture there
Showing two pairs of lovers and all had golden hair.
I looked into the mirror to check my worst fears.
My face is dark but handsome It has not loved for years.
I lay down with the paper to see what Time had wrought:
Peace was beyond vision, war too much for thought.
Only the suffering shadow of Dream Driven Boy, 16
Looked in my eyes from the Centerfold after murdering High School Queen.
I stripped, my head on the pillow eyes on the cracked blue wall.
The same cockroach or another continued its upward crawl.
From what faint words, what whispers did I lie alone apart?
What wanted consummation? What sweetening of the heart?
I wished that I were married to a sensual thoughtful girl.
I would have made a wedded workmanlike tender churl.
I wished that I were working for $10,000 a year.
I looked all right in business suits but my heart was weak with fear.
I wished I owned an apartment uptown on the East Side,
So that my gentle breeding nurtured, had not died.
I wished I had an Aesthetic worth its weight in gold.
The myth is still unwritten. I am getting old.
I closed my eyes and drifted back in helpless shame
To jobs & loves wasted Disillusion itself was lame.
I closed my eyes and drifted the shortening years ahead,
Walk home from the movies lone long nights in bed,
Books, plays, music, spring afternoons in bars,
The smell of old Countries, the smoke of dark cigars.
February 1952
[According to biographer Bill Morgan, the actual address where this poem was written was 346 West 15th Street.—The Allen Ginsberg Trust, May 2006]
A Crazy Spiritual
A faithful youth
with artificial legs
drove his jalopy
through the towns of Texas.
He got sent out
of the Free Hospital
of Galveston, madtown
on the Gulf of Mexico
after he recovered.
They gave him a car
and a black mongrel;
name was Weakness.
He was a thin kid
with golden hair
and a frail body
on wire thighs,
who never traveled
and drove northward
timid on the highway
going about twenty.
I hitched a hike
and showed him the road.
I got off at Small Town
and stole his dog.
He tried to drive away,
but lost control,
rode on the pavement
near a garage,
and smashed his doors
and fenders on trees
and parked cars,
and came to a halt.
The Marshal came,
stopping everything
pulled him out
of the wreck cursing.
I watched it all
from the lunch cart,
holding the dog
with a frayed rope.
“I’m on my own
from the crazyhouse.
Has anybody
seen my Weakness?”
What are they saying?
“Call up the FBI.
Crazy, ha? What
is he a fairy?
He must do funny
things with women,
we bet he * * *
them in the * * *.”
Poor child meanwhile
collapsed on the ground
with innocent expression
is trying to get up.
Along came a Justice
of the Supreme Court,
barreling through town
in a blue limousine.
He stopped by the crowd
to find out the story,
got out on his pegleg
with an angry smile.
“Don’t you see
he has no legs?
That’s you fools
what crazy means.”
He picked the boy
up off the ground.
The dog ran to them
from the lunch cart.
He put them both in
the back seat of his car
and stood in the square
hymning at the crowd:
“Rock rock rock
for the tension
of the people
of this country
rock rock rock
for the craziness
of the people
of America
tension is a rock
and god will
rock our rock
craziness is a rock
and god will
rock our rock
Lord we shall all
be sweet again.”
He showed his wooden leg
to the boy, saying:
“I promise to drive you
home through America.”
Paterson, April 1952
Wild Orphan
Blandly mother
takes him strolling
by railroad and by river
—he’s the son of the absconded
hot rod angel—
and he imagines cars
and rides them in his dreams,
so lonely growing up among
the imaginary automobiles
and dead souls of Tarrytown
to create
out of his own imagination
the beauty of his wild
forebears—a mythology
he cannot inherit.
Will he later hallucinate
among mysteries with
an insane gleam
of recollection?
The recognition—
something so rare
in his soul,
met only in dreams
—nostalgias
of another life.
A question of the soul.
And the injured
losing their injury
in their innocence
—a cock, a cross,
an excellence of love.
And the father grieves
in flophouse
complexities of memory
a thousand miles
away, unknowing
of the unexpected
youthful stranger
bumming toward his door.
New York, April 13, 1952
II
THE GREEN
AUTOMOBILE
(1953–1954)
The Green Automobile
If I had a Green Automobile
I’d go find my old companion
in his house on the Western ocean.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
I’d honk my horn at his manly gate,
inside his wife and three
children sprawl naked
on the living room floor.
He’d come running out
to my car full of heroic beer
and jump screaming at the wheel
for he is the greater driver.
We’d pilgrimage to the highest mount
of our earlier Rocky Mountain visions
laughing in each other’s arms,
delight surpassing the highest Rockies,
and after old agony, drunk with new years,
bounding toward the snowy horizon
blasting the dashboard with original bop
hot rod on the mountain
we’d batter up the cloudy highway
where angels of anxiety
careen through the trees
and scream out of the e
ngine.
We’d burn all night on the jackpine peak
seen from Denver in the summer dark,
forestlike unnatural radiance
illuminating the mountaintop:
childhood youthtime age & eternity
would open like sweet trees
in the nights of another spring
and dumbfound us with love,
for we can see together
the beauty of souls
hidden like diamonds
in the clock of the world,
like Chinese magicians can
confound the immortals
with our intellectuality
hidden in the mist,
in the Green Automobile
which I have invented
imagined and visioned
on the roads of the world
more real than the engine
on a track in the desert
purer than Greyhound and
swifter than physical jetplane.
Denver! Denver! we’ll return
roaring across the City & County Building lawn
which catches the pure emerald flame
streaming in the wake of our auto.
This time we’ll buy up the city!
I cashed a great check in my skull bank
to found a miraculous college of the body
up on the bus terminal roof.
But first we’ll drive the stations of downtown,
poolhall flophouse jazzjoint jail
whorehouse down Folsom
to the darkest alleys of Larimer
paying respects to Denver’s father
lost on the railroad tracks,
stupor of wine and silence
hallowing the slum of his decades,
salute him and his saintly suitcase
of dark muscatel, drink
and smash the sweet bottles
on Diesels in allegiance.
Then we go driving drunk on boulevards
where armies march and still parade
staggering under the invisible
banner of Reality—
hurtling through the street
in the auto of our fate
we share an archangelic cigarette
and tell each other’s fortunes:
fames of supernatural illumination,
bleak rainy gaps of time,
great art learned in desolation