America ( Top of Page )

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck 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 and 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 our 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 goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged 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 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don’re 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 makes 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.

***

barbershop in the rain

It’s raining again at the barbershop,

it always seems to be raining when I get my hair cut,

but it’s OK. I simply sit there like the Sphinx

and think of my brother,

how he used to work in a barbershop

so many years ago and he’d cut my hair

for free, of course, on the weekends.

They always play that horrible elevator/dentist music,

that soft pop crap that makes you wonder

where the devil your old girlfriend is living now

and what her husband is like.

the sun splashing all around

Waiting out in the backyard

I notice the grass is cut short and neat,

and the wasp nests

that once hung like proud stalactites

from beneath the gutters

had been knocked down and smashed

into unregal piles of pulpy cardboard,

and he’d built a pretty wooden fence around

a tree. There, listening to familiar neighborhood

sounds of children and vehicles, and slamming

screen doors, I thought of when I

was a child cutting grass

in my grandfather’s backyard,

then resting on his stoop sucking

on the ice cubes left in the cold wet

lemonade glass, sniffing the air

as the smells of my grandmother’s sizzling cooking

inside drifted outside to mingle

with the fresh tangy warmth of grass clippings,

the sun splashing all around.

but how can I tell you?

Spring is a greening, warming,

brightening moment,

a coming alive, a surging

of life”s energies, spring is you.

But how can I tell you?

The sheen of your skin,

soft and sweet and pure,

the fragrance all about you

lingering in tiny swells and eddies

draws me out, pulls me to you,

you as you are snarling and snapping

in the dull dripping shadows

and the air heavy as mist.

***

In Aunt Alice”s house:

“Bless this kitchen

and season it with love” the little plaque

says propped in the corner

right behind a scrawled note: “put

bag of fertilizer in garage” she left

to remind herself.

“The memory”s

the second thing to go, you know,”

she said.

***