46 America poems

We were running out of breath, as we ran out to meet ourselves. We were surfacing the edge of our ancestors’ fights, and ready to strike. It was difficult to lose days in the Indian bar if you were straight. Easy if you played pool and drank to remember to forget. We made plans to be professional — and did. And some of us could sing so we drummed a fire-lit pathway up to those starry stars. Sin was invented by the Christians, as was the Devil, we sang. We were the heathens, but needed to be saved from them — thin chance. We knew we were all related in this story, a little gin will clarify the dark and make us all feel like dancing. We had something to do with the origins of blues and jazz I argued with a Pueblo as I filled the jukebox with dimes in June, forty years later and we still want justice. We are still America. We know the rumors of our demise. We spit them out. They die soon.

1 I am a great American I am almost nationalistic about it! I love America like a madness! But I am afraid to return to America I’m even afraid to go into the American Express— 2 They are frankensteining Christ in America in their Sunday campaigns They are putting the fear of Christ in America under their tents in their Sunday campaigns They are driving old ladies mad with Christ in America They are televising the gift of healing and the fear of hell in America under their tents in their Sunday campaigns They are leaving their tents and are bringing their Christ to the stadiums of America in their Sunday campaigns They are asking for a full house an all get out for their Christ in the stadiums of America They are getting them in their Sunday and Saturday campaigns They are asking them to come forward and fall on their knees because they are all guilty and they are coming forward in guilt and are falling on their knees weeping their guilt begging to be saved O Lord O Lord in their Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday campaigns 3 It is a time in which no man is extremely wondrous It is a time in which rock stupidity outsteps the 5th Column as the sole enemy in America It is a time in which ignorance is a good Ameri-cun ignorance is excused only where it is so it is not so in America Man is not guilty   Christ is not to be feared I am telling you the American Way is a hideous monster eating Christ   making Him into Oreos and Dr. Pepper the sacrament of its foul mouth I am telling you the devil is impersonating Christ in America America’s educators & preachers are the mental-dictators of false intelligence   they will not allow America to be smart they will only allow death to make America smart Educators & communicators are the lackeys of the American Way They enslave the minds of the young and the young are willing slaves (but not for long) because who is to doubt the American Way is not the way? The duty of these educators is no different than the duty of a factory foreman Replica production   make all the young think alike dress alike   believe alike   do alike Togetherness   this is the American Way The few great educators in America are weak & helpless They abide   and so uphold the American Way Wars have seen such men   they who despised things about them but did nothing   and they are the most dangerous Dangerous because their intelligence is not denied and so give faith to the young who rightfully believe in their intelligence Smoke this cigarette doctors smoke this cigarette and doctors know Educators know   but they dare not speak their know The victory that is man is made sad in this fix Youth can only know the victory of being born all else is stemmed   until death be the final victory and a merciful one at that If America falls it will be the blame of its educators preachers   communicators   alike America today is America’s greatest threat We are old when we are young America is always new   the world is always new The meaning of the world is birth not death Growth gone in the wrong direction The true direction grows ever young In this direction what grows grows old A strange mistake   a strange and sad mistake for it has grown into an old thing while all else around it is new Rockets will not make it any younger— And what made America decide to grow? I do not know   I can only hold it to the strangeness in man And America has grown into the American Way— To be young is to be ever purposeful   limitless To grow is to know limit   purposelessness Each age is a new age How outrageous it is that something old and sad from the pre-age incorporates each new age— Do I say the Declaration of Independence is old? Yes I say what was good for 1789, is not good for 1960 It was right and new to say all men were created equal because it was a light then But today it is tragic to say it today it should be fact— Man has been on earth a long time One would think with his mania for growth he would, by now, have outgrown such things as constitutions manifestos codes commandments that he could well live in the world without them and know instinctively how to live and be —for what is being but the facility to love? Was not that the true goal of growth, love? Was not that Christ? But man is strange and grows where he will and chalks it all up to Fate   whatever be— America rings with such strangeness It has grown into something strange and the American is good example of this mad growth The boy man   big baby meat as though the womb were turned backwards giving birth to an old man The victory that is man does not allow man to top off his empirical achievement with death The Aztecs did it by yanking out young hearts at the height of their power The Americans are doing it by feeding their young to the Way For it was not the Spaniard who killed the Aztec but the Aztec who killed the Aztec Rome is proof   Greece is proof   all history is proof Victory does not allow degeneracy It will not be the Communists will kill America no   but America itself— The American Way   that sad mad process is not run by any one man or organization It is a monster born of itself   existing of its self The men who are employed by this monster are employed unknowingly They reside in the higher echelons of intelligence They are the educators the psychiatrists the ministers the writers the politicians the communicators the rich the entertainment world And some follow and sing the Way because they sincerely believe it to be good And some believe it holy and become minutemen in it Some are in it simply to be in And most are in it for gold They do not see the Way as monster They see it as the “Good Life” What is the Way? The Way was born out of the American Dream a nightmare— The state of Americans today compared to the Americans of the 18th century proves the nightmare— Not Franklin not Jefferson who speaks for America today but strange red-necked men of industry and the goofs of show business Bizarre! Frightening! The Mickey Mouse sits on the throne and Hollywood has a vast supply— Could grammar school youth seriously look upon a picture of George Washington and “Herman Borst” the famous night club comedian together at Valley Forge? Old old and decadent   gone the dignity the American sun seems headed for the grave O that youth might raise it anew! The future depends solely on the young The future is the property of the young What the young know the future will know What they are and do the future will be and do What has been done must not be done again Will the American Way allow this? No. I see in every American Express and in every army center in Europe I see the same face the same sound of voice the same clothes the same walk I see mothers & fathers no difference among them Replicas They not only speak and walk and think alike they have the same face! What did this monstrous thing? What regiments a people so? How strange is nature’s play on America Surely were Lincoln alive today he could never be voted President   not with his looks— Indeed Americans are babies all in the embrace of Mama Way Did not Ike, when he visited the American Embassy in Paris a year ago, say to the staff—“Everything is fine, just drink Coca Cola, and everything will be all right.” This is true, and is on record Did not American advertising call for TOGETHERNESS? not orgiasticly like today’s call nor as means to stem violence This is true, and is on record. Are not the army centers in Europe ghettos? They are, and O how sad   how lost! The PX newsstands are filled with comic books The army movies are always Doris Day What makes a people huddle so? Why can’t they be universal? Who has smalled them so? This is serious! I do not mock or hate this I can only sense some mad vast conspiracy! Helplessness is all it is! They are caught   caught in the Way— And those who seek to get out of the Way can not The Beats are good example of this They forsake the Way’s habits and acquire for themselves their own habits And they become as distinct and regimented and lost as the main flow because the Way has many outlets like a snake of many tentacles— There is no getting out of the Way The only way out is the death of the Way And what will kill the Way but a new consciousness Something great and new and wonderful must happen to free man from this beast It is a beast we can not see or even understand For it be the condition of our minds God how close to science fiction it all seems! As if some power from another planet incorporated itself in the minds of us all It could well be! For as I live I swear America does not seem like America to me Americans are a great people I ask for some great and wondrous event that will free them from the Way and make them a glorious purposeful people once again I do not know if that event is due   deserved or even possible I can only hold that man is the victory of life And I hold firm to American man I see standing on the skin of the Way America   to be as proud and victorious as St. Michael on the neck of the fallen Lucifer—

After the Fourth of July On this night of the mid- summer festival of fire, where liquid explosives look like the arch and ache of the willow tree so near your grave, on this night of the awaiting mid- wife who lulled you in- to this world, the light all violet because the Earth and stars inclined toward each other, she also sleeps, she who was your first deliverer, guiding you out of your mother—her bluing skin no small sign of the future cyanosis of her spirit for no small journey was it to this country to bring you to birth in this torch song heat and an anthem of a free nation's conception of combustions: rosins, petroleum, tallow, arsenic and worse, as you, too, fell from the sky of her body with me a microscopic egg inside— half the composition that made up my own toss and tumble to this crash of ground I sit over and bless while you lie under, under the willow, under this world that no midwife nor wavelength can under- standably reach. So I stand in this over- determined fire forced out like bullets upon a target— the pulled trigger releasing the hammer that strikes the impacted mixture— hailstorm and hymn of memories. And the outstretched womb involutes and the abdominal wall tightens and inside all abandoned encasements the night over the day darkens.

In the American schoolyard where we lunged headfirst onto the rocky ground scrab- bling for a ball as if for love, the crossed chalk- line still electrified our tough boyish hearts, and no one much cared for such exotic gods as loomed up out of the Palatine Hills in the required guidebooks dumped in heaps behind our makeshift goal. We knew what we knew. Sweatstains darkened our blue school shirts while our fathers’ fighters strafed the mock- ups in the practice fields, never far enough from town it didn’t thunder all day through the blackened cottages’ stony stares locked up tight behind their shot bolts; nor through the evening, either, when drifting home, stripped to the waist, we’d dance feet-chalked across the marketplace like young, uneasy gods, a little drunk on our shame, our power.

A name only once crammed into the child's fitful memory in malnourished villages, vast deliriums like the galloping foothills of the Colorado: of Mohawks and the Chippewa, horsey penny-movies brought cheap at the tail of the war to Africa. Where indeed is the Mississippi panorama and the girl that played the piano and kept her hand on her heart as Flanagan drank a quart of moonshine before the eyes of the town's gentlemen? What happened to your locomotive in Winter, Walt, and my ride across the prairies in the trail of the stage-coach, the gold-rush and the Swanee River? Where did they bury Geronimo, heroic chieftain, lonely horseman of this apocalypse who led his tribesmen across deserts of cholla and emerald hills in pursuit of despoilers, half-starved immigrants from a despoiled Europe? What happened to Archibald's soul's harvest on this raw earth of raw hates? To those that have none a festival is preparing at graves' ends where the mockingbird's hymn closes evening of prayers and supplication as new winds blow from graves flowered in multi-colored cemeteries even where they say the races are intact.

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials, And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is, He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds Of the thick satin quilt of America And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain, or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade, And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night, It was not blood but money That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—, He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were Clogging up my heart— And so I perish happily, Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”— Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad Would never speak in rhymed couplets, And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes And I think, “I am asleep in America too, And I don’t know how to wake myself either,” And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life: “I was listening to the cries of the past, When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.” But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable Or what kind of nightmare it might be When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river Even while others are drowning underneath you And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters And yet it seems to be your own hand Which turns the volume higher?

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old, Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love, A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother, Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. America two dollars and twentyseven 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 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 your 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 jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions. I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged 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 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy. America you don’t really want to go to war. America its 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 make 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. Berkeley, January 17, 1956

God save America, My home, sweet home!

for Phil Young and my father Robert Hedge Coke; for Whitman and Hughes America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in. Sing back the moment you cherished breath. Sing you home into yourself and back to reason. Before America began to sing, I sung her to sleep, held her cradleboard, wept her into day. My song gave her creation, prepared her delivery, held her severed cord beautifully beaded. My song helped her stand, held her hand for first steps, nourished her very being, fed her, placed her three sisters strong. My song comforted her as she battled my reason broke my long-held footing sure, as any child might do. As she pushed herself away, forced me to remove myself, as I cried this country, my song grew roses in each tear’s fall. My blood-veined rivers, painted pipestone quarries circled canyons, while she made herself maiden fine. But here I am, here I am, here I remain high on each and every peak, carefully rumbling her great underbelly, prepared to pour forth singing— and sing again I will, as I have always done. Never silenced unless in the company of strangers, singing the stoic face, polite repose, polite while dancing deep inside, polite Mother of her world. Sister of myself. When my song sings aloud again. When I call her back to cradle. Call her to peer into waters, to behold herself in dark and light, day and night, call her to sing along, call her to mature, to envision— then, she will quake herself over. My song will make it so. When she grows far past her self-considered purpose, I will sing her back, sing her back. I will sing. Oh I will—I do. America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in.