Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I didn’t get much sleep last night thinking about underwear Have you ever stopped to consider underwear in the abstract When you really dig into it some shocking problems are raised Underwear is something we all have to deal with Everyone wears some kind of underwear The Pope wears underwear I hope The Governor of Louisiana wears underwear I saw him on TV He must have had tight underwear He squirmed a lot Underwear can really get you in a bind You have seen the underwear ads for men and women so alike but so different Women’s underwear holds things up Men’s underwear holds things down Underwear is one thing men and women have in common Underwear is all we have between us You have seen the three-color pictures with crotches encircled to show the areas of extra strength and three-way stretch promising full freedom of action Don’t be deceived It’s all based on the two-party system which doesn’t allow much freedom of choice the way things are set up America in its Underwear struggles thru the night Underwear controls everything in the end Take foundation garments for instance They are really fascist forms of underground government making people believe something but the truth telling you what you can or can’t do Did you ever try to get around a girdle Perhaps Non-Violent Action is the only answer Did Gandhi wear a girdle? Did Lady Macbeth wear a girdle? Was that why Macbeth murdered sleep? And that spot she was always rubbing— Was it really in her underwear? Modern anglosaxon ladies must have huge guilt complexes always washing and washing and washing Out damned spot Underwear with spots very suspicious Underwear with bulges very shocking Underwear on clothesline a great flag of freedom Someone has escaped his Underwear May be naked somewhere Help! But don’t worry Everybody’s still hung up in it There won’t be no real revolution And poetry still the underwear of the soul And underwear still covering a multitude of faults in the geological sense— strange sedimentary stones, inscrutable cracks! If I were you I’d keep aside an oversize pair of winter underwear Do not go naked into that good night And in the meantime keep calm and warm and dry No use stirring ourselves up prematurely ‘over Nothing’ Move forward with dignity hand in vest Don’t get emotional And death shall have no dominion There’s plenty of time my darling Are we not still young and easy Don’t shout

Sometime during eternity some guys show up and one of them who shows up real late is a kind of carpenter from some square-type place like Galilee and he starts wailing and claiming he is hip to who made heaven and earth and that the cat who really laid it on us is his Dad And moreover he adds It’s all writ down on some scroll-type parchments which some henchmen leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres a long time ago and which you won’t even find for a coupla thousand years or so or at least for nineteen hundred and fortyseven of them to be exact and even then nobody really believes them or me for that matter You’re hot they tell him And they cool him They stretch him on the Tree to cool And everybody after that is always making models of this Tree with Him hung up and always crooning His name and calling Him to come down and sit in on their combo as if he is the king cat who’s got to blow or they can’t quite make it Only he don’t come down from His Tree Him just hang there on His Tree looking real Petered out and real cool and also according to a roundup of late world news from the usual unreliable sources real dead

Retired ballerinas on winter afternoons walking their dogs in Central Park West (or their cats on leashes— the cats themselves old highwire artists) The ballerinas leap and pirouette through Columbus Circle while winos on park benches (laid back like drunken Goudonovs) hear the taxis trumpet together like horsemen of the apocalypse in the dusk of the gods It is the final witching hour when swains are full of swan songs And all return through the dark dusk to their bright cells in glass highrises or sit down to oval cigarettes and cakes in the Russian Tea Room or climb four flights to back rooms in Westside brownstones where faded playbill photos fall peeling from their frames like last year’s autumn leaves

Airport bus from JFK cruising through Queens passing huge endless cemetery by Long Island’s old expressway (once a dirt path for wheelless Indians) myriad small tombstones tilted up gesturing statues on parapets stone arms or wings upraised lost among illegible inscriptions And the setting yellow sun painting all of them on one side only with an ochre brush Rows and rows and rows and rows of small stone slabs tilted toward the sun forever While on the far horizon Mannahatta’s great stone slabs skyscraper tombs and parapets casting their own long black shadows over all these long-haired graves the final restless places of old-country potato farmers dustbin pawnbrokers dead dagos and Dublin bouncers tinsmiths and blacksmiths and roofers house painters and house carpenters cabinet makers and cigar makers garment workers and streetcar motormen railroad switchmen and signal salesmen swabbers and sweepers and swampers steam-fitters and key-punch operators ward heelers and labor organizers railroad dicks and smalltime mafiosi shopkeepers and saloon keepers and doormen icemen and middlemen and conmen housekeepers and housewives and dowagers French housemaids and Swedish cooks Brooklyn barmaids and Bronxville butlers opera singers and gandy dancers pitchers and catchers in the days of ragtime baseball poolroom hustlers and fight promoters Catholic sisters of charity parish priests and Irish cops Viennese doctors of delirium now all abandoned in eternity parcels in a dead-letter office inscrutable addresses on them beyond further deliverance in an America wheeling past them and disappearing oblivious into East River’s echoing tunnels down the great American drain

People getting divorced riding around with their clothes in the car and wondering what happened to everyone and everything including their other pair of shoes And if you spy one then who knows what happened to the other with tongue alack and years later not even knowing if the other ever found a mate without splitting the seams or remained intact unlaced and the sole ah the soul a curious conception hanging on somehow to walk again in the free air once the heel has been replaced

London crossfigured creeping with trams and the artists on sundays in the summer all ‘tracking Nature’ in the suburbs It could have been anyplace but it wasn’t It was London and when someone shouted over that they had got a model I ran out across the court but then when the model started taking off her clothes there was nothing underneath I mean to say she took off her shoes and found no feet took off her top and found no tit under it and I must say she did look a bit ASTOUNDED just standing there looking down at where her legs were not But so very carefully then she put her clothes back on and as soon as she was dressed again completely she was completely all right Do it again! cried someone rushing for his easel But she was afraid to and gave up modelling and forever after slept in her clothes

In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see the people of the world exactly at the moment when they first attained the title of ‘suffering humanity’ They writhe upon the page in a veritable rage of adversity Heaped up groaning with babies and bayonets under cement skies in an abstract landscape of blasted trees bent statues bats wings and beaks slippery gibbets cadavers and carnivorous cocks and all the final hollering monsters of the ‘imagination of disaster’ they are so bloody real it is as if they really still existed And they do Only the landscape is changed They still are ranged along the roads plagued by legionnaires false windmills and demented roosters They are the same people only further from home on freeways fifty lanes wide on a concrete continent spaced with bland billboards illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness The scene shows fewer tumbrils but more strung-out citizens in painted cars and they have strange license plates and engines that devour America

In Golden Gate Park that day a man and his wife were coming along thru the enormous meadow which was the meadow of the world He was wearing green suspenders and carrying an old beat-up flute in one hand while his wife had a bunch of grapes which she kept handing out individually to various squirrels as if each were a little joke And then the two of them came on thru the enormous meadow which was the meadow of the world and then at a very still spot where the trees dreamed and seemed to have been waiting thru all time for them they sat down together on the grass without looking at each other and ate oranges without looking at each other and put the peels in a basket which they seemed to have brought for that purpose without looking at each other And then he took his shirt and undershirt off but kept his hat on sideways and without saying anything fell asleep under it And his wife just sat there looking at the birds which flew about calling to each other in the stilly air as if they were questioning existence or trying to recall something forgotten But then finally she too lay down flat and just lay there looking up at nothing yet fingering the old flute which nobody played and finally looking over at him without any particular expression except a certain awful look of terrible depression

The dove-white gulls on the wet lawn in Washington Square in the early morning fog each a little ghost in the gloaming Souls transmigrated maybe from Hudson’s shrouded shores across all the silent years— Which one’s my maybe mafioso father in his so white suit and black shoes in his real estate office Forty-second Street or at the front table wherever he went— Which my dear lost mother with faded smile locked away from me in time— Which my big brother Charley selling switching-signals all his life on the New York Central— And which good guy brother Clem sweating in Sing Sing’s darkest offices deputy-warden thirty years watching executions in the wooden armchair (with leather straps and black hood) He too gone mad with it in the end— And which my nearest brother Harry still kindest and dearest in a far suburb— I see them now all turn to me at last gull-eyed in the white dawn about to call to me across the silent grass

I am waiting for my case to come up and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for someone to really discover America and wail and I am waiting for the discovery of a new symbolic western frontier and I am waiting for the American Eagle to really spread its wings and straighten up and fly right and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety to drop dead and I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy and I am waiting for the final withering away of all governments and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder I am waiting for the Second Coming and I am waiting for a religious revival to sweep thru the state of Arizona and I am waiting for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored and I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American and I am waiting to see God on television piped onto church altars if only they can find the right channel to tune in on and I am waiting for the Last Supper to be served again with a strange new appetizer and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder I am waiting for my number to be called and I am waiting for the Salvation Army to take over and I am waiting for the meek to be blessed and inherit the earth without taxes and I am waiting for forests and animals to reclaim the earth as theirs and I am waiting for a way to be devised to destroy all nationalisms without killing anybody and I am waiting for linnets and planets to fall like rain and I am waiting for lovers and weepers to lie down together again in a new rebirth of wonder I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed and I am anxiously waiting for the secret of eternal life to be discovered by an obscure general practitioner and I am waiting for the storms of life to be over and I am waiting to set sail for happiness and I am waiting for a reconstructed Mayflower to reach America with its picture story and tv rights sold in advance to the natives and I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in the Lost Continent in a new rebirth of wonder I am waiting for the day that maketh all things clear and I am awaiting retribution for what America did to Tom Sawyer and I am waiting for Alice in Wonderland to retransmit to me her total dream of innocence and I am waiting for Childe Roland to come to the final darkest tower and I am waiting for Aphrodite to grow live arms at a final disarmament conference in a new rebirth of wonder I am waiting to get some intimations of immortality by recollecting my early childhood and I am waiting for the green mornings to come again youth’s dumb green fields come back again and I am waiting for some strains of unpremeditated art to shake my typewriter and I am waiting to write the great indelible poem and I am waiting for the last long careless rapture and I am perpetually waiting for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn to catch each other up at last and embrace and I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder