Ted Berrigan

She was pretty swacked by the time she Put the spaghetti & meatballs into the orgy pasta bowl—There was mixed salt & pepper in the “Tittie-tweak” pasta bowl—We drank some dago red from glazed girlie demi-tasse cups—after which we engaged in heterosexual intercourse, mutual masturbation, fellatio, & cunnilingus. For dessert we stared at a cupboard full of art critic friends, sgraffitoed into underglazes on vases. We did have a very nice time.

for George Schneeman New York’s lovely weather hurts my forehead in praise of thee the? white dead whose eyes know: what are they of the tiny cloud my brain: The City’s tough red buttons: O Mars, red, angry planet, candy bar, with sky on top, “why, it’s young Leander hurrying to his death” what? what time is it in New York            in these here alps City of lovely tender hate and beauty making beautiful old rhymes? I ran away from you when you needed something strong then I leand against the toilet bowl (ack) Malcolm X I love my brain it all mine now is saved not knowing that & that (happily) being that: “wee kill our selves to propagate our kinde” John Donne yes, that’s true the hair on yr nuts & my big blood-filled cock are a part in that too PART 2 Mister Robert Dylan doesn’t feel well today That’s bad This picture doesn’t show that It’s not bad, too it’s very ritzy in fact here I stand I can’t stand to be thing I don’t use                            atop the empire state building & so sauntered out that door That reminds me of the time I wrote that long piece about a gangster name of “Jr.” O Harry James! had eyes to wander but lacked tongue to praise so later peed under his art paused only to lay a sneeze on Jack Dempsey asleep with his favorite Horse That reminds me of I buzz on & off Miró pop in & out a Castro convertible minute by minute                                           GENEROSITY! Yes now that the seasons totter in their walk I do a lot of wondering about Life      in praise of ladies dead of & Time plaza(s), Bryant Park by the Public                     eye of brow Library, Smith Bros. black boxes, Times Square Pirogi Houses with long skinny rivers thru them they lead the weary away off! hey! I’m no sailor off a ship at sea   I’M HERE & “The living is easy” It’s “HIGH TIME” & I’m in shapes of shadow, they certainly can warm, can’t they? Have you ever seen one?                                                NO! of those long skinny Rivers So well hung, in New York City NO!          in fact I’m the Wonderer & as yr train goes by                               forgive me, René!              ‘just oncet’ I woke up in Heaven He woke, and wondered more, how many angels on this train huh?                      snore for there she lay on sheets that mock lust                  done that 7 times been caught and brought back to a peach nobody. To Continue: Ron Padgett & Ted Berrigan hates yr brain my dears amidst the many other little buzzes & like, Today, as Ron Padgett might say is “A tub of vodka” “in the morning” she might reply and that keeps it up past icy poles where angels beg fr doom then zip ping in-and-out, joining the army wondering about Life by the Public Library of Life No Greater Thrill! (I wonder) Now that the earth is changing I wonder what time it’s getting to be sitting on the New York Times Square that actually very ritzy, Lauren    it’s made of yellow wood or I don’t know something               maybe This man was my                       it’s been fluffed up friend He had a sense for the vast                               doesn’t he? Awake my Angel! give thyself to the lovely hours        Don’t cheat The victory is not always to the sweet. I mean that. Now this picture is pretty good here Though it once got demerits from the lunatic Arthur Cravan He wasn’t feeling good that day Maybe because he had nothing on paint-wise I mean PART 3 I wrote that about what is this empty room            without a heart now in three parts a white flower came home wet & drunk                2 Pepsis and smashed my fist thru her window in the nude As the hand zips you see Old Masters, you can see well hung in New York              they grow fast here Conflicting, yet purposeful yet with outcry vain! PART 4 Praising, that’s it! you string a sonnet around yr fat gut and falling on your knees you invent the shoe for a horse. It brings you luck while sleeping “You have it seems a workshop nature” Have you                                              “Good Lord!” Some folks is wood seen them?                                          Ron Padgett wd say amidst the many other little buzzes past the neon on & off night & day     STEAK SANDWICH Have you ever tried one Anne?          SURE! “I wonder what time ‘its’?” as I sit on this new Doctor NO             I only look at buildings they’re in as you and he, I mean he & you & I buzz past in yellow ties      I call that gold THE HOTEL BUCKINGHAM (facade) is black, and taller than last time is looming over lunch         naked        high time        poem       & I, equal in perfection & desire is looming         two eyes         over coffee-cup (white) nature and man:         both hell on poetry. Art is art and life is “A monograph on infidelity” Oh. Forgive me stench of sandwich O pneumonia in American Poetry Do we have time?                           well look at Burroughs 7 times been caught and brought back to Mars & eaten. “Art is art & Life is home,” Fairfield Porter said that turning himself in Tonight arrives again in red some go on            even in Colorado                                 on the run the forests shake meaning: coffee            the cheerfulness of this poor fellow is terrible, hidden in the fringes of the eyelids’ blue mysteries          (I’M THE SKY) The sky is bleeding now onto 57th Street of the 20th Century & HORN & HARDART’S Right here. That’s PART 5 I’m not some sailor off a ship at sea I’m the wanderer                                                                (age 4) & now everyone is dead sinking bewildered of hand, of foot, of lip nude, thinking laughter burnished brighter than hate Goodbye. André Breton said that what a shit! Now he’s gone! up bubbles all his amorous breath & Monograph on Infidelity entitled The Living Dream I never again played I dreamt that December 27th, 1965 all in the blazon of sweet beauty’s breast I mean           “a rose”           Do you understand that? Do you? The rock&roll songs of this earth commingling absolute joy AND incontrovertible joy of intelligence certainly can warm can’t they?        YES! and they do Keeping eternal whisperings around (Mr. MacAdams writes in the nude: no that’s not (we want to take the underground         me that: then zips in & revolution to Harvard!)                 out the boring taxis, re- fusing to join the army and yet this girl has                asleep “on the springs” so much grace                   of red GENEROSITY) I wonder! Were all their praises simply prophecies of this the time!           NO GREATER THRILL my friends But I quickly forget them, those other times, for what are they but parts in the silver lining of the tiny cloud my brain drifting up into smoke the city’s tough blue top: I think a picture always leads you gently to someone else Don’t you? like when you ask to leave the room & go to the moon.

What I’m trying to say is that if an experience is proposed to me—I don’t have any particular interest in it—Any more than anything else. I’m interested in anything. Like I could walk out the door right now and go some where else. I don’t have any center in that sense. If you’ll look in my palm you’ll see that my heart and my head line are the same and if you’ll look in your palm you’ll see that it’s different. My heart and my head feel exactly the same. Me, I like to lay around of a Sunday and drink beer. I don’t feel a necessity for being a mature person in this world. I mean all the grown-ups in the world, they’re just playing house, all poets know that. How does your head feel? How I feel is what I think. I look at you today, & I expect you to look the same tomorrow. If you’re having a nervous breakdown, I’m not going to be looking at you like you’re going to die, because I don’t think you are. If you’re a woman you put yourself somewhere near the beginning and then there’s this other place you put yourself in terms of everybody. “The great cosmetic strange- ness of the normal deep person.” Okay. Those were those people—and I kept telling myself, I have to be here, because I don’t have a country. How tight is the string? And what is on this particular segment of it? And the photographer, being black, and the writer, me, being white, fell out at this point. And he didn’t want to look at it—I mean it’s nothing, just some drunk Indians riding Jersey milk cows—but I wanted to see it, I mean it was right in front of my eyes and I wanted therefore to look at it. And death is not any great thing, it’s there or it’s not. I mean God is the progenitor of religious impetuousity in the human beast. And Davy Crockett is right on that—I mean he’s gonna shoot a bear, but he’s not gonna shoot a train, because the train is gonna run right over him. You can’t shoot the train. And I always thought there was another way to do that. And it is necessary to do that and we bear witness that it is necessary to do it. The only distinction between men and women is five million shits.

for Shelley Oh you, the sprightliest & most puggish, the brightest star Of all my lively loves, all Ladies, & to whom once I gave up My heart entire, thenceforth yours to keep forever Locked up in your own heart’s tiniest room, my best hope, or To throw away, carelessly, at your leisure, should that prove Your best pleasure, Who is that dumpy matron, decked out in worn & faded Shabby army fatigues which pooch out both before & behind, now screeching Scoring me painfully in philistine Commedia dell’arte farce, low summer fare Across a pedestrian Ferry’s stretch of water in some meshugganah Snug Harbor And once more, even, fiercely pecking at me in the cold drab Parish Hall of Manhattan’s Landmark Episcopal Church, where a once Avant-garde now Grade School Poetry Project continues to dwell, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bouwerie, whose Stones hold in tight grip one wooden leg & all of Peter Stuyvesant’s bones? Who is that midget-witch who preens & prances as she flaunts her lost wares, Otherwise hidden beneath some ancient boy’s flannel-shirt, its tail out & flapping, & who Is shrieking even now these mean words: “Hey     Ted!”     “Hey, you Fat God!” & called me, “Fickle!”         “Fickle!” & she points a long boney finger at me, & croons, gleefully. “Limbo!”     “That's where you really live!” & She is claiming to be you as she whispers, viciously, “Alone, & In Pain, In Limbo, is where you live     in your little cloud-9 home     Ted! Pitiful!” She has a small purse, & removing it from one of her shopping bags She brings out from inside that small purse, my withered heart; & lifting it high into the air over her head with her two hands, she turns it upside down unzips its fasteners, & shakes it out over the plywood floor, happily. “Empty,” she cries loudly, “just like I always knew it would be!” “Empty!” “Empty” “Empty” I watch her, and think, That’s not really you, up there, is it, Rose?     Rochelle?     Shelley? O, don’t be sad, little Rose! It’s still Your ribbon I wear, your favor tied to the grip of my lance, when I ride out to give battle, these golden days.

Nine stories high Second Avenue On the roof there’s a party All the friends are there watching By the light of the moon the blazing sun Go down over the side of the planet To light up the underside of Earth There are long bent telescopes for the friends To watch this through. The friends are all in shadow. I can see them from my bed inside my head. 44 years I’ve loved these dreams today. 17 years since I wrote for the first time a poem On my birthday, why did I wait so long? my land a good land its highways go to many good places where many good people were found; a home land, whose song comes up from the throat of a hummingbird & it ends where the sun goes to across the skies of blue. I live there with you.

For Jack Collom 10 Things I do Every Day play poker drink beer smoke pot jack off curse BY THE WATERS OF MANHATTAN flower positive & negative go home read   lunch   poems hunker down changes Life goes by quite merrily blue NO HELP WANTED Hunting For The Whale “and if the weather plays me fair I’m happy every day.” The white that dries clear the heart attack the congressional medal of honor A house in the country NOT ENOUGH