Reality Sandwiches: 1953-1960 Read online

  REALITY SANDWICHES 1953 - 60

  ALLEN GINSBERG

  'Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy'

  Dedicated to

  the Pure Imaginary

  POET Gregory Corso

  Acknowledgement

  Anyone who asked for writings I sent them -- the Needle,

  Provincetown Review, Mattachine Review, Beatitude, Yugen,

  Evergreen Review, Swank, Partisan Review, White Dove,

  Chicago Review, i.e. Cambridge Review, New Directions 16,

  Grecourt Review, Combustion, Folio, Isis, Nomad, Venture,

  The Beat Scene, Rhinozerous, Hasty Papers, & Between Worlds.

  Contents:

  My Alba

  Sakyamuni Coming out from the Mountain

  The Green Automobile

  Havana

  Siesta in Xbalba

  On Burroughs' Work

  Love Poem on Theme By Whitman

  Over Kansas

  Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo

  Dream Record

  Blessed be the muses

  Fragment 1956

  A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley

  Sather Gate Illumination

  Scribble

  Afternoon Seattle

  Psalm III

  Tears

  Ready To Roll

  Wrote This Last Night

  Squeal

  American Change

  'Back on Times Square, Dreaming of Times Square'

  My Sad Self

  Funny Death

  Battleship Newsreel

  I Beg You Come Back & Be Cheerful

  To An Old Poet in Peru

  Aether

  MY ALBA

  Now that I've wasted

  five years in Manhattan

  life decaying

  talent a blank

  talking disconnected

  patient and mental

  sliderule and number

  machine on a desk

  autographed triplicate

  synopsis and taxes

  obedient prompt

  poorly paid

  stayed on the market

  youth of my twenties

  fainted in offices

  wept on typewriters

  deceived multitudes

  in vast conspiracies

  deodorant battleships

  serious business industry

  every six weeks whoever

  drank my blood bank

  innocent evil now

  part of my system

  five years unhappy labor

  22 to 27 working

  not a dime in the bank

  to show for it anyway

  dawn breaks it's only the sun

  the East smokes O my bedroom

  I am damned to Hell what

  alarmclock is ringing

  NY 1953

  SAKYAMUNI COMING OUT FROM THE MOUNTAIN

  Liang Kai, Southern Sung

  He drags his bare feet

  out of a cave

  under a tree,

  eyebrows

  grown long with weeping

  and hooknosed woe,

  in ragged soft robes

  wearing a fine beard,

  unhappy hands

  clasped to his naked breast --

  humility is beatness

  humility is beatness --

  faltering

  into the bushes by a stream,

  all things inanimate

  but his intelligence --

  stands upright there

  tho trembling:

  Arhat

  who sought Heaven

  under a mountain of stone,

  sat thinking

  till he realized

  the land of blessedness exists

  in the imagination --

  the flash come:

  empty mirror --

  how painful to be born again

  wearing a fine beard,

  reentering the world

  a bitter wreck of a sage:

  earth before him his only path.

  We can see his soul,

  he knows nothing

  like a god:

  shaken

  meek wretch --

  humility is beatness

  before the absolute World.

  NY Public Library 1953

  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 others 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 engine.

  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 others' fortunes:
>
  fames of supernatural illumination,

  bleak rainy gaps of time,

  great art learned in desolation

  and we beat apart after six decades. . . .

  and on an asphalt crossroad,

  deal with each other in princely

  gentleness once more, recalling

  famous dead talks of other cities.

  The windshield's full of tears,

  rain wets our naked breasts,

  we kneel together in the shade

  amid the traffic of night in paradise

  and now renew the solitary vow

  we made each other take

  in Texas, once:

  I can't inscribe here. . . .

  . . . . . .

  . . . . . .

  How many Saturday nights will be

  made drunken by this legend?

  How will young Denver come to mourn

  her forgotten sexual angel?

  How many boys will strike the black piano

  in imitation of the excess of a native saint?

  Or girls fall wanton under his spectre in the high

  schools of melancholy night?

  While all the time in Eternity

  in the wan light of this poem's radio

  we'll sit behind forgotten shades

  hearkening the lost jazz of all Saturdays.

  Neal, we'll be real heroes now

  in a war between our cocks and time:

  let's be the angels of the world's desire

  and take the world to bed with us before

  we die.

  Sleeping alone, or with companion,

  girl or fairy sheep or dream,

  I'll fail of lacklove, you, satiety:

  all men fall, our fathers fell before,

  but resurrecting that lost flesh

  is but a moment's work of mind:

  an ageless monument to love

  in the imagination:

  memorial built out of our own bodies

  consumed by the invisible poem --

  We'll shudder in Denver and endure

  though blood and wrinkles blind our eyes.

  So this Green Automobile:

  I give you in flight

  a present, a present

  from my imagination.

  We will go riding

  over the Rockies,

  we'll go on riding

  all night long until dawn,

  then back to your railroad, the SP

  your house and your children

  and broken leg destiny

  you'll ride down the plains

  in the morning: and back

  to my visions, my office

  and eastern apartment

  I'll return to New York.

  NY 1953

  HAVANA 1953

  I

  The night cafe -- 4AM

  Cuba Libre 20c:

  white tiled squares,

  triangular neon lights,

  long wooden bar on one side,

  a great delicatessen booth

  on the other facing the street.

  In the center

  among the great city midnight drinkers,

  by Aedama Palace

  on Gomez corner,

  white men and women

  with standing drums,

  mariachis, voices, guitars --

  drumming on tables,

  knives on bottles,

  banging on the floor

  and on each other,

  with wooden clacks,

  whistling, howling,

  fat women in strapless silk.

  Cop talking to the fat nosed girl

  in a flashy black dress.

  In walks a weird Cezanne

  vision of the nowhere hip Cuban:

  tall, thin, check grey suit,

  grey felt shoes,

  blaring gambler's hat,

  Cab Calloway pimp's mustachio

  -- it comes down to a point in the center --

  rushing up generations late talking Cuban,

  pointing a gold ringed finger

  up toward the yellowed ceiling,

  other cigarette hand pointing

  stiff-armed down at his side,

  effeminate: -- he sees the cop --

  they rush together -- they're embracing

  like long lost brothers --

  fatnose forgotten.

  Delicate chords

  from the negro guitarino

  -- singers at El Rancho Grande,

  drunken burlesque

  screams of agony,

  VIVA JALISCO!

  I eat a catfish sandwich

  with onions and red sauce

  20c.

  II

  A truly romantic spot,

  more guitars, Columbus Square

  across from Columbus Cathedral

  -- I'm in the Paris Restaurant

  adjacent, best in town,

  Cuba Libres 30c --

  weatherbeaten tropical antiquity,

  as if rock decayed,

  unlike the pure

  Chinese drummers of black stone

  whose polished harmony can still be heard

  (Procession of Musicians) at the Freer,

  this with its blunt cornucopias and horns

  of conquest made of stone --

  a great dumb rotting church.

  Night, lights from windows,

  high stone balconies

  on the antique square,

  green rooms

  paled by florescent houselighting,

  a modern convenience.

  I feel rotten.

  I would sit down with my servants and be dumb.

  I spent too much money.

  White electricity

  in the gaslamp fixtures of the alley.

  Bullet holes and nails in the stone wall.

  The worried headwaiter

  standing amid the potted palms in cans

  in the fifteen foot wooden door looking at me.

  Mariachi harmonica artists inside

  getting around to Banjo on My Knee yet.

  They dress in wornout sharpie clothes.

  Ancient streetlights down the narrow Calle I face,

  the arch, the square,

  palms, drunkenness, solitude;

  voices across the street,

  baby wail, girl's squeak,

  waiters nudging each other,

  grumble and cackle of young boys' laughter

  in streetcorner waits,

  perro barking off-stage,

  baby strangling again,

  banjo and harmonica,

  auto rattle and a cool breeze --

  Sudden paranoid notion the waiters are watching me:

  Well they might,

  four gathered in the doorway

  and I alone at a table

  on the patio in the dark

  observing the square, drunk.

  25c for them

  and I asked for "Jalisco" --

  at the end of the song

  oxcart rolls by

  obtruding its wheels

  o'er the music o' the night.

  SIESTA IN XBALBA and

  RETURN TO THE STATES

  dedicated to Karena Shields

  I.

  Late sun opening the book,

  blank page like light,

  invisible words unscrawled,

  impossible syntax

  of apocalypse --

  Uxmal: Noble Ruins

  No construction --

  let the mind fall down.

  -- One could pass valuable months

  and years perhaps a lifetime

  doing nothing but lying in a hammock

  reading prose with the white doves

  copulating underneath

  and monkeys barking in the interior

  of the mountain

  and I have succumbed to this

  temptation --

  'They go mad in the Selva --'

>   the madman read

  and laughed in his hammock

  eyes watching me:

  unease not of the jungle

  the poor dear,

  can tire one --

  all that mud

  and all those bugs . . .

  ugh. . . .

  Dreaming back I saw

  an eternal kodachrome

  souvenir of a gathering

  of souls at a party,

  crowded in an oval flash:

  cigarettes, suggestions,

  laughter in drunkenness,

  broken sweet conversation,

  acquaintance in the halls,

  faces posed together,

  stylized gestures,

  odd familiar visages

  and singular recognitions

  that registered indifferent

  greeting across time:

  Anson reading Horace

  with a rolling head,

  white-handed Hohnsbean

  camping gravely

  with an absent glance,

  bald Kingsland drinking

  out of a huge glass,

  Dusty in a party dress,

  Durgin in white shoes

  gesturing from a chair,

  Keck in a corner waiting

  for subterranean music,

  Helen Parker lifting

  her hands in surprise:

  all posturing in one frame,

  superficially gay

  or tragic as may be,

  illumed with the fatal

  character and intelligent

  actions of their lives.

  And I in a concrete room

  above the abandoned

  labyrinth of Palenque

  measuring my fate,

  wandering solitary in the wild

  -- blinking singleminded

  at a bleak idea --

  until exhausted with

  its action and contemplation

  my soul might shatter

  at one primal moment's

  sensation of the vast

  movement of divinity.

  As I leaned against a tree

  inside the forest

  expiring of self-begotten love,

  I looked up at the stars absently,

  as if looking for

  something else in the blue night

  through the boughs,

  and for a moment saw myself

  leaning against a tree . . .

  . . . back there the noise of a great party

  in the apartments of New York,

  half-created paintings on the walls, fame,

  cocksucking and tears,

  money and arguments of great affairs,

  the culture of my generation . . .

  my own crude night imaginings,

  my own crude soul notes taken down

  in moments of isolation, dreams,

  piercings, sequences of nocturnal thought

  and primitive illuminations