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1. |
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“HUM BOM!”
Whom bomb?
We bomb’d them!
Whom Bomb?
We bomb’d them!
Whom Bomb?
We bomb’d them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb’d them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb you!
Whom bomb?
We bomb you!
Whom bomb?
You bomb you!
Whom bomb?
You bomb you!
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
What do we do?
Who do we bomb?
What do we do!
Who do we bomb?
What do we do?
You bomb! You bomb them!
What do we do?
You bomb! You bomb them!
What do we do?
We bomb! We bomb you!
What do we do?
You bomb! You bomb you!
Allen Ginsberg – May 1971 (Fall of America Poems 1965-1971, City Lights, SF, 1973)
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2. |
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“PENTAGON EXORCISM”
“No taxation without representation”
Who represents my body in Pentagon? Who spends
my spirit’s billions for war manufacture? Who
levies the majority to exult unwilling in Bomb
Roar? “Brainwash!” Mind-fear! Governor’s language!
“Military-Industrial-Complex!” President’s language!
Corporate voices jabber on electric networks building
body-pain, chemical ataxia, physical slavery
to diaphanoid Chinese Cosmic-eye Military Tyranny
movie hysteria—Pay my taxes? No Westmoreland wants
to be Devil, others die for his General Power
sustaining hurt millions in house security
tuning to images on TV’s separate universe where
peasant manhoods burn in black & white forest
villages—represented less than myself by Magic
Intelligence influence matter-scientists’ Rockefeller
bank telephone war investment Usury Agency
executives jetting from McDonnell Douglas to General Dynamics
over smog-shrouded metal-noised treeless cities
patrolled by radio fear with tear gas, businessman!
Go spend your bright billions for this suffering!
Pentagon wake from planet-sleep! Apokatastasis!
Spirit Spirit Dance Dance Spirit Spirit Dance!
Transform Pentagon skeleton to maiden-temple O Phantom
Guevara! Om Raksa Raksa Hu? Hu? Hu? Phat Svaha!
Anger Control your Self feared Chaos, suffocation
body-death in Capitols caved with stone radar sentinels!
Back! Back! Back! Central Mind-machine Pentagon reverse
consciousness! Hallucination manifest! A million Americas
gaze out of man-spirit’s naked Pentacle! Magnanimous
reaction to signal Peking, isolate Space-beings!
– Milan, September 29, 1967
Planet News: 1961-1967 (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)
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3. |
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“A PROPHECY”
O Future bards
chant from skull to heart to ass
as long as language lasts
Vocalize all chords
zap all consciousness
I sing out of mind jail
in New York State
without electricity
rain on the mountain
thought fills cities
I’ll leave my body
in a thin motel
my self escapes
through unborn ears
Not my language
but a voice
chanting in patterns
survives on earth
not history’s bones
but vocal tones
Dear breaths and eyes
shine in the skies
where rockets rise
to take me home
– May 1968
(Fall of America Poems: 1965-1971, City Lights, SF 1973)
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4. |
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BIXBY CANYON
Path crowded with thistle fern blue daisy,
glassy grass, pale morninglory
scattered on a granite hill
bells clanging under gray sea cliffs,
dry brackensprout seaweed-wreathed
where bee dies in sand hollows
ant-swarmed above
white froth-wave glassed bay surge
Ishvara-ripple on cave wall
sea birds
skating wind swell,
Amor Krishna Om Phat Svaha air rumble at
ocean-lip
Yesterday
Sand castles Neal, white plasm balls round
jellies—
Skeleton snaketubes & back
nostrils’ seaweed-tail dry-wrinkled
brown seabulb & rednailed
cactus blossom-petal tongues—
Brownpickle saltwater tomato ball
rubber tail Spaghettied
with leafmeat,
Mucus-softness crown’d Laurel thong-hat
Father Whale gunk transparent
yellowleaf egg-sac sandy
lotus-petal cast back to cold
watersurge.
Bouquet of old seaweed
on a striped blanket, kelp tentacle spread
round the prayer place
Hermes silver
firelight spread over wave sunglare—
The Cosmic Miasma Anxiety meditating nakedman
—Soft Bonepipe!”
Musical Sea-knee gristlebone rubber
burp footswat beard ball bounce
of homosexual Shlurp ocean hish
Sabahadabadie Sound-limit
to Evil—
Set limit, set limit, set limit to
oceansong?
Limit birdcries, limit the Limitless
in language? O Say
Can You See The Internationale
Mental Traveller Marseillaise
in waves of eye alteration Politics?
’Tis sweet Liberty I hymn in freeman’s sunlight
not limited to observe No Nakedness signs
in silent bud-crowded pathways, artforms
of flowers limitless Ignorance—
Wet seaweed blossoms froth left, sun breathing
giant mist under the bridge,
gray cliffs cloud-skin haloed
Yellow sunlight of Old
shining on mossledge, tide foam
lapped in harmless gold light—
O Eyeball Brightness shimmering! Father Circle
whence we have sprung, thru thy bright
Rainbow horn, Silence!
So sings the laborer under the rock bridge,
so pipes pray to the Avalanche.
– Big Sur, June 16, 1968 (grass)
Fall of America Poems: 1965-1971, City Lights, SF 1973
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5. |
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“DEAR QUEER BAR”
Dear Queer Bar, don’t dissolve like rainbow bubble dewdrop rose lightning- flash world
Stay o’er young men with charming sideburns delicate black sweaters and rum coats
jukebox lead thee chanting softly from the heart guitar chords burping through alcoholic Isis
sweet bodies stay, I’m alone blonde beard nod in my company
flesh is so soft and sweet bellies so white and tender
how can consumption, cancer, and 4am ddt disprove the tenderness of loneliness, longings, and solitary sighs?
sweet boys, never fade, god wants you, loves you
lights flash on polished balconies and gables “Time to go now!”
waitress and I sigh, glasses clink in hand, the music’s stopped
“I’m sorry, I’ll have to collect your drink in one minute”
Heavens, give me the perception to die happy
circa 1970 Previously unpublished
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6. |
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“HOLY GHOST ON THE NOD OVER THE BODY OF BLISS”
Is this the God of Gods, the one I heard about
in memorized language Universities murmur?
Dollar bills can buy it! the great substance
exchanges itself freely through all the world’s
poetry money, past and future currencies
issued & redeemed by the identical bank,
electric monopoly after monopoly owl-eyed
on every one of 90 billion dollarbills vibrating
to the pyramid-top in the United States of Heaven—
Aye aye Sir Owl Oh say can you see in the dark you
observe Minerva nerveless in Nirvana because
Zeus rides reindeer thru Bethlehem’s blue sky.
It’s Buddha sits in Mary’s belly waving Kuan
Yin’s white hand at the Yang-tze that Mao sees,
tongue of Kali licking Krishna’s soft blue lips.
Chango holds Shiva’s prick, Ouroboros eats th’cobalt bomb,
Parvati on YOD’s perfumèd knee cries Aum
& Santa Barbara rejoices in the alleyways of Brindaban
La illaha el (lill) Allah hu—Allah Akbar!
Goliath struck down by kidneystone, Golgothas grow old,
All these wonders are crowded in the Mind’s Eye
Superman & Batman race forward, Zarathustra on Coyote’s ass,
Lao-tze disappearing at the gate, God mocks God,
Job sits bewildered that Ramakrishna is Satan
and Bodhidharma forgot to bring Nothing.
December 1966
Planet News Poems: 1961-1967, City Lights, SF, 1968
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7. |
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“SONORA DESERT EDGE”
“Om Ah Hum Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hum”
—Drum H. from Gary S. from Tarthang Tulku
Brown stonepeaks rockstumps
cloudless sunlight
Saguaro green arms praying up
spine ribs risen
Woodpecker-holed
nose-pricked limbs
lifted salutation—
orange flower eyes lifted on
needly Ocotillo stalk
Jumping Cholla pistils closing pollened
eyebrow-vagina buds to the
poked pinkie—
Palo Verde smooth forked branch
above prickly-pear ears
Smoke plumed up white
from scratched desert plain,
chemical smoke, military copper
airplanes rotting,
4% Copper Smelter smog
—in wire cage, ivory hook-beaked
round black pupiled
Bald Eagle’s head, tailfeathers
hung below claw’d branch, symmetric
body plumes brown webbed like dollarbills,
insecticides sterilized many
adults
—green duck neck sheen spectral as
moon machines
Raven hopping curious black beaked
Coyote’s nose sensitive lifted to air
blinking eye sharp
as the rose bellied Cardinal’s ivory whistle
—tiny bright statues of Buddha
Standing,
blue desert valley haze—
cactus lessons in sentience,
Trees like mental carrots—Anaconda
smelters white plumesmoke in
San Manuel, or Phelps-Dodge
in Douglas?—
Yellow’d Creosote bushes in granular
dust, hills jeep tracked,
Prairie dogs stand quivering-spined in
cactus-shade. A museum,
minds in Ashramic City—tweetling
bird radios—Hopi Rain:
Allen Ginsberg - April 29, 1969
Fall of America Poems: 1965-1971, City Lights, SF 1973
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8. |
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“DEATH ON ALL FRONTS”
“The Planet Is Finished”
A new moon looks down on our sick sweet
planet
Orion’s chased the Immovable Bear halfway
across the sky
from winter to winter. I wake, earlier in bed, fly
corpses
cover gas lit sheets, my head aches, left temple
brain fibre throbbing for Death I Created on all
Fronts.
Poisoned rats in the Chickenhouse and myriad
lice
Sprayed with white arsenics filtering to the
brook, City Cockroaches
stomped on Country kitchen floors. No babies
for me.
Cut earth boys & girl hordes by half & breathe
free
say Revolutionary expert Computers:
Half the blue globe’s germ population’s more
than enough,
keep the cloudy lung from stinking pneumonia.
I called in Exterminator Who soaked the Wall
Floor with
bed–bug death–oil: Who’ll soak my brain with
death–oil?
I wake before dawn, dreading my wooden
possessions,
my gnostic books, my loud mouth, old loves
silent, charms
turned to image money, my body sexless fat,
Father dying,
Earth Cities poisoned at war, my art hopeless—
Mind fragmented—and still abstract—Pain in
left temple living death—
Allen Ginsberg - Cherry Valley, September 26, 1969
Fall of America Poems: 1965-1971, City Lights, 1973
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9. |
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“OVER DENVER AGAIN”
Gray clouds blot sunglare, mountains float west, plane
softly roaring over Denver—Neal dead a year—clean suburb yards,
fit boardinghouse for the homosexual messenger’s
alleyway Lila a decade back before the Atombomb.
Denver without Neal, eh? Denver with orange sunsets
& giant airplanes winging silvery to San Francisco—
watchtowers thru red cold planet light, when the Earth Angel’s dead
the dead material planet’ll revolve robotlike
& insects hop back and forth between metallic cities.
Allen Ginsberg - February 13, 1969
Fall of America Poems: 1965-1971, City Lights, SF, 1973
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10. |
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“GURU”
It is the moon that disappears
It is the stars that hide not I
It’s the City that vanishes, I stay
with my forgotten shoes,
my invisible stocking
It is the call of a bell
Allen Ginsberg - Primrose Hill, May 1965
Planet News: Poems 1961-1967. City Lights, SF 1968
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11. |
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“SEPTEMBER ON JESSORE ROAD”
“Millions of babies watching the skies
Bellies swollen, with big round eyes
On Jessore Road—long bamboo huts
Noplace to shit but sand channel ruts
Millions of fathers in rain
Millions of mothers in pain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go
One Million aunts are dying for bread
One Million uncles lamenting the dead
Grandfather millions homeless and sad
Grandmother millions silently mad
Millions of daughters walk in the mud
Millions of children wash in the flood
A Million girls vomit & groan
Millions of families hopeless alone
Millions of souls Nineteenseventyone
homeless on Jessore road under gray sun
A million are dead, the millions who can
Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan
Taxi September along Jessore Road
Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal loadp
ast watery fields thru rain flood ruts
Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts
Wet processions Families walk
Stunted boys big heads dont talk
Look bony skulls & silent round eyes
Starving black angels in human disguise
Mother squats weeping & points to her sons
Standing thin legged like elderly nuns
small bodied hands to their mouths in prayer
Five months small food since they settled there
on one floor mat with a small empty pot
Father lifts up his hands at their lot
Tears come to their mother’s eye
Pain makes mother Maya cry
Two children together in palmroof shade
Stare at me no word is said
Rice ration, lentils one time a week
Milk powder for warweary infants meek
No vegetable money or work for the man
Rice lasts four days eat while they can
Then children starve three days in a row
and vomit their next food unless they eat slow.
On Jessore road Mother wept at my knees
Bengali tongue cried mister Please
Identity card torn up on the floor
Husband still waits at the camp office door
Baby at play I was washing the flood
Now they won’t give us any more food
The pieces are here in my celluloid purse
Innocent baby play our death curse
Two policemen surrounded by thousands of boys
Crowded waiting their daily bread joys
Carry big whistles & long bamboo sticks
to whack them in line They play hungry tricks
Breaking the line and jumping in front
Into the circle sneaks one skinny runt
Two brothers dance forward on the mud stage
The guards blow their whistles & chase them in rage
Why are these infants massed in this place
Laughing in play & pushing for space
Why do they wait here so cheerful & dread
Why this is the House where they give children bread
The man in the bread door Cries & comes out
Thousands of boys & girls Take up his shout
Is it joy? is it prayer? “No more bread today”
Thousands of Children at once scream “Hooray!”
Run home to tents where elders await
Messenger children with bread from the state
No bread more today! & no place to squat
Painful baby, sick shit he has got.
Malnutrition skulls thousands for months
Dysentery drains bowels all at once
Nurse shows disease card Enterostrep
Suspension is wanting or else chlorostrep
Refugee camps in hospital shacks
Newborn lay naked on mothers’ thin laps
Monkeysized week-old Rheumatic babe eye
Gastroenteritis Blood Poison thousands must die
September Jessore Road rick
shaw50,000 souls in one camp I saw
Rows of bamboo huts in the flood
Open drains, & wet families waiting for food
Border trucks flooded, food cant get past,
American Angel machine please come fast!
Where is Ambassador Bunker today?
Are his Helios machinegunning children at play?
Where are the helicopters of U.S. AID?
Smuggling dope in Bangkok’s green shade.
Where is America’s Air Force of Light?
Bombing North Laos all day and all night?
Where are the President’s Armies of Gold?
Billionaire Navies merciful Bold?
Bringing us medicine food and relief?
Napalming North Vietnam and causing more grief?
Where are our tears? Who weeps for this pain?
Where can these families go in the rain?
Jessore Road’s children close their big eyes
Where will we sleep when Our Father dies?
Whom shall we pray to for rice and for care?
Who can bring bread to this shit flood foul’d lair?
Millions of children alone in the rain!
Millions of children weeping in pain!
Ring O ye tongues of the world for their woe
Ring out ye voices for Love we dont know
Ring out ye bells of electrical pain
Ring in the conscious American brain
How many children are we who are lost
Whose are these daughters we see turn to ghost?
What are our souls that we have lost care?
Ring out ye musics and weep if you dare—
Cries in the mud by the thatch’d house sand drain
Sleeps in huge pipes in the wet shit-field rain
waits by the pump well, Woe to the world!
whose children still starve in their mothers’ arms curled.
Is this what I did to myself in the past?
What shall I do Sunil Poet I asked?
Move on and leave them without any coins?
What should I care for the love of my loins?
What should we care for our cities and cars?
What shall we buy with our Food Stamps on Mars?
How many millions sit down in New York
& sup this night’s table on bone & roast pork?
How many million beer cans are tossed
in Oceans of Mother? How much does She cost?
Cigar gasolines and asphalt car dreams
Stinking the world and dimming star beams—
Finish the war in your breast with a sigh
Come taste the tears in your own Human eye
Pity us millions of phantoms you see
Starved in Samsara on planet TV
How many millions of children die more
before our Good Mothers perceive the Great Lord?
How many good fathers pay tax to rebuild
Armed forces that boast the children they’ve killed?
How many souls walk through Maya in pain
How many babes in illusory rain?
How many families hollow eyed lost?
How many grandmothers turning to ghost?
How many loves who never get bread?
How many Aunts with holes in their head?
How many sisters skulls on the ground?
How many grandfathers make no more sound?
How many fathers in woe
How many sons nowhere to go?
How many daughters nothing to eat?
How many uncles with swollen sick feet?
Millions of babies in pain
Millions of mothers in rain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of children nowhere to go”
Allen Ginsberg - New York, November 14–16, 1971
Fall of America Poems: 1956-1971 City Lights Books, SF 1973
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12. |
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“CREMATION PIECE (On Neal’s Ashes)”
The planet hanging
the air hanging
“And the Glory of the Lord”
“It's only words I know / that you'll
understand”
several battalions of U.S. troops
Princess Snowflower will steal over….
in Riverside
1920s
song
traveler passing through
Staring out the window tiny church
Proud lights
the air hanging
Communications
bombshells crash on flesh
Taxi-Harmonious Modernity grown rusty-old —
The prettiness of existence! To sit at the window
car crash
Princess Snowflower will
“Speak over the bullhorn to the
herdsmen –”
talking
If anyone had strength to hear
“Check into yourself that you are wrong —
You may be the Wrong”
newscaster
“And the Glory of the Lord”
a phantom skeleton with teeth, skull
resting on a pillow
calling your....
Modernity grown rusty-old —
The prettiness of existence
new consciousness
car crash
fulfilled
to spirit returned
at the window
moonlight sticks of tea
In a circle
And the planet hanging
and the air hanging
and the world released
desire fulfilled
history over
story told
karma resolved
and prayers complete
“And the Glory of the Lord”
and buses roaring thru the street
Delicate eyes that blinked blue Rockies all ash
nipples, Ribs I touched w/ my thumb are ash
mouth my tongue touched once or twice all ash
bony cheeks soft on my belly are cinder, ash
earlobes & eyelids, youthful cock tip, curly pubis
breast warmth, man palm, high school thigh,
baseball bicept arm, asshole anneal'd to silken skin
all ashes, all ashes again.
all ashes again
all ash all ashes again
all ash
Appearance unnecessary now.
Are you reincarnate? Can ya hear me talking?
If anyone had strength to hear the invisible,
drive thru Maya Wall
you had it—
What’re you now, Spirit?
That were body in spirit
by Railroad track
I'm a phantom skeleton with teeth, skull
resting on a pillow
calling your spirit
god echo consciousness
and the world released
desired fulfilled, your history over,
story told, Karma resolved
prayers complete
vision manifest, new consciousness fulfilled,
spirit returned in a circle, and the world left standing empty
destiny fallen on RR track
all ash
all ash
Delicate eyes
all ash
all ash
Allen Ginsberg - August 1968
Fall of America Poems: 1965-1971, City Lights, SF 1973
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13. |
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“PERTUSSIN”
Always Ether Comes
to dissuade the
Goat-like
Sensible—
or N2O recurring to
elicit ironic
suicidal pen marks—
Parallels: in Montmartre Rousseau
daubing or Rimbaud arriving,
the raw Aether
shines with Brahmanic cool moonshine
aftertaste, midnight Nostalgia.
Allen Ginsberg - June 28, 1968
Fall of America Poems: 1965-1971, City Lights, SF, 1973
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14. |
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“IRON HORSE”
The Universe is empty
The Universe is empty
“No time No time Sam Lewis—
Oh—No time nowCarolyn,
No time now, Neal.”
Na-mu sa-man-da mo-to-nan o-ha-ra-chi ko-to-sha so-no-nan to-ji-to en gya-gya gya-ki gya-ki un-nun shi-fu-ra shi-fu-ra ha-ra-shi-fu-ra ha-ra-chi-fu-ra chi-shu-sa chi-chu-sa shu-shi-ri shu-shi-ri so-ha-ja so-ba-ja se-chi-gya shi-ri-ei so-mo-ko
Morning, crossing New Mexico border
massive cliff waves
on earth mid-America—
hill north with yellow tipis trading post and gas stations rare
Indian center of America — Gallup ahead
I’d like to live here, a blessing
these cliffs under the shimmer-
ing consciousness of LSD.
Passing through the plain line level everywhere, fenced flat,
horizon gray fleeced with cloud haze
bringing blue where Gemini men walked in space that day—
Na-mu sa-man-da mo-to-nan o-ha-ra-chi ko-to-sha so-no-nan to-ji-to en gya-gya gya-ki gya-ki un-nun shi-fu-ra shi-fu-ra ha-ra-shi-fu-ra ha-ra-chi-fu-ra chi-shu-sa chi-chu-sa shu-shi-ri shu-shi-ri so-ha-ja so-ba-ja se-chi-gya shi-ri-ei so-mo-ko”
And ninety-nine soldiers piled on the train at Amarillo—
Hadn’t read the paper four weeks
training Air Force
Pneumohydraulics
—Ninety-nine soldiers entering the train
and all so friendly
Only a month
hair clipped & insulted
They weren’t too sad,
glad going to some electronics field near Chicago
—Been taking courses in Propaganda,
How not to believe what they were told
by the enemy,
Young fellas that some of them had long hair
before they came to the heated camp
friendly, over hamburgers
Volunteered
assignments behind the line of Great Machines
that drop Napalm,
milking
the Calf of Gold.
Three months from now
Vietnam, they said.
Walking the length of the train,
Lounge Car with Time Magazine
Amarillo Globe, US News & World Report
Reader’s Digest Coronet Universal Railroad Schedule,
everyone on the same track,
bound leatherette read on sofas,
America heartland passing flat
trees rising in night—
Dining Car — one lamb chop $2.75
Na-mu sa-man-da mo-to-nan o-ha-ra-chi ko-to-sha so-no-nan to-ji-to en gya-gya gya-ki gya-ki un-nun shi-fu-ra shi-fu-ra ha-ra-shi-fu-ra ha-ra-chi-fu-ra chi-shu-sa chi-chu-sa shu-shi-ri shu-shi-ri so-ha-ja so-ba-ja se-chi-gya shi-ri-ei so-mo-ko”
Allen Ginsberg - July 22–23, 1966
Iron Horse. City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1974.
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15. |
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“HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MOVIE?”
Old maple hairytrunks root asphalt grass marge, November branches rare leaved,
Giant woodlegged wiretowers’ threads stretch above pond woods highway, white sun fallen hills West.
Car rolling underpass, radio hornvoice “the sight of Bobby Seale bound & gagged at Trial” denied lawyer presum’d innocent?
MDA Love Drug Cure Junk Habit? Rochester Exit one mile flashing out Volkswagen window—
Blue sky fring’d with clouds’ whale-ghost-blue schools north drift—
High, high Manson sighed on Trial, how many folk in jail for grass Ask Congressman?
Highway Crash! Politics! Police! Dope! armed robbery Customary E. 10th street, no insurance possible.
—Brown deer tied neat footed dead eye horned across blue Car trunk, old folks Front seat, they’re gonna eat it!
Help! Hurrah! What’s Going on here? Samsara? Illusion? Reality?
What’re all these trailers row’d up hillside, more people? How can Lyca sleep?
Cows on Canandaigua fields lactate into rubber stainless steel plastic milk-house machinery vats ashine—
Revolutionary Suicide! Driving on Persian gasoline?
Kill Whale & ocean? Oh one American myself shits 1000 times more Chemical waste into freshwater & seas than any single Chinaman!
America Suicide Cure World Cancer! Myself included dependent on Chemicals, wheels, dollars,
metal Coke Cans Liquid propane batteries marijuana lettuce avocados cigarettes plastic pens & milkbottles—electric
in N.Y.C. heavy habit, cut airconditioners isolation from street nightmare smog heat study decentralized Power sources 10 years
not atomic thermopollutive monolith. Om. How many species poisoned biocided from Earth realms?
O bald Eagle & Blue Whale with giant piteous Cat Squeak—Oh Wailing whale ululating underocean’s sonic roar of Despair!
Sing thy Kingdom to Language deaf America! Scream thy black Cry thru Radio electric Aether—
Scream in Death America! Or did Captain Ahab not scream Curses as he hurled harpoon
into the body of the mother, great White Whale Nature Herself,
thrashing in intelligent agony innocent vast in the oil-can sick waters?
All Northvietnam bomb-Cratered ruined topsoil Laos in secrecy more bombs than many W W II’s!
Mekong swamp lethicided by Monsanto Pentagon Academy Death-brains!
What wisdom teaching this? What Mafia runs N.J.? What Mafia knew J. Edgar FBI?
What’s Schenley’s Whiskey trader Fleischmann’s Hoover Institute?
What opium’s passed thru CIA Agents’ airplane’s luggage in Saigon, Bangkok, Athens, Washington?
What narcotic agent’s not dependent on Shit for a living?
What Bank’s money created ex nihil serves orphan, widow, monk, philosopher?
or what Bank’s money serves real Estate Asphalt over widow’s garden? Serves old Nick in the Pentagon?
Old Indian prophecies believe Ghost Dance peace will Come restore prairie Buffalo or great White Father Honkie
be trampled to death in his dreams by returning herds’ thundering reincarnation!
Oh awful Man! What have we made the world! Oh man capitalist exploiter of Mother Planet!
Oh vain insect sized men with metal slaves by Great Lake Erie, tenderest Passaic & Hudson poisoned by dollars!
BID TAMPERING PROBED IN LACKAWANNA Buffalo News headline folded on rubber floor, car vibrating smooth to sun ruddy woods’ dusk quiet—
Radio hissing cough words dashboard noisemusic—Any minute Apocalypse Rock!
Brown Pelican eggs softened by DDT. Seal’s livers poisoned to Northman. Oceans Dead 2000 A.D.?
Television Citizen 6% Earths human Americans ingest half the planet’s raw matter as alchemized by Syracuse Gen. Electric Power brown robot palace near 8 Lane Thruway’s Exit before Ramada Inn.
HXL Trucks sleeping on brokenearthed embankment past Iron-strutted passages,
fields aglitter with damp metallic garbage under th’electricwire trestles—
And woods survive into another Thanksgiving’s brown sacred silence—
Lights on cars front Western Lane gray twilight falls on rolling robotland.
Allen Ginsberg - November 1970
Fall of America Poems: 1965-1971, City Lights Books, SF, 1973
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A Peter Hale & Jesse Goodman Production in Association with the Allen Ginsberg Estate presents Allen Ginsberg's The Fall of America Vol II
Musically Interpreting poems from Ginsberg’s The Fall of America: Poems of these States 1965-1971.
Mastering: Nathan Moody at Obsidian Sound.
Lacquering: Paul Gold
Unless otherwise noted, Archival poetry read by Allen Ginsberg, compiled by Barry Miles, 1971, Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Ginsberg Collection.
Poetry courtesy HarperCollins Publishers / City Lights Publishers.
All words by Allen Ginsberg. Allen’s musical works are published by May King Poetry Music, administered by Music of Virtual in North America & by BMG Rights Management for the Rest of the World.
“Ginsberg, in his new vision for poetry, believed that the events of his life, expressed honestly, reflected the visions of multitudes, and as The Fall of America and the entries on this release prove beyond any measure of doubt, he was accurate. He was the voice of millions.”
-Michael Schumacher
“Allen could often seamlessly mix the secular with the divine, the past to the future and enact transformation and liberation through poetry. It’s an honor to mouth these words with the shaping of music composed here” -Anne Waldman
“Well, here we are now dearest Allen, rallying and resisting, revolting and revealing, your “prophecy” in constant manifestation, fighting fascism as soldiers of peace, informed by your singing out from the ‘mind jail” -Thurston Moore
“Allen’s spirit of true freedom clearly resonates in his words & in the soul that he was" -Ai Weiwei
“I felt and visualized the history, weight, and hope of being in America in his voice” -Miho Hatori
“Wow! It’s just like when we used to perform together! It’s like the pieces were made for each other” -Philip Glass
Fall of America Poems published by City Lights Books in San Francisco, covers the years 1965-1971 when Allen is crisscrossing the country, exploring a system of composition by narrating into the portable reel to reel Uher that Bob Dylan had gifted him.
In 1965, Ginsberg began planning an ambitious project, a book of thematically connected poems, a collection that “discovered” America in poetry similar to the way Kerouac’s On the Road had explored the country in prose.
The Vietnam War would be a constant presence overhanging Ginsberg’s travel writings like a darkening shadow affecting daily life in the country. It would be a study of contrasts: natural beauty slammed up against an ugliness that rose out of the tensions of violence. The public’s polarized dialogue over Vietnam and, earlier in the decade, the civil rights movement, convinced Ginsberg that America was teetering on the precipice of a fall.
- Michael Schumacher, from introduction to The Fall of America Journals 1965-1971.
All proceeds benefit PEN America /
Pen.org.
