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AND OTHER POEMS

BY

ALLEN GINSBERG

‘ Unscrew the locks from the doors !

Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! ‘

CITY UGHTS BOOKS
San Francisco

© 1956, 1959 by Allen Ginsberg

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 56-8587
ISBN: 0-87286-017-5

First printing: October, 1956
Second printing: April, 1957
Third printing: May, 195 7
Fourth printing: October, 1957
Fifth printing: April, 1958
Sixth printing: September, 1958
Seventh printing: January, 1959
Eighth printing: September, 1959
Ninth printing: February, 1960
Tenth printing: January, 1961
Eleventh printing: September, 1962
Twelfth printing: July, 1963
Thirteenth printing: June, 1964
Fourteenth printing: April, 1965
Fifteenth printing: October, 1965
Sixteenth printing: May, 1966
Seventeenth printing: September, 1 966
Eighteenth printing: December, 1966
Ninteenth printing: June, 1967
Twentieth printing: June, 1968
Twenty-first printing: April, 1969
Twenty-second printing: November, 1969
Twenty-third printing: July, 1970
Twenty-fourth printing: May, 1971
Twenty-fifth printing: January, 1973

280,000 copies in print

City Lights Books are published at the City Lights

Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco,
94133

DEDICATION

To-

Jack Kerouac, new Buddha of American prose, who spit
forth intelligence into eleven books written in hall the number
of years (1951-1956)- On the Road, Visions of Neal, Dr Sax,
Springtime Mary, The Subterraneans, San Francisco Blues,
Some of the Dharma, Book of Dreams, Wake Up, Mexico City
Blues, and Visions of Gerard- creating a spontaneous bop
prosody and original classic literature. Several phrases and the
title of Howl are taken from him.

William Seward Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, an
endless novel which will drive everybody mad.

Neal Cassady, author of The First Third, an autobiog­
raphy (1949) which enlightened Buddha.

All these books are published in Heaven.

CONTENTS

HOWL FOR CARL SOLOMON

Introduction by William Carlos Williams 7
HOWL 9
FOOTNOTE TO HOWL 21
A SUPERMARKET IN CALIFORNIA 23
TRANSCRIPTION OF ORGAN MUSIC 25
SUNFLOWER SUTRA 28
AMERICA 31
IN THE BAGGAGE ROOM AT GREYHOUND 35

Earlier Poems :

AN ASPHODEL

SONG

WILD ORPHAN

IN BACK OF THE REAL

38
39
42
44

HOWL FOR CARL SOLOMON

When he was younger, and I was younger, I used to know
Allen Ginsberg, a young poet living in Paterson, New Jersey,
where he, son of a well-known poet, had been born and grew
up. He was physically slight of build and mentally much
disturbed by the life which he had encountered about him
during those first years after the first world war as it was exhi­
bited to him in and about New York City. He was always on
the point of ‘ going away ‘, where it didn’t seem to matter; he
disturbed me, I never thought he’d live to grow up and write
a book of poems. His ability to survive, travel, and go on
writing astonishes me. That he has gone on developing and
perfecting his art is no less amazing to me.
Now he turns up fifteen or twenty years later with an arresting
poem. Literally he has, from all the evidence, been through
hell. On the way he met a man named Carl Solomon with
whom he shared among the teeth and excrement of this life
something that cannot be described but in the words he has
used to describe it. It is a howl of defeat. Not defeat at all for
he has gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience,
a trivial experience. Everyone in this life is defeated but a man,
if he be a man, is not defeated.
It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body,
through the horrifying experiences described from life in these
pages. The wonder of the thing is not that he has survived
but that he, from the very depths, has found a fellow whom he
can love, a love he celebrates without looking aside in these
poems. Say what you will, he proves to us, in spite of the most
debasing experiences that life can offer a man, the spirit of
love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the
courage and the faith – and the art ! to persist.

7

8

It is the belief in the art of poetry that has gone hand in hand
with this man into his Golgotha, from that charnel house,
similar in every way, to that of the Jews in the past war. But
this is in our own country, our own fondest purlieus. We are
blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are
damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the
angels. This poet sees through and all around the horrors he
partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids
nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims
it as his own – and, we believe, laughs at it and has the
time and affrontery to love a fellow of his choice and record
that love in a well-made poem.
Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are gomg
through hell.

William Carlos Williams.

9

HOWL

for
Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for
an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking
in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating
across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw
Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs
illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating
Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing
obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money
in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo
with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley,
death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and
cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the
mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,

10

illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns,

wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of
teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon
and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn,
ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery
to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and
children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked
and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the
drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and
sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s,
listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to
Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the
stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out
of the moon,

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories
and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and
jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights
with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the
pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of
ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and
migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s
bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard
wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

11

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow
toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop
kaballa because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their
feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian
angels who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in
supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the
impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz
or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to
converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so
took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind
nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash
of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the F.B.I. in
beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark
skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic
tobacco haze of Capitalism,

who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square
weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos
wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten
Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and
trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in
policecars for conunitting no crime but their own wild
cooking pederasty and intoxication,

12

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the
roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists,
and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors,
caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the
grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen
freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccupped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob
behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blonde &
naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed
shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that
winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does
nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman’s loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a
sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the
bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and
ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt
and come eluding the last gyzyrn of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the
sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to
sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under
barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen
night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and
Adonis of Denver- joy to the memory of his innumerable
lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt
waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings

13

& especially secret gas-station solipisisms of johns, &
hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke
on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of
basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of
Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment
offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the
snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to
open to a room full of steamheat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of
the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon
& their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at
the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of
onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and
rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame
under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of
theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations
which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas
dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for

,Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads
every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up

14

and were forced to open antique stores where they thought
they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison
Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter
of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks
of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister
intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken
taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and
walked away unknown and forgotten into the .ghostly daze
of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one
free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway
window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes,
cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses
barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930’s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up
groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the
blast of colossal steamwhistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each
other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham
jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a
vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out
Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to
Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver &
brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find
out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each
other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul
illuminated its hair for a second,

15

who crashed through their minds in jail wa1tmg for impossible
criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality m
their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to
tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to
the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn
to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism &
were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and
subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of
the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of
suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin metrasol
electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy
pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong
table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears
and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of
the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering
with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the
midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life
a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out
of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 AM
and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the
last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire
hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but
a hopeful little bit of hallucination-

16

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re
really in the total animal soup of time –

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a
sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the
catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through
images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul
between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs
and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand
before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with
shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to
the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting
down here what might be left to say in time come after
death,

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn
shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s
naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani
saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their
own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

17

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls
and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable
dollars ! Children screaming under the stairways ! Boys
sobbing in armies ! Old men weeping in the parks !

Moloch ! Moloch ! Nightmare of Moloch ! Moloch the loveless !
Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison ! Moloch the crossbone
soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows ! Moloch whose
buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war!
Moloch the stunned governments !

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery ! Moloch whose blood is
running money ! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies !
Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo ! Moloch whose
ear is a smoking tomb !

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows ! Moloch whose
skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!
Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog !
Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities !

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone ! Moloch whose soul is
electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the
specter of genius ! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless
hydrogen ! Moloch whose name is the Mind !

Moloch in whom I sit lonely ! Moloch in whom I dream Angels !
Crazy in Moloch ! Cocksucker in Moloch ! Lacklove and
manless in Moloch !

Moloch who entered my soul early ! Moloch in whom I am a
consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me
out of my natural ecstasy ! Moloch whom I ab;mdon !
Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

18

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries!
spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks!
monstrous bombs !

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements,
trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists
and is everywhere about us !

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down
the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down
the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’
animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad
generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes!
the holy yells ! They bade farewell ! They jumped off the
roof! to solitude ! waving! carrying flowers ! Down to
the river ! i nto the street !

III

Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland
where you’re madder than I am

I’m with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange

I’m with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother

I’m with you in Rockland
where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries

I’m with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor

I’m with you in Rockland

19

where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I’m with you in Rockland

where your condition has become serious and is reported on
the radio

I’m with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms
of the senses

I’m with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of
Utica

I’m with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of
the Bronx

I’m with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the
game of the actual pingpong of the abyss

I’m with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent
and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed
madhouse

20

I’m with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its
body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I’m with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the
Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national
Golgotha

I’m with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect
your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I’m with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive-thousand mad comrades all
together singing the final stanzas of the lnternationale

I’m with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our
bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t
let us sleep

I’m with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own
souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop
angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary
walls collapse 0 skinny legions run outside 0 starry­
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here 0 victory
forget your underwear we’re free

I’m with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the
highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage
in the Western night

San Francisco 1955-56

21

FOOTNOTE TO HOWL

Holy ! Holy ! Holy ! Holy ! Holy ! Holy! Holy ! Holy ! Holy !
Holy ! Holy ! Holy ! Holy ! Holy ! Holy !

The world is holy ! The soul is holy ! The skin is holy ! The nose
is holy ! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy !

Everything is holy ! everybody’s holy ! everywhere is holy !
everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my
soul are holy!

The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the
hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy !

Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac
holy Huneke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown
buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human
angels!

Holy my mother in the insane asylum ! Holy the cocks of the
grandfathers of Kansas !

Holy the groaning saxophone ! Holy the bop apocalypse ! Holy the
jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace & junk & drums!

Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the
cafeterias filled with the millions ! Holy the mysterious
rivers of tears under the streets !

Holy the lone juggernaut ! Holy the vast lamb of the middle­
class ! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion ! Who digs
Los Angeles IS Los Angeles !

Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy
Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul !

Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space
holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy
the Angel in Moloch !

22

Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive
holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles
holy the eyeball holy the abyss !

Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies!
suffering! magnanimity!

Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the
soul!

23

A SUPERMARKET IN CALIFORNIA

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumera­
tions !

What peaches and what penumbras ! Whole families
shopping at night ! Aisles full of husbands ! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes ! – and you, Garcia Lorca,
what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the
grocery boys.

I heard you asking questions of each : Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.

We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?

{I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)

Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees
add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be
lonely.

24

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past
blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry
and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the
boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Berkeley 1955

25

TRANSCRIPTION OF ORGAN MUSIC

The flower in the glass peanut bottle formerly in the kitchen
crooked to take a place in the light,

the closet door opened, because I used it before, it kindly stayed
open waiting for me, its owner.

I began to feel my misery in pallet on floor, listening to musiC,
my misery, that’s why I want to sing.

The room closed down on me, I expected the presence of the
Creator, I saw my gray painted walls and ceiling, they
contained my room, they contained me

as the sky contained my garden,
I opened my door

The rambler vine climbed up the cottage post, the
leaves in the night still where the day had placed them, the animal
heads of the flowers where they had arisen

to think at the sun

Can I bring back the words? Will thought of transcription
haze my mental open eye?

The kindly search for growth, the gracious desire to exist of
the flowers, my near ecstasy at existing among them

The privilege to witness my existence- you too must seek
the sun . . .

My books piled up before me for my use
waiting in space where I placed them, they haven’t

disappeared, time’s left its remnants and qualities for me to use­
my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.

26

I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of
things, walked out to the garden crying.

Saw the red blossoms in the night light, sun’s gone, they had
all grown, in a moment, and were waiting stopped in time for the
day sun to come and give them … .

Flowers which as in a dream at sunset I watered faithfully not
knowing how much I loved them.

I am so lonely in my glory- except they too out there- I
looked up- those red bush blossoms beckoning and peering in the
window waiting in blind love, their leaves too have hope and are
upturned top flat to the sky to receive- all creation open to
receive- the flat earth itself.

The music descends, as does the tall bending stalk of the heavy
blossom, because it has to, to stay alive, to continue to the last
drop of joy.

The world kr.ows the love that’s in its breast as in the flower,
the suffering lonely world.

The Father is merciful.

The light socket is crudely attached to the ceiling, after the
house was built, to receive a plug which sticks in it alright, and
serves my phonograph now . . .

The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it
open, it has graciously stayed open.

The kitchen has no door, the hole there will admit me should
I wish to enter the kitchen.

I remember when I first got laid, H. P. graciously took my
cherry, I sat on the docks of Provincetown, age 23, joyful, elevated
in hope with the Father, the door to the womb was open to admit
me if I wished to enter.

27

There are unused electricity plugs all over my house if I ever
need them.

The kitchen window is open, to admit air …
The telephone- sad to relate- sits on the floor- I haven’t

the money to get it connected-

I want people to bow as they see me and say he is …