The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

Once
I was a Romantic Egotist
whatever that ever meant
(something to do with imagining something, I think)
The King of the Nutshell Was I

For Bumblebee, from Eddie Yellow –

My girlfriend is by the shore, down by the bay, down by the shore, at the beach, life’s a beach and so am I, the great rocks of this planet ground down by water and time into all the sand in the universe, of which I am one of the number promised to Abraham on a mountain three thousand years ago according to a book everybody keeps talking about —

My girlfriend — my blackbird — my dark-haired girl, my quiet princess with flashing eyes and furtive smile — down down down

never again?

Never again to be Peapod? Or Sweetpea? Or Pie? Or Hippo? Or Baby? Babybaby, babybaby, come back, come back to me, oh, I would love to go to Atlantic City and put all my money on black and let it ride —

letting water wash over me —

staring out at the setting sun —

the rise and fall of alliterative verse —

Up and down — In and Out — Lion and Tiger — Which one doesn’t belong — I’ve been playing clever games for some some time now, almost almost ten thousand days —

Six hundred days with her. More. Give or take. Where does the time — where does — swift silent planet — The Wanderer — we thought we did not wander — we thought this was home — Home is where you go back to — Home is where the — home is your — Home Home and Homeless Drifting Oh Oh Oh to Be Prince Caspian — Shadows of Shadows the Darkness behind, the Light Before, Cold in sad darkness, cold in my own shadow —

Memory the Time Traveler — Thought & Memory fly out — fear for Thought but fear for Memory more — where are we going — my sad parents — unloved — unlorn — injected all their love and forming into us young bairns and made us too old children and now secure in our own selves, self-loving and self-loved, independent ones on independence day, weaned, we see them as mere Givers — privileges but no duties — Even now, in this house, this strange suburban house — still — the limits of control — controlling — I am controlled —

There is a pill inside me. Does something to my dopamine. Little Latin lattices made up of the very small, so small it can slip between the gaps and make me think and feel — Oh Happy Fleshy Soft Robot — you think that is air you’re breathing? In a way yes, and in a way no, it is all electricity in your brainbox — Scream at the falseness

Another pill is missing. My nerves go haywire and soak up the serotinin — Joy is dying — or drowning — or gasping for air — little buds shriveled — instead a cold hard intensity — Truth instead of Beauty and the Beauty of Truth — Just live — decide not to decide? What about truth? What about guilt and innocence? What about what we’ve done? Still, alliterative. The Sweet Still Waters. Several sounds recurring there. This then is that. This is That. Cogito Ergo —

A hundred years pass in the blink of someone’s eye. A voice in the street. Bears in the woods. An angry bald man. A young woman aging. An old man and old woman, without their children, on a holiday, in a movie theater, narrating the movie to each other — they have become one and must speak — I was annoyed until I saw their wrinkles and their shriveled bodies and not having it wanted it oh baby oh baby Pie SweetPie oh baby baby baby baby what will I do what about my baby this is not writing who will pay me a dollar for my thoughts think remember think, member, member, is Life Memory Now? Ooohhh Memory, Ooh Memory, speak sing of the hero, sing of the women who waited spinning and unspinning and sing of the great unmovable bed, with one post a tree trunk extending ever and ever and deeper and deeper into the soil and foundation, its roots expanding and expanding and providing the anchor that had never existed for all those long years before the walls of Troy or lost at sea and now in her arms, a Penny a Penny a Penny for Thought, a Penny for Memory, Tree Bed, Sweet Bower, here in the heart of the cave-home we’ve built around our lives is the Living Tree we found once and though all the works of man decay our Eternal Bower will never pass away.

I love you I love you I love you forever. I love you I love you I love you forever.

America, by Allen Ginsburg

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America whewn will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trostkyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insance demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.

I’m addression you.
Are you goint to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an upublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfivethousand mental institions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light fo five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litanty in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they’re all different sexes
America I will you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket cost a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.
America you don’t really want to go to war.
America it’s them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureacracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.