Allen Ginsberg
Pussy Blues
For Anne Waldman
You said you got to go home and feed your pussycat
When I ask you to stay here tonight where’s your pussy at?
Keep your pussy her try our hot cat food
Yeah lotsa cats around her and they all half nude
Going home alone do your pussy no good
Hey it’s the 4th of July say it’s your us birthday
Yeah stay out all night national holiday
Tiger on you fence don’t let him get away
Pussy pussy come home I’m gonna feed you fish
Yeah pussy pussy here come your big red dish
I’ll tickle your belly all the eats you wish
Hey there pussy cantcha catch my mouse
Hey please pussy play with my white mouse
You can stay all night you clean my house
Thank you to H. H. for writing & sending this poem
A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit-
man, 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 enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole fam-
ilies 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.
Will we stroll dreaming ofthe 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
America
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 when 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 Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane 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 addressing you.
Are you going 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 unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.America how can I write a holy litany 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 sell 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 costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 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're 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 out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy 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.
Berkely , January 17 , 1956
Howl and Other Poems - Allen Ginsberg - City Lights Books , San Fransisco , 1956 -
51st Printing : Sept. 1994 .
The End
I am I , old Father Fisheye that begat the ocean , the worm
at my own car , the serpent turning around a tree ,
I sit in the mind of the oak and hide in the rose , know if any
wake up , none but my death ,
come to me bodies , come to me prophecies , come all fore-
boding , come spirits and visions ,
I receive all , I'll die of cancer , I enter the coffin forever , I
close my eye , I disappear ,
I fall on myself in winter snow , I roll in a great wheel through
rain , I watch fuckers in convulsion ,
car screech , furies groaning their basso music , memory fading
in the brain , men imitating dogs ,
I delight in a woman's belly , youth stretching his breasts and
thighs to sex , the cock sprung inward
gassing its seed on the lips of Yin , the beasts dance in Siam ,
they sing opera in Moscow ,
my boys yearn at dusk on stoops , I enter New York , I play
my jazz on a Chicago Harpsichord ,
Love that bore me I bear back to my Origin with no loss , I
float over the vomiter
thrilled with my deathlessness , thrilled with this endlessness I
dice and bury ,
come Poet shut up eat my word , and taste my mouth in yout ear .
New York , 1960
Kaddish , City Lights Books , 1961
from Contemporary American Poetry - Edited by Donald Hall - 2nd - Penguin Books - 1972
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 langauge!
"Military-Industrial-Complex!" President's language!
Corporate voices jabber on electric networks building
body-pain, chemical ataxia, physical slavery
to diaphanoid Chinese Comic-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 Hùm Hùm Hùm Phat Svaha!
Anger Control your Self feared Chaos, suffocation
body-death in Capitols caved with stone radar sentinels!
Back! Back! Back! Central Min-machine Pentagon reverse
consciousness! Hallucination manifest! A million Americas
gaze out of man-spirit's naked Pentacle! Magnanimous
reaction to signal Peking, isolate Space-being!
Milan, September 29, 1967
Elegy Che Guevera
European Trib.boy's face photo'd eyes opened,
young feminine beardless radiant kid
lain back smiling looking upward
Calm as if ladies' lips were kissing invisible parts of the body
Aged reposeful angelic boy corpse,
perceptive Argentine Doctor, petulant Cuba Major
Pipe mouth's & faithfully keeping Diary
in mosquitos Amazonas
Sleep on a hill, dull Havana Throne renounced
More sexy your neck than sad aging necks or Johnson
De Gaulle, Kosygin,
or the bullet pierced neck of John Kennedy
Eyes more intelligent glanced up to death newspapers
than worried living Congress Cameras passing
dot screens into TV shade, glass-eyed
McNamara, Dulles in old life ...
Women in bowler hats sitting in mud outskirts 11,000 feet up in Heaven
with a headache in La Paz
selling black potatoes brought down from earth roof'd huts
on mountain-lipped Puno
would've adored your desire and kissed you Visage
new Christ
They'll raise up a red-bulb-eyed war-mask's
white tusks to scare soldier-ghosts
who shot thru your lungs
Incredible! one boy turned aside from operating room
or healing Pampas yellow eye
To face the stock rooms of Alcoa, Myriad Murderous
Board Directors of United Fruit
Smog-Manufacturing Trutees of Chicago U
Lawyer Phantoms ranged back to dead
John Foster Dulles' Sullivan and Cromwell lawfirm
Acheson's mustache, Truman's bony hat
To go mad and hide in jungle on mule & point rifle at OAS
at Rusk's egoic Courtesies, the metal deployements of Pentagon
derring-do Admen and dumbed intellectuals
from Time to CIA
One boy against the Stock Market all Wall Street ascream
since Norris wrote The pit
afraid of free dollars showering from the Observers' Balcony
scattered by laughing younger brothers,
Against the Tin Company , against Wire Services,
against infrared sensor Telepath Capitalism's
money-crazed scientists
against College boy millions watching Wichita Family Den TV
One radiant face driven mad with a rifle
Confronting the electric networks.
Venice, November 1967
The Fall of America, Poems of These States. City Lights Books , 1973 .
