America
America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven 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 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
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 got 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 your emotional life be run
by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed be 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 an hour
and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions
of underprivileged 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 perticket 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 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old
man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me cry I once
saw Israel Amter plan. Everybody must have been a
spy.
America you don't really don't 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
Readers' Digest. Her wants our auto plants in
Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our
fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him make 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 impressions 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 shoulder to the wheel.
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