Allen Ginsberg

One does not know yet whether Christ was
God or the Devil -
Buddha is more reassuring.

It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

I am miserable now — not feeling unhappiness, just lack of life coming to me and coming out of me — resignation to getting nothing and seeking nothing, staying behind shell. The glare of unknown love, human, unhad by me, — the tenderness I never had. I don’t want to be just a nothing, a sick blank, withdrawal into myself forever. I just want something, beside the emptiness I’ve carried around in me all my life.

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

Thus, as the Buddha said to a lady who offered him a curse,the gift is returned to the giver when it is not accepted

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing...
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

I saw Bob Dylan a couple of weeks ago (this being, what, December 1994?) and he was saying… “Who owns all the money? Who owns the media?”. As he travels around the world, he notices that all the media change their story every week, and someone is directing that. And “Who owns all the money?”, he was saying. And it was like he knew that he had a great deal of power, to influence people’s psyches, or minds, or thinking, or psychology, or opinion-ation, and yet his power was miniscule, compared to the power of the moguls of the media. And in America it’s only 22 people who run… who own… 80 percent of the mass-media, so that the… it would be very difficult for a poem… for a poet… to overcome that barrage of bullshit.
On the other hand, poetry is the only place where you get an individual person telling his subjective truth, what he really thinks, as distinct from what he wants people to think he thinks (like a politician or someone preparing an editorial in a dignified newspaper). So if you need the historical truth of what people think inside, you have to follow Shelley (and his admonition is that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the race”) — or what William Carlos Williams said more acutely was, “The government is of words”.
After all, the people making political speeches, they’re writing prose, if not poetry, and they are trying to get a little flowery language in there, but the language is shifty, and the language is manipulative, and people who are advertising, or even doing ordinary mass-media, are still inhibited and can’t say what they really think, but the poet can say what he really thinks, authentically, and that’s the advantage, and it’s longer-lasting than the immediate radio-broadcast or television-broadcast, because a poem is like a radio that can broadcast continually, for thousands of years. And so, in the long run, it may have an ameliorating effect on the spirit.

with my fucking suave manners and knowitall, eyes, and mind full of fantasy - the Me! that horror that keeps me conscious, in this Hell of Birth & Death

May no Evil Eye peek thru window, keyhole or gunsight at his white haired face!

Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye — corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear

Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art.

...my man world will blow up

The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction

the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.

Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human — looks out of the heart
burning with purity — for the burden of life
is love,

but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.

No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love — be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love — cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:

the weight is too heavy — must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.

The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye — yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.

YOUR NAME IS WRITTEN IN HEAVEN

The whole blear world
of smoke and twisted steel
around my head in a railroad
car, and my mind wandering
past the rust into futurity:
I saw the sun go down
in a carnal and primeval
world, leaving darkness
to cover my railroad train
because the other side of the
world was waiting for dawn.