Allen Ginsberg

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!

..who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, and alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up 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 and the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion and the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising and the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality..

The Package is the Product, onomatopoeticized

I do not wish to escape to myself, I wish to escape from myself. I wish to obliterate my consciousness and my knowledge of independent existence, my guilts, my secretiveness.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

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

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

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 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?

America, Sacco & Vanzetti must not die.

Eat Eat said the sign

Slaves of Plastic! Leather-shoe chino-pants prisoners! Haircut junkies! Dacron-shiffers!

He saw that I was shy, and at the time I was still scared of feeling with another person, so he put his arm around me and pulled me and put my head on his breast and gave me love actually.

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking,
talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues
shout blind on the phonograph

It's too bad our problems are not solved more easily. But that is an old stupid complaint. Still the others are stupid. It is as if to save ourselves we had to save them too. That is why genius must suffer- it has to bear the burdens of the whole world. Our happiness and reality depends on the happiness and reality of others.

I want to know I want I want ridiculous to know to know WHAT rotting ginsberg I want to know what happens after I rot because I’m already rotting my hair’s falling out I’ve got a belly I’m sick of sex my ass drags in the universe I know too much and not enough I want to know what happens after I die well I’ll find out soon enough do I really need to know now? is that any use at all use use use death death death death death god god god god god god god the Lone Ranger the rhythm of the typewriter