Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 17
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As to knowledge of death:
and life itself as without
consummation foreseeable
in ideal joy or passion
(have I exaggerated the
terror of catastrophe?
reality can be joy or terror—
and have I exaggerated the joy?):
life as vile, as painful,
as wretched (this pessimism
which was X’s jewel),
as grim, not merely bleak:
the grimness of chance. Or as
Carl wrote, after bughouse,
“How often have I
had occasion to see
existence display
the affectations
of a bloodthirsty
negro homosexual.”
December 1951
Walking home at night,
reaching my own block
I saw the Port Authority
Building hovering over
the old ghetto side
of the street I tenement
in company with obscure
Bartlebys and Judes,
cadaverous men,
shrouded men, soft white
fleshed failures creeping
in and out of rooms like
myself. Remembering
my attic, I reached
my hands to my head and hissed,
“Oh, God how horrible!”
New York, December 1951
I learned a world from each
one whom I loved;
so many worlds without
a Zodiac.
New York, December 1951
I made love to myself
in the mirror, kissing my own lips,
saying, “I love myself,
I love you more than anybody.”
New York, December 30, 1951
A Ghost May Come
Elements on my table—
the clock.
All life reduced to this—
its tick.
Dusty’s modern lamp,
all shape, space and curve.
Last attempts at speech.
And the carved
serpentine knife of Mexico,
with the childish
eagle head on the handle.
New York, December 30, 1951
I feel as if I am at a dead
end and so I am finished.
All spiritual facts I realize
are true but I never escape
the feeling of being closed in
and the sordidness of self,
the futility of all that I
have seen and done and said.
Maybe if I continued things
would please me more but now
I have no hope and I am tired.
New York, Early 1952
An Atypical Affair
—Long enough to remember the girl
who proposed love to me in the neon
light of the Park Avenue Drugstore
(while her girl friends walked
giggling in the night) who had
such eerie mental insight into my
coldness, coupled with what seemed
to me an untrustworthy character,
and who died a few months later,
perhaps a month after I ceased
thinking of her, of an unforeseen
brain malignancy. By hindsight,
I should have known that only such
a state of deathliness could bare
in a local girl such a luminous
candor. I wish I had been kinder.
This hindsight is the opposite,
after all, of believing that even
in the face of death man can be
no more than ordinary man.
New York, January 1952
345 W. 15th St.
I came home from the movies with nothing on my mind,
Trudging up 8th Avenue to 15th almost blind,
Waiting for a passenger ship to go to sea.
I live in a roominghouse attic near the Port Authority,
An enormous City warehouse slowly turning brown
Across from which old brownstones’ fire escapes hang down
On a street which should be Russia outside the Golden gates
Or back in the middle ages not in United States.
I thought of my home in the suburbs, my father who wanted me home,
My aunts in the asylum myself in Nome or Rome.
I opened the door downstairs & Creaked up the first flight.
A Puerto Rican in the front room was laughing in the night.
I saw from the second stairway the homosexual pair
That lived in different cubicles playing solitaire,
And I stopped on the third landing and said hello to Ned,
A crooked old man like Father Time who drank all night in bed.
I made it up to the attic room I paid $4.50 for.
There was a solitary cockroach on my door.
It passed me by. I entered. Nothing of much worth
Was hung up under the skylight. I saw what I had on earth.
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