i bite my tongue.









my life is in pieces.
faded colors talk of wisdom.
bold ones of passion and creation.
the gold speck you accidentally dropped on me
speaks loudly of Truth.

you didn't mean to hurt me,
perhaps i didn't listen well enough
repeated mistakes and very few breaks,
leave birds weary
from singing their songs.

what i told you last night,
i meant even if my breath smelled like whiskey.

i'm not too sure what i'm doing here anymore.

today's horoscope

you need to wake up from your reverie, especially if you've been lost in dreams about great adventures and faraway lands. there's nothing inherently wrong with these kinds of fantasies, but you have serious work to do now and cannot afford the luxury of drifting in the impractical realms of your imagination. but don't lose touch with your hopes; just express what you can in the real world, for that's where your vision must manifest.

upon realizing that the lady i was living with was crazy.
i moved out today without saying goodbye
leaving my key on top of the $133 -
the utility bill for which i paid for more than my own share.

now i'm spending time collecting myself again.
everything i own sitting in my car out front.
my mind clearer now than in the last month.
new directions for everything,
after traffic stalled us long enough to talk
about building futures out of collaborations.

i am hopeful.
more than.

america, by allen ginsberg

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, 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.
a 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 twentyfivethousand 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 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 russian.s them russians and them chinamen.
and them russians.
the russians 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's 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.