“What came is gone forever every time”
“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”
“No more to say, and nothing to weep for”
“Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!”
“Burroughs a purest ignu his haircut is a cream his left finger pinkey chopped off for early ignu reasons metaphysical spells love spells with psychoanalysts
his very junkhood an accomplishment beyond a million dollars”
“Burroughs ... his very junkhood an accomplishment beyond a million dollars.”
“Naomi: ‘And when we die we become an onion, a cabbage, a carrot, or a squash, a vegetable.’ I come downtown from Columbia and agree. She reads the Bible, thinks beautiful thoughts all day.
‘Yesterday I saw God. What did he look like? Well, in the afternoon I climbed up a ladder—he has a cheap cabin in the country, like Monroe, N.Y. the chicken farms in the wood. He was a lonely old man with a white beard.
‘I cooked supper for him. I made him a nice supper—lentil soup, vegetables, bread & butter—miltz—he sat down at the table and ate, he was sad.
‘I told him, Look at all those fightings and killings down there, What’s the matter? Why don’t you put a stop to it?
‘I try, he said—That’s all he could do, he looked tired. He’s a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil soup.”
“Poet is Priest
Money has reckoned the soul of America
Congress broken thru to the precipice of Eternity
the president built a War machine which will vomit and rear Russia out of Kansas
The American Century betrayed by a mad Senate which no longer sleeps with its wife.
Franco has murdered Lorca the fairy son of Whitman
just as Maykovsky committed suicide to avoid Russia
Hart Crane distinguished Platonist committed suicide to cave in the wrong America
just as millions of tons of human wheat were burned in secret caverns under the White House
while India starved and screamed and ate mad dogs full of rain
and mountains of eggs were reduced to white powder in the halls of Congress
no godfearing man will walk there again because of the stink of the rotten eggs of America
and the Indians of Chiapas continue to gnaw their vitaminless tortillas
aborigines of Australia perhaps gibber in the eggless wilderness
and I rarely have an egg for breakfast tho my work requires infinite eggs to come to birth in Eternity
eggs should be eaten or given to their mothers
and the grief of the countless chickens of America is expressed in the screaming of her comedians over the radio”
“I am the defense early warning radar system
I see nothing but bombs”
“the day of the publication of the true literature of the American body will be day of Revolution
the revolution of the sexy lamb”
“Now is the time of prophecy without death as a consequence
the universe will ultimately disappear
Hollywood will rot on the windmills of Eternity
Hollywood whose movies stick in the throat of God
Yes Hollywood will get what it deserves
Time
Seepage of nerve-gas over the radio
History will make this poem prophetic and its awful silliness a hideous spiritual music
I have the moan of doves and the feather of ecstasy
Man cannot long endure the hunger of the cannibal abstract”
“- an ant's dream's
funnier than
ours
- he has more of them
faster and seems
to give less of
a shit -”
“Unspeakable King of the roads that are gone — Unintelligible Horse riding out of the
graveyard — Sunset spread over Cordillera and insect — Gnarl Moth —
Griever — Laugh with no mouth, Heart that never had flesh to die — Promise that was not made — Reliever, whose blood burns in a million animals wounded —
O Mercy, Destroyer of the World, O Mercy, Creator of Breasted Illusions, O Mercy,
cacophonous warmouthed doveling, Come”
“Love that bore me I bear back to my Origin with no loss, I float over the vomiter
thrilled with my deathlessness, thrilled with this endlessness I dice and bury,
come Poet shut up eat my word, and taste my mouth in your ear.”
“I don’t know how.” “You’ll find a way,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.” “You’ll figure something out.” “I’m all alone.” She”
“– Думаю, нужно быть писателем, когда в голове столько безумных идей и историй. А то лопнешь, если их не запишешь.”
“If only I had a decent sense of humor Ah, well. Where subtlety fails us we must simply make do with cream pies.”
“The stars in their infinite peace seemed to pour their healing light into me. I thought of captives in prison, the sick and the suffering from the beginning of time who had looked to these stars for strength. What was my little sorrow to the centuries of pain which those stars had watched? So near they seemed, so compassionate. My bitter hurt seemed to grow small and drop away. If I must go on alone, I should still have silence and the high stars to walk with me.”
“Moral posturing is part and parcel of temptation. It does not invite us directly to do evil - no, that would be far too blatant. It pretends to show us a better way, where we finally abandon our illusions and throw ourselves into the work of actually making the world a better place. It claims, moreover, to speak for true realism: What's real us what us right there in front of us - power and bread. By comparison, the things of God fade into unreality, into a secondary world that no one really needs. God is the issue: Is he real, reality itself, or isn't he? Is he good or do we have to invent the good ourselves?”
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