RIP Allen Ginsberg - June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997

In 1955, he "saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix..." and if he'd written nothing but "Howl" he'd be great, but "Howl" was just the most famous of many great poems he wrote. 

                  
                               America

                                 
      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 I 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.
      I 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 underpriviliged
      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 1835 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 Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
      The Russia 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 no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black
      n*****s.
      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.


                                                      -- Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg is buried inn Gomel Chesed Cemetery in Newark, New Jersey.