Paris Tat *3rd installation* (Spring 2010)

(Here we go from the beginning...)

Olivier began in purple, a color that hints of metal, but a fantasy none the less. I’d chosen this color for the first structure being needled onto my rib cage, an iron tower that symbolizes the very city I was visiting. Paris, they say, is the city of love. An appropriate description, given the veil of romance that spreads over unevenly paved streets and huge wooden doorways and their palaces and train stations filled with art. It is a city ruled by beautiful things, and I was drunk with it even as I was lovesick for my home-island. The Eiffel Tower was an easy choice, the quintessential visual for this city spread across the Seine. The tower dates back to the 1889 World’s Fair, where it served as the entrance arch. Gustav Eiffel engineered this wonder, and built it to resist the wind, with its broad open spaces and artistic curved legs. He also contributed his name to it, the tallest building in the world (until the Chrysler in 1930, another marvel named after a man.) City dwellers were appalled, called it an eyesore, and indeed had every intention of taking it down as soon as the city took over ownership after twenty years. But! It’s 1,063 foot height proved functional for broadcasting, and during World War II it became a symbol of war heroics, and eventually of the city itself.

My first sighting of le Tour happened in the cab ride from the airport to my new home, on the second day of a snowstorm. Its romance is undeniable. Indeed, it seems to bestow the whole city with an aura of cinema worthy kisses and tearful goodbyes. As we drove over the snow-blanketed streets I was awestruck and silent, exhausted and nervous. I never thought I’d study abroad, and even a five-week winter session seemed like a long time away. I was crashing a University of Delaware Women’s Studies/Art History trip, so I knew no one. I also stuck out like a sore thumb, as my mother would say. I was very anxious about how this adventure would unfold. I couldn’t fall asleep that first night, and around 2am I crept out into the living room to stare at the snow falling onto the street below. Everything around me felt so unfamiliar, I was more homesick than I’d ever been. The next morning things looked less alien in the daylight, and later that day I looked up the address and directions to the tattoo shop. The journey there was my first independent outing, and my roommate Sarah and I got lost. It was only my first week in this new place, and I was slowly re-learning the language without harsh halts, and getting oriented on the un-gridded streets. Getting lost was usually acceptable barring time constraints. In fact, it was a welcome exploration. After all, it would take years to explore every narrow winding alley, to see all of the small museums and lovely facades and whimsical shops. Getting lost was a mini-adventure, and one more way to get a look at as many beautiful things as possible. Of course, like any city, there are borders to this overwhelming beauty.

Paris is a city with a rich interior and under-privileged exterior. The banlieus, or suburbs, are the neighborhoods surrounding the center city. These outskirts include urban housing developments, originally built in the 1970s as a place to live while you worked towards owning your own home. It was, indeed, an optimistic endeavor. They were supposed to be stepping-stones to upward mobility. Racial and ethnic tensions run high here, where residents feel abandoned and ostracized, even though many of the youth were born in country and are legal French citizens. These places are sites of high unemployment and violence, where each generation attempts to be heard by the government, and to be recognized as French instead of shooed away as immigrants. Riots have been breaking out here since the 1980s, and as recently as 2007 the media and government both seemed shocked that this sort of outburst was occurring, again. These latest riots were more organized than the car burning and rock throwing of the past, and this time bombs and guns were utilized to attack police. Close to 100 officers were wounded, retaliation for the death of a teenager they claim was involved in a police chase. Some estimate the injured count was much higher, not to mention citizens who were hurt or killed. The cause of this unrest has remained largely intact. The Arab and North African populations want to be treated like citizens, and to be given the opportunity to learn, succeed, and become French. There is an immense strain between them and the ‘other’ Parisians, whose whiteness is a privilege. The truth of this racial tension is deeply imbedded in a colonial history. Particularly in the country of Algeria, whose fight for independence included acts of violence with Paris’s city limits, France was not except from the European trend of colonization. This merging of cultures started out violently, and has continued to be complex and difficult. These darker citizens, kept on the outskirts of the city, have a conception of Americans that is largely un-friendly. When my roommate and I got off the number 11 train at the Pyrenees stop (about a 45 minute ride from the Louvre with multiple train transfers), we began to wander in the wrong direction, across the traffic circle from our destination. I had a large backpack, a laptop, an expensive winter coat, and a racial profile and overall demeanor that screamed, “I’m American and I’m lost.” Not smart. Not safe. Of course being from New York I was used to wandering around ghettos, and felt this was no different. I knew something was off, but I had no idea how afraid we should have been, how close in time and space we were to widespread public violence.

To make matters worse, when I returned the next day for my appointment, I ended up being tattooed completely alone. I assumed my 5pm appointment would give me plenty of time to make dinner by 7pm. However, the Parisian mindset is not one of efficiency. We did not start on time (he was eating), and I was on the table for three hours. When we hadn’t started by 5:45, my roommate raced home so as to be on time for dinner. It is very, very rude in France to be late and/or absent to meals without letting the host know. She went to represent both of us, to beg my forgiveness and try to excuse me. Silly me, I thought I’d be able to fit it all in. (I was over two hours late to dinner.)

Those three hours I spent on the table are crystal clear in my mind, the way some of the other day trips and paintings and wine bottles are not. I stood behind a screen and undressed, bra and shirt carelessly discarded on a folding chair. When he placed the stencil I panicked for just a moment. It looked big. It spanned from about 4 fingers below my armpit to just above level with my belly button, behind the curve of my breast but never quite reaching the flat part of my back. I was shocked at myself, standing alone and naked in this unfamiliar space, willing to remake my body this way. I took a deep breath with my eyes clenched shut and said, “Ok. It’s perfect.”

Paris Tat *2nd installation* (Spring 2010)

(More of this epic-ness. If you follow me then you recognize that the poem was my first poem ever, included here as primary evidence of my emotional experience. This is a lot in scene, which is some of my favorite stuff to write on. Scenes are key to making the reader feel like you are really including them. Again, if you wanna see the tat, just ask...)

That winter in Paris I fell in love with the night. That was when I felt the most at home, when New York felt close, when the city felt familiar. I wrote only one poem there, a verse for the city I missed.

I can't quite adjust
to streets that I can't map out on grid paper,
and this city without liquid borders.
The streets zig zag and curve
in an unfamiliar sprawl
as I walk with my headphones to steady my pace.
Sometimes when I'm just setting foot on the sidewalk,
a breeze seems to brush my cheek, & through the music I can hear
my city, and feel my own streets underfoot as I set out into the dusk.
Like all breezes & moments that matter
this feeling is fleeting, and as I cross the street
I remember that this place doesn't sing to me.
We can't even speak except in halting sentences
fraught with disconnects & lost in translations.
At night though, if I un-focus my eyes, the lights seem familiar.
And if I listen, underneath the rhythm of a language not my own
I can hear the lap of the East River.
And with one focusing breath
I can trace the skyline onto my forearm
where it'll stay for me the whole night.

That space between rivers,
my island of abbreviations
& stumbles & imagined constellations,
is more patient that I.
I wrote the skyline a post card.
It said: Thanks for waiting

But this is just a part of the story. Because my enchantment with Paris was undeniable. I loved having wine with lunch and being surrounded by things that were ancient. I loved the Seine, and the walkway at its banks. I loved the language, the challenge of communicating. I loved the lingerie, the beautiful women, the stick shift taxicabs. And I loved collecting souvenirs, post cards to be sent (and kept), and shoes, and shot glasses. And of course my own piece of Parisian art: the tattoo.

His work was steady and light. He paced himself in the Parisian way. Maybe because they are surrounded by art, eternal and lasting art, they see no reason to rush their own for such a silly thing as schedules or dinnertime. It seems ingrained in them, this aversion to rushing. I used my breath, gathering the pain of each touch of the needle with an inhale, and breathing it out as he paused or re-inked. Every once in awhile another artist would step behind the screen to see his progress. They all forgot I spoke French, and so I eavesdropped on these conversations amusedly. They talked about getting take-out, about the absurdity of an all color tattoo. They talked about how American girls are usually screamers, about various clients that they’d serviced that past week. They talked about my breasts, about sharing wine with me, about how shocked they were that I was taking this all so quietly, so strongly. I smiled through this secret knowledge, too focused on controlling my breath to think about what it meant to be alone and foreign and exposed in this way. After all, these guys were professionals. My breasts were unremarkable, my body just another canvas. Possibly. Or maybe I was exotic and tempting. Maybe he took his time because he enjoyed touching my skin this way, this intimate act of creating me. It was absolutely intimate, sharing this cramped space of pain and creation and color, for no less than three hours.

* * * * *

I needed a break between colors, so while he cleaned the blue from his needle I slipped off the table and walked back into a narrow hallway towards the bathroom. As I peed I tried not to notice how tender my skin had become, or my slightly lightheaded feeling. I knew enough about tattoos to know that my body was in defensive mode, and I was cruising on adrenaline. I also knew we were halfway done, maybe more. So I hurried, eager to ride out that high till the end. By this point in my tattooing history, I had begun to understand my body differently. It was a place that I could change, recreate in a new way. This high I was feeling was a reaction to pain, the pain you have to go through to make something permanent. Tattoos were never just pretty things to me, though I think they are beautiful. They are statements and stories, and for me they are an assertion that I am a storyteller, and that I will make you hear my voice. Tattoos should be sexy, adding secrets and color to the naked body. Revealing secrets in this way makes me vulnerable and powerful at the same time, a balance women must deal with on a daily basis. They are both a reveal and a command. My tattoos assert my control over my body and my stories. They declare that both are valuable, that both are worthy and beautiful.

When I walked back out into the main room I had to squint, let my eyes readjust to the bright light, and when they had I saw that Olivier was smiling at me. I must have been a sight, squinting and naked to the waist, my ribcage stained and red with irritation. “Ready?” he asked. “Oui, je suis prêt.” I said. He raised his eyebrows and nodded. When I lay back on the table he was ready with the last and final color: red. I took a deep breath and listened for the buzz of the needle. ‘Home stretch’ became my mantra. This color, bright like lipstick and ladybugs, was not for a famous landmark, or any building for that matter. It was for a bird.

To A Skylark (Shelly)

(We just watched Becoming Jane so I thought a little romantic piece would be in order. I like how this floats and soars, like the bird. These dudes got it, and women were just starting to be able to take a crack at it, and now I get to write. Romantic poetry is super lyrical, romantic *DUH* and pretty. Don't discount it...)

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of heaven
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,

Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see—we feel that it is there.

All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed.

What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

Like a high-born maiden
In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:

Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves:

Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.

Teach us, sprite or bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus hymeneal
Or triumphal chaunt
Matched with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then, as I am listening now

Paris Tat (Spring 2010)

(So this has been a huge project, I've been working on it since the winter. The whole piece is about getting tattooed in Paris, and about my Grandmother and her life in NYC in the 40's. There is a power point that goes with it, and I'll probably post some more sections of this. It inspired the ideas for my thesis, so thats cool. Basically I'm gonna amend traditional histories with women's stories, making it more true and more complete. So this is some of my memories, and what I can piece together of Elizabeth Ann's. The whole thing is very available upon request. I very wanna go back to Paris, and I very wanna get another tattoo. This is the first calendar year since 2005 that I won't get inked. Weird...)

Olivier maintained a steady if not frantic pace, and when le Tour was complete he rinsed the needle and dipped into a new color: blue. A blue close to that of a midday cloudless sky, a color that did not realistically represent the structure he began to needle onto my skin. This next image was just that; another structure, another landmark, although this one stood overlooking a city I was on more intimate terms with. Over the west side of Central Park, two pointed towers jut above the tops of the trees. Some mistake this for the site of John Lennon’s murder, but that was two blocks south on 72rd Street, at the Dakota. This building is called the San Remo, and it’s your average pre-war luxury apartment building. Asking prices range from 3-25 mill., and your neighbors could include Bono, Steven Spielberg, or Dustin Hoffman. It first entered in my city visuals archive on walks around the Jackie O reservoir, usually taken on slow afternoons with a partner to catch up, gossip, console and laugh with. It is a significant mark of the skyline, less flashy than Empire or Chrysler, endearing in its oft-mistaken old school identity. I began looking forward to seeing it swaddled in the multi-colored setting sunlight.

How it made its way into the fold of images designed to color my ribcage is slightly more complex than a pretty silhouette against uptown summer days. The West Side is my unfamiliar side of town, a whole north to south span that I’ve explored remarkably less in my Manhattan lifetime than the east side. The west side, slowly, became the mythical land of “her”, a woman I’d known all my life but never really seen. When I sat in my childhood church at her funeral, I realized how strange it was that I knew almost nothing of her life before the years I existed. She was my mother’s mother, taller than average and not prone to long speeches. I remember her in slippers and curlers, tending to the compost or doing the Sunday crossword. We never had heart to hearts in the kitchen. She never deigned to pass on sage wisdoms. She came back to New York only once when I lived here, in a dorm on 55th street. She told me then she’d lived on the west side, and that the subway had cost a nickel. I didn’t occur to me to ask her how it felt to leave rural Pennsylvania for the big apple. How it must have been hard being a beautiful single woman in a new urban environment. How she fell in love here. Why she left after four kids. None of this seemed relevant until she was gone, and I realized that her and I had shared this place I loved and I had wasted the benefit of learning from her lived experience. When she was gone she left behind a large mystery and a lot of money, and it was this fund my parents dipped into so I could have my Parisian adventure. So for this, my ninth tattoo, a small testament to two beautiful cities and a woman I loved but never truly knew, this west side landmark became the symbol of her New York, the New York we’d failed to share.

Howl Pt III (Ginsberg)

(Finish it out. Tomorrow, some prose...)

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of
the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Howl Pt II (Ginsberg)

(I'm not saying these guys are perfect. Especially the feminist in me has some issues. But they were breaking free of all sorts of constraints. It was the beginning of poetry as we know it today. Keep it rolling...)

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up
their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Chil-
dren screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old
men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Mo-
loch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jail-
house and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judg-
ment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned govern-
ments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running
money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast
is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrap-
ers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose
factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and
antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity
and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the
Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in
Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness
without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ec-
stasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light stream-
ing out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries!
blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses
granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios,
tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American
river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive
bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood!
Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells!
They bade farewell! They jumped off the roofl to solitude! waving! carrying
flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

Howl Pt 1 (Ginsberg)

(Ok so back to 60 years ago. This is setting the scene for the beats. There are three parts, I'll post it as such, plus a footnote. Just go with it. I know it seems long, but thats only b/c as I said, he's working with these long lines to imitate actual vocal rhythms, and the page can't support them so they're broken up and it looks much longer than it is. I promise. Also, if you go to poets.org you can listen to him recite this. I highly recommend that experience.)

For Carl Solomon

I 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,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan-
sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes
on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in
wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt
of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or
purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and
endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind
leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-
enness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring
winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of
mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy
Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain
all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat
through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the
crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue
to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire
escapes off windowsills of Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and
anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with
brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous
picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of
China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wonder-
ing where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward
lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah
because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels
who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural
ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse
of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
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,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but
the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in
fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts
with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre-
hensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze
of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and
undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and
wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before
the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for
committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and
intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof
waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and
screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of
Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of
public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom-
ever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind
a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to
pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew
of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the
womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass
and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom.
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a
package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued
along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with
a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of con-
sciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and
were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of
the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C.,
secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to
the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner
backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or
with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings
& especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys
too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a
sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams
& stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks
waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-
heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hud-
son under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy
bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions
and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to
build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the
tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in
the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming
of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside
of Time, & 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 & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regi-
ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis-
ing & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down
by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked
away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown
soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window,
jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the
street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph
records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whis-
key and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears
and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the each other's
hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you
had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver
& waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver
is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salva-
tion and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a
second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals
with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang
sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha
or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with
their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently
presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with
shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instanta-
neous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity
hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & am-
nesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table,
resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and
fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns
of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the
echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to
stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the
tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the last
telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper
rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the
total animal soup of time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash
of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the
vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images
juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual
images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of
consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens
Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before
you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet
confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his
naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here
what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow
of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love
into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered
the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies
good to eat a thousand years.