HEY ALLEN GINSBERG WHERE HAVE YOU GONE AND WHAT WOULD YOU THINK OF MY DRUGS?

A mouse went to see his mother. When his car broke down he bought a bike. When the bike wore out he bought skates. When the skates wore down he ran. He ran until his sneakers wore through. Then he walked. He walked and walked, almost walked his feet through so he bought new ones. His mother was happy to see him and said, “what nice new feet you have on.” —paraphrase of a story in Mouse Tails by Arnold Lobel

hey, listen, a bad thing happened to
my friend’s marriage, can’t tell you
only can tell my own story which
so far isn’t so bad:

“Dad” and I stay married. so far.
so good. so so.

But it felt undoable. This lucky life
every day, every day. every. day.

(all the poetry books the goddamn same
until one guys gets up and stuns the audience)

Then, Joe Wenderoth, not by a long shot
sober says, I promised my wife I wouldn’t fuck
anyone, to no one in particular and reads a poem
about how Jesus has no penis.

Meanwhile, the psychiatrist, attractive in a fatherly
way, says libido question mark.

And your libido?
like a father, but not like mine, or my sons’—

“fix it.”

My friend’s almost written
a good novel by which I mean finished
which means I’d like to light myself
on fire, on fire
with envy, this isn’t “desire”
not what the Dr. meant
by libido?
                         I hope—

not, it’s just chemical:
             jealousy. boredom. lethargy.

Books with prominent seraphs: their feet feet feet I am
marching to the same be—

other

than the neuronic slave I thought anxiety made me
do it, made me get up and carry forth, sally
the children to school the poems dragged
by little hands on their little seraphs
to the page my marriage sustained, remaining
energy: project #1, project #2, broken
fixtures, summer plans, demand met, request
granted, bunny noodles with and without cheesy
at the same time, and the night time I insomnia
these hours penning invisible letters—

             till it stopped.

doc said: it’s a syndrome.       you’ve got it,
                                     classic.

it’s chemical,
mental

circuitry we’ve got a fix for this
classic, I’m saying I can

make it better.

Everything was the same, then,
but better.

At night I slept.
In the morning got up.

Kids to school, husband still a fool—
hardy spirit makes
me pick a monday morning fight, snipe! I’ll pay for that
later I’m still a pain in the
elbow from writing prose those shift+hold+letter,
I’m still me less sleepy, crazy, I suppose
less crazy-jealous just
ha-ha now at Jesus’ no penis his
amazed at the other poet’s kickass
friend’s novel I dream instead about
the government makes me put stickers
on my driver’s license of family members
who are Jews, and mine all are. Can they get us
all? I escape with a beautiful light-haired man,
blue-eyed day trader, gentile.

gentle, gentle, mind encased in its
blood-brain barrier from the harsh skull
sleep, sleep and sleepy wake and want
to sleep and sleep a steep dosage—

             “—chemical?”

in my dreams now every man’s mine, no-
problem, perhaps my mind’s a little plastic,
malleable, not so fatal now

the dose is engineered like that new genetic watercress
to turn from green to red when planted over buried
mines, nitrogen dioxide makes for early autumn
red marks the spot where I must
watch my step, up one half-step-dose specific—

             The psychiatrist’s lived in NY so long
             he’s of ambiguous religious—
             everyone’s Jewish sometimes—
             writes: “up the dosage.”

now,
when I’m late I just shrug
it’s my new improved style
missed the train? I tug
the two boys single file

the platform a safe aisle
between disasters, blithely
I step, step, step-lively
carefully, wisely.

I sing silly ditties
play I spy something pretty
grey-brown-metal-filthy
for a little city fun.

Just one way to enjoy life’s
trials, mile after mile, lucky
to have such dependable feet.

you see,
the rodents don’t frighten I’m
calm as can be expected to recover left to my
one devivces I was twice as fast getting everywhere but
where did that get me but there, that inevitable location
more waiting, the rats there scurry, scurry, a furry

till the next train comes

“up the dosage.”

Brown a first-cut brisket in hot Dutch oven
after dusting with paprika. Remove. Sauté
thickly sliced onions and add wine. (Sweet
is better, lasts forever, never need a new bottle).
Put the meat on onions, cover with tomato-sauce-
onion-soup-mix mixture, cover. Back in a low
oven many hours.

The house smells like meat.
My hair smells like meat.

I’m a light unto the nation.

I’m trying
to get out of Egypt.
This year,
I’ll be better.

Joseph makes sense of the big man’s dreams, is saved,
saves his brothers those jealous boys who sold him
sold them all as slaves. Seven years of plenty. Seven
years of famine. He insomnias the nights counting up
grains, storing, planning, for what? They say throw
the small boys in the river (and mothers do so). Smite
the sons (and fathers do it.) God says take off your shoes,
this holy ground this pitiful, incombustible bush.

Is God chemical?
Enzymatic of our great need to chaos?

We’re unforgivable.
People of the salted
cheeks. Slap, turn, slap.

To be chosen
is to be
unforgiving/ unforgiv-
en, always chosen:
be better.

The Zuckers are a long line of obsessives.

This served them well in war time saw it
coming in time that unseeable thing they
hoarded they ferried, schemed, paced, got the hell
out figured out at night, insomnia, how to visa—

now, if it happens again, I won’t be
ready

I’m “better.”

The husband, a country club Jew from Denver, American
intelligentsia will have to carry me out and he’s no big
man and I’m not a small girl how fast

can the doctor switch the refugee gene back on?

How fast can I get worse? Smart again and worse?

Better to be alive than better.

             “…listen:” says the doctor, “sleeping isn’t death.
             All children unlearn this fear you got confused
             thought thinking was the same as spinning—”            
             Writes: “up the dosage.”
             don’t think. this refugee thing part
             of a syndrome fear of medication of being better…

Truth is, the anti-obsessional medicine works
wonders and drags me through life’s course…

About this time of year but years ago the priests spread
rumors of blood libel. Jews huddled in basements accused
of using Christian babes’ blood to make unleavened bread.

signs and wonders.
Christ rises.

Blood and body and babes.
Basements and briskets
and bread of afflictions.

I am calm now with my pounds of meat
made and frozen, my party schedule, my pills
of liberation, my gentile dream-boy, American
passport, my grey haired-psychiatrist, my blue-
eyed son, my brown-eyed son, my poems on their
pretty little fleet-feet, my big shot friends, olive-skinned
husband, my right elbow on fire: fire inside deep in the nerve
from too much carrying and word-mongering, smithery, bearing
and tensing choosing to be better to live this real life this better orbit this Jack

Kerouac never loved you like you wanted.
Blake.
Buddha.
Only Jesus and that’s his shtick,
he loves

everyone: smile! that’s it,
for the camera, blood pressure
normal, better, you’re a poster child
for signs and wonders what a little chemistry
does for the brain, blood, thought, hey,

did you know that Pharaoh actually wanted
to let them go? those multitude Jews
but God hardened Pharaoh’s heart against them [Jews]
to prove his prowess show his signs, wonders, outstretched
hand, until the dosage was a perfect ten and then
some, sea closing up around those little chariots
the men and horses while women on the far shore shook
their tambourines. And then what? Forty years to get the smell
of slavery off them.

Because of this. Bloody Nile. My story one of
the lucky. Escape hatch even from my own
obsess—

             I am here because of this.
Because of what my ancestors did for me to tell this
story of the outstretched hand what it did for me this
marked door and behind this red-marked door, around
a corner a blue-eyed boy waits to love me up with his
leavened bread, his slim body, professional detachment,
medical advancements, forgive me my father’s mother’s
father was the last in a long line of Rabbis—again! with this? This
rhapsody of affliction and escape, the mind bobbing along
in its watery safe. Be like everyone. Else. Indistinguishable but
better than the other nations but that’s what got us into this, Allen,
no one writes these long-ass poems anymore. Now we’re
better, all better. All Christian. Kind.

  — Rachel Zucker (b. 1971), American Poet, from Columbia Poetry Review #18, 2005.

AMERICA
by Allen Ginsberg

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven 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 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 your 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 jetplanes 1400 miles an hour
        and twentyfive-thousand 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 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real
        mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry
        I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must
        have been a spy.
America you don’t 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 make 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.

Berkeley, January 17, 1956

(From The Portable Beat Reader. Ann Charters, Ed. New York: Penguin Press. 1992. pp 74-77).

Okay. I admit it. I have a tool obsession. Bike tools, mechanics tools, hand tools, power tools, or measuring tools, I love them all.

Whenever I need to go out and buy a tool to fix something, my wife calls it “going to church”. I think she got that from the Sweet Potato Queens, or something like that, but it doesn’t matter. Buying a new tool is almost a religious experience. Or pornographic. I haven’t decided which yet.

This past weekend, while I was out riding with my clubmates from the Cutthroat Racing team, the sink in our laundry room exploded. Not literally, of course, but it did start spewing water. So, as I was debating whether or not I should actually attempt to climb Capitol Hill to check out a couple of members’ new house, my cell phone is ringing in my back pocket.

I get home and strip out the old faucet, then head off to “church” … the denomination this week was Home Depot, but sometimes I worship at the alter of Lowe’s, occasionally at the local Ace Hardware chapel … but my favorite is the Craftsman Tool Cathedral at Sears. Or at least it was until today.

Today, I got a book in the mail. A big book. A very big book called “The Big Book” from MSC Industrial Supply Co. I think this book has every tool known to man inside. They don’t carry Snap-On and they don’t carry Craftsman, but they’ve got just about everything else.

So I’m sitting here, leafing though this 4700 page catalogue and drooling. Do I want electronic dial calipers from Starrett or Brown & Sharpe? Or do I want a Vectrax CNC Mill?

Like I said, an almost religious experience. Or pornographic. But I still haven’t decided which yet, and the floor is getting wet from all the drool. Maybe I should get rubber floor mats to protect the carpet; MSC Industrial Supply carries them as well.

Then I start to think about tools in another sense. Tools as metaphor. The following quotes are good illustrations:

“The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools.”
  — Confucius

“Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.”
  — Julien S. Huxley