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 and 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 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.
ginsberg aside (he's the proto-proto-hippie), i love that cartoon, neodude. staring into the mouth of the octopus, looking through to infinity, experiencing true love exchange. hopefully, this is what will happen after faschist america (and the rest of the faschist world) fades away, to be replaced with: imaginenine.com -this is really worth looking into. it makes me think of the things that become apparent on lsd. things that are not apparent through conversation, yet are always there. this site (imaginenine.com) should definitely inform our future-the cartoon, however, is timeless! thanx.
Hmm interesting, not how I interpret it at all. I see it as the reduction of the "God-factor" (the human mind's ability to find immense meaning and worth in things) to a mere predatory mechanism designed to lure and entrap prey while the hunter feeds. This takes on an especially sinister overtone when the mother reveals herself as something other than human in the process of blowing her own child's mind with "forever" while she prepares to consume him. Things are never how they seem. There's always one more layer outside, or one more story on the inside. An endless fractal of meaning/no-meaning, it's turtles all the way down.
yes, i see your point. many lives have been forever diverted from "normal" and in a lot of cases, healthy interaction in life by dominant and possessive mothers (+distant & unemotive fathers). The most damage is done to an individual, in the first years of life, by mothers who see their children as their very own emotional appendages. The cartoon expresses this perfectly. I wander what kind of mother Ginsberg had?
snow snow i am a rock white and pale the baby smiles as it is swallowed by a whale in futurity do i forsee awful things as this happening to thee? i hope not, anymore
actually, it is about how to prepare babies for eating, to be precise. potentially, this could become a world-wide phenomenon, thus limiting overpopulation, globally.
Allen Ginsberg and William Borroughs went to town after a huge dose of exotic and erotic time they said "America is mine" and people began to frown ok, they said let's reincarnate and have another round.
