Allen Ginsberg - Kaddish and other Poems - (The Pocket Poets Series, #14/City Lights Books)

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 alsout,
listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the
phonograph
the rhythm the
rhythm - and your memory in my head three
years after - And read Adonais' last triumphant stanzas
aloud - wept, realizing how we suffer -
And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing,
remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Andthem, or the
Buddhist Book of Answers - and in my own imagination of
a withered leaf - at dawn -
Dreaming back thru life, Your Time - and mine accelerating
toward Apocalypse,
the final moment - the flower burning in the Day - and what
comes after,
looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city
a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and
a phantom Russia, or a crumpled bed that never
existed -
like a poem in the dark - escaped back to Oblivion -
No more to say, nothing to weep for but the Beings in the
Dream, trapped in its disappearance,
sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom,
worshipping each other,
worshipping the God included in it all - longing or inevita-
bility? - while it lasts, a Vision - Anything more?
(or)
..... Two years, after a trip to Mexico - bleak in the flat plain
near Brentwood, scrub brush and grass aound the unused RR
train track to the crazyhouse -
new brick 20 story central building - lost on the vast
lawns of madtown on Long Island - huge cities of the moon.
Asylum spreads out giant wings above the path to a
minute black hole - the door - entrance thru crotch -
I went in - smelt funny - the halls again - up elevator
- to a glass door on a Woman's Ward - to Naomi - Two
nurses buxom white - They led her out, Naomi stared - and
I gaspt - She'd had a stroke -
Too thin, shrunk on her bones - age come to Naomi -
now broken into white hair - loose dress on her skeleton -
face sunk, old! withered - cheek of crone -
One hand stiff - heaviness of forties & menopause re-
duced by one heart stroke, lame now - wrinkles - a scar on her
head, the lobotomy - ruin, the hand dripping downwards to
death -