Poem Rocket
Allen Ginsburg
Be a Star-Screwer!
Gregory Corso
Old moon my eyes are new moon with human footprint
no longer Romeo Sadface in drunken river Loony Pierre eyebrow,
goof moon
O possible moon in Heaven we get to first of ageless constellations
of names
as God is possible as All is possible so we'll reach another life.
Moon politicians earth weeping and warring in eternity
tho not one star disturbed by screaming madmen from Hollywood
oil tycoons from Romania making secret deals with flabby green
Plutonians --
slave camps on Saturn Cuban revolutions on Mars?
Old life and new side by side, will Catholic church find Christ on
Jupiter
Mohammed rave in Uranus will Buddha be acceptable on the
stolid planets
or will we find Zoroastrian temples flowering on Neptune?
What monstrous new ecclesiastical designs on the entire universe
unfold in the dying Pope's brain?
Scientists alone is true poet he gives us the moon
he promises the stars he'll make us a new universe if it comes to
that
O Einstein I should have sent you my flaming mss.
O Einstein I should have pilgrimaged to your white hair!
O fellow travelers I write you a poem in Amsterdam in the Cosmos
where Spinoza ground his magic lenses long ago
I write you a poem long ago
already my feet are washed in death
Here I am naked without identity
with no more body than the fine black tracery of pen mark on soft
paper
as star talks to star multiple beams of sunlight all the same myriad
thought
in one fold of the universe where Whitman was
and Blake and Shelley saw Milton dwelling as in a starry temple
brooding in his blindness seeing all --
Now at last I can speak to you beloved brothers of an unknown
moon
real Yonus squatting in whatever form amidst Plutonic Vapors of
Eternity
I am another Star.
Will you eat my poems or read them
or gaze with aluminum blind plates on sunless pages?
do you dream or translate & accept data with indifferent droopings
of antennae?
do I make sense to your flowery green receptor eyesockets? do you
have visions of God?
Which way will the sunflowers turn surrounded by millions of suns?
This is my rocket my personal rocket I send up my message Beyond
Someone to hear me there
My immortality
without steel or cobalt basalt or diamond gold or mercurial fire
without passports filing cabinets bits of paper warheads
without myself finally
pure thought
message all and everywhere the same
I send up my rocket to land on whatever planet awaits it
preferably religious sweet planets no money
fourth dimensional planets where Death shows movies
plants speak (courteously) of ancient physics and poetry itself is
manufactured by trees
the final Planet where the Great Brain of the Universe sits waiting
for a poem to land on his golden pocket
joining the other notes mash-notes love-sighs complaints-musical
shrieks of despair and the million unutterable thoughts
of frogs
I send you my rocket of amazing chemical
more than my hair my sperm or the cells of my body
the speeding thought that flies upwards with my desire as instanta-
neous as the universe and faster than light
and leave all other questions unfinished for the moment to turn
back to sleep in my dark bed on earth.
Close as I ever came to seeing things
The way the physicists say things really are
Was out on Sudbury Marsh one summer eve
When a silhouetted tree against the sun
Seemed at my sudden glance to be afire:
A black and boiling smoke made all its shape.
Binoculars resolved the enciphered sight
To make it clear the smoke was a cloud of gnats,
Their millions doing such a steady dance
As by the motion of the many made the one
Shape constant and kept it so in both the forms
I'd thought to see, the fire and the tree.
Strike through the mask? you find another mask,
Mirroring mirrors by analogy
Make visible. I watched till the greater smoke
Or night engulfed the other, standing out
On the marsh amid a hundred hidden streams
Meandering down the Concord to the sea.
1
The white vapor trail
Scrawls slowly on the sky
Without any squeak.
2
Gilt and painted clouds
Float back through the shining air,
What, are these stars, too?
3
In the heavy world’s
Shadow, I watch the Sputnik
Coasting in sunlight.
4
Those crisp cucumbers
Not yet planted on Syrtis -
How I desire one!
5
In the fantastic
Seas of Venus, who would dare
To imagine gulls?
6
When Proxima sets
What constellations do they
Dream around our sun?