AMERICA (Allen Ginsberg)

America I´ve given you all and now I´m nothing.
America two dollars ans twentyseven cents January
17, 1956
I can´t stand my own mind.
America when we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don´t feel good don´t bother me.
I don´t right my poem till I´m my right mind.
America when you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthly of your million of Trotskytes?
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 it´s 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 Tanger 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 stpo 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 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 see 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 adressing 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. Businness-
men are serious but me.
It occurs me that I am America.
I am talking to mysel 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 and unpublishable
private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour
and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of

underpriviliged who live in my flowerpots

under the lightof five hundred suns.

I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers

is the next to go.

My ambition is to be the 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 Com-

munist 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 sin-

cere 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´t really want to go to war.

America it´s then bad Russians.

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen.

And them Russians.

The Russia want 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 Readers´

Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.

Him big bureaucracy running our fllingsta-

tions.

That no good. Ugh. Him made Indians learn read.

Him need black niggers. Hah. Her make us

all work sixteen hours a day. Help.

America this is quite serious.

America is this correct?

I´d better get right down to the job.

It´s true I don´t want to join the Army on 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