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 1935 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 our, auto plants in Siberia.
Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations. Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest.
That no good. 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?

so now you show me your bruises so i can 'ooh' and 'ah' at the display. maybe i'm supposed to make one of my famous jokes, that makes everything okay? or maybe i'm supposed to be the handsome prince, who rides up and unties your hands. or maybe i'm supposed to be the furrow-browed friend who think she understands.

[yeah, and i loved you first, but you know i would prefer if she didn't empty her syringes in your arm.]

<P>to-do list:

-bust through finals
-dye hair
-put some weight back on
-stop smoking

there is more, i'm just lacking the presence of mind at the moment.</P>

pain is temporary. pain is temporary. pain is temporary. pain is temporary.