Jazz radio on a midnight kick,
Round about Midnight.

Sitting on the bed,
With a jazz type chick
Round about Midnight,

Piano laughter, in my ears,
Round about Midnight.

Stirring up laughter, dying tears,
Round about Midnight.

Soft blue voices, muted grins,
Excited voices, Father’s sins,
Round about Midnight.

Come on baby, take off your clothes,
Round about Midnight.

- from Kaufman’s Round about Midnight.

Morning Joy

Piano buttons, stitched on morning lights.
Jazz wakes with the day,
As I awaken with jazz, love lit the night.
Eyes appear and disappear,
To lead me once more, to a green moon.
Streets paved with opal sadness,
Lead me counterclockwise, to pockets of joy,
And jazz.

ON

On yardbird corners of embryonic hopes, drowned in a heroin tear.
On yardbird corners of parkerflights to sound filled pockets in space.
On neuro-corners of striped brains & desperate electro-surgeons.
On alcohol corners of pointless discussion & historical hangovers.
On television corners of cornflakes & rockwells impotent America.
On university corners of tailored intellect & greek letter openers.
On military corners of megathon deaths & universal anesthesia.
On religious corners of theological limericks and
On radio corners of century-long records & static events.
On advertising corners of filter-tipped ice-cream & instant instants
On teen-age corners of comic book seduction and corrupted guitars,
On political corners of wamted candidates & ritual lies.
On motion picture corners of lassie & other symbols.
On intellectual corners of conversational therapy & analyzed fear.
On newspaper corners of sexy headlines & scholarly comics.
On love divided corners of die now pay later mortuaries.
On philosophical corners of semantic desperadoes & idea-mongers.
On middle class corners of private school puberty & anatomical revolts
On ultra-real corners of love on abandoned roller-coasters
On lonely poet corners of low lying leaves & moist prophet eyes.

- On, by Bob Kaufman

    who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
    in policecars for committing no crime but their
    own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication

Howl – Ginsberg

       I

       I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
             madness, starving hysterical naked,
       dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
              looking for an angry fix,
       angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
              connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
              ery of night,
       who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
              up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
              cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
              contemplating jazz,

       who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
              saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
              ment roofs illuminated,
       who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
              hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
              among the scholars of war,
       who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
              publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
              skull,
       who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
              ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
              to the Terror through the wall,
       who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
              Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
       who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
              Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
              torsos night after night
       with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
              cohol and cock and endless balls,
       incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
              lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
              Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
              tionless world of Time between,
       Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
              dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
              storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
              blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
              vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
              lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
       who chained themselves to subways for the endless
              ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
              until the noise of wheels and children brought
              them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
              battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
              in the drear light of Zoo,
       who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s
              floated out and sat through the stale beer after
              noon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack
              of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
       who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
              pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
              lyn Bridge,
       lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
              down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
              off Empire State out of the moon,
       yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
              and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
              and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
       whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
              and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
              Synagogue cast on the pavement,
       who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
              trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
              City Hall,
       suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
              ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
              drawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,
       who wandered around and around at midnight in the
              railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
              leaving no broken hearts,
       who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
              through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
              father night,
       who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
              athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
              stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
       who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
              ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
              angels,
       who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
              gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
       who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
              homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
              light smalltown rain,
       who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
              seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
              brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
              and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
              to Africa,
       who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
              behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
              and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
              place Chicago,
       who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
              F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
              eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
              prehensible leaflets,
       who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
              the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
       who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
              Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
              of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
              down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
              wailed,
       who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
              and trembling before the machinery of other
              skeletons,
       who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
              in policecars for committing no crime but their
              own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
       who howled on their knees in the subway and were
              dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
              scripts,
       who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
              motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
       who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
              the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
              love,
       who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
              gardens and the grass of public parks and
              cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
              whomever come who may,
       who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
              with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
              when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
              them with a sword,
       who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
              the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
              the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
              and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
              sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
              threads of the craftsman’s loom,
       who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
              beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
              dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
              the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
              on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
              come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
       who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
              in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
              but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
              rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
              in the lake,
       who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
              stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
              poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
              to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
              in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’
              rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
              gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
              ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
              solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
       who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
              dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
              picked themselves up out of basements hung
              over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
              Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
              ment offices,
       who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
              the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
              East River to open to a room full of steamheat
              and opium,
       who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
              cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
              blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
              be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
       who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
              the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
              Bowery,
       who wept at the romance of the streets with their
              pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
       who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
              bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
              their lofts,
       who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
              with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
              by orange crates of theology,
       who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
              incantations which in the yellow morning were
              stanzas of gibberish,
       who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
              & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
              kingdom,
       who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
              an egg,
       who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
              for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
              fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
       who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
              fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
              stores where they thought they were growing
              old and cried,
       who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
              on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
              & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
              of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
              fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
              ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
              drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
       who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
              pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
              into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
              ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
       who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
              the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
              saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
              danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
              phonograph records of nostalgic European
              1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
              threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
              in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
              whistles,
       who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
              to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
              watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
       who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
              if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
              a vision to find out Eternity,
       who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
              came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
              watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
              Denver and finally went away to find out the
              Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
       who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
              for each other’s salvation and light and breasts,
              until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
       who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
              impossible criminals with golden heads and the
              charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
              blues to Alcatraz,
       who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
              Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
              or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
              Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
              daisychain or grave,
       who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
              notism & were left with their insanity & their
              hands & a hung jury,
       who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
              and subsequently presented themselves on the
              granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
              and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
              stantaneous lobotomy,
       and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
              Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
              therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
              amnesia,
       who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
              pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
       returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
              blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
              man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
              East,
       Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid
              halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
              ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
              dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
              mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
              moon,
       with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
              flung out of the tenement window, and the last
              door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
              slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
              nished room emptied down to the last piece of
              mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
              on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
              imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
              hallucination
       ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
              now you’re really in the total animal soup of
              time
       and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
              with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
              of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
              ing plane,
       who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
              through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
              archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
              and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
              and dash of consciousness together jumping
              with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
              Deus
       to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
              prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
              ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
              fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
              of thought in his naked and endless head,
       the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
              yet putting down here what might be left to say
              in time come after death,
       and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
              the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
              suffering of America’s naked mind for love into
              an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
              cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
       with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
              out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
              years.

                           II

       What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
              their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
              nation?
       Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
              tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
              stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
              weeping in the parks!
       Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
              loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
              judger of men!
       Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
              crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
              sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
              Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
              ned governments!
       Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
              blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
              are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
              bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
              tomb!
       Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
              Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
              streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
              tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
              smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
       Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
              whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
              whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
              whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
              Moloch whose name is the Mind!
       Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
              Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
              Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
       Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
              I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
              who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
              Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
              Light streaming out of the sky!
       Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
              skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
              industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
              houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
       They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
              ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
              Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
              us!
       Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
              gone down the American river!
       Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
              boatload of sensitive bullshit!
       Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
              gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
              spairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides!
              Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
              the rocks of Time!
       Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
              wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
              They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
              carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
              street!

                           III

       Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland
              where you’re madder than I am
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where you must feel very strange
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where you imitate the shade of my mother
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where you laugh at this invisible humor
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where we are great writers on the same dreadful
              typewriter
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where your condition has become serious and
              is reported on the radio
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
              the worms of the senses
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
              spinsters of Utica
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
              harpies of the Bronx
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re
              losing the game of the actual pingpong of the
              abyss
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
              is innocent and immortal it should never die
              ungodly in an armed madhouse
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where fifty more shocks will never return your
              soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
              cross in the void
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
              plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
              fascist national Golgotha
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where you will split the heavens of Long Island
              and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
              superhuman tomb
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
              rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where we hug and kiss the United States under
              our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
              night and won’t let us sleep
       I’m with you in Rockland
              where we wake up electrified out of the coma
              by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the
              roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the
              hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
              lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
              spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
              here O victory forget your underwear we’re
              free
       I’m with you in Rockland
              in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
              journey on the highway across America in tears
              to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Time is Eternity,
ultimate and immovable;
everyone’s an angel.

It’s Heaven’s mystery
of changing perfection :
absolute Eternity

changes! Cars are always
going down the street,
lamps go off and on.

It’s a great flat plain;
we can see everything
on top of a table.

Clams open on the table,
lambs are eaten by worms
on the plain. The motion

of change is beautiful,
as well as form called
in and out of being.
Next : to distinguish process
in its particularity with
an eye to the initiation

of gratifying new changes
desired in the real world.
Here we’re overwhelmed

with such unpleasant detail
we dream again of Heaven.
For the world is a mountain

of shit : if it’s going to
be moved at all, it’s got
to be taken by handfuls.

Man lives like the unhappy
whore on River Street who
in her Eternity gets only

a couple of bucks and a lot
of snide remarks in return
for seeking physical love

the best way she knows how,
never really heard of a glad
job or joyous marriage or

a difference in the heart :
or thinks it isn’t for her,
which is her worst misery.

Suggested Read : Allen Ginsberg 
P.S : Dangerous dossiers : exposing the secret war against America’s greatest authors
 

Cityscape and slums, dangerous traffic and trafficking, the national highway cuts into the narrow city streets. Every highway is a tributary for the pulsating city. When life in country roads gush into the gaping black hole, the city is caught unaware, the arterial streets get clogged, the traffic is jammed. Flyovers and subways are open heart surgeries on the city, they move the fat a little further but the the terrible sounds, vast ugliness and the sickening air remains. The smell of gasoline and smoke in the traffic blocks, vehicles going slow, the dust – traffic snarls pisses us off more than anything. We feel we don’t deserve this. We asked for a trip on the national highway at super speeds, here we are wasting time in a traffic muddle. Irony. The time of the day when traffic moves the slowest, rush hour.

Then it’s the mad rush to get our vehicle off the traffic block. Maneuvering, twisting the wheel, expletives like flying kisses. We shout – what that lady in the blue car is thinking she is doing in the traffic block; what are we doing? We wriggle out somehow and take a deep breath as if one helluva constipation is all over. The sad part of the bargain is that we come to the same place, the very next day and race around in a bloody maze.

Ha ! but the lure of the city, despite its cruel hand. There once was an army man who loved the smell of napalm in those humid Vietnam mornings, he used to wonder how he will survive after the war gets over. I cannot survive a day without the city, today I was bumper to bumper for two long hours. Ironically the road is called ‘the Bypass’. Tomorrow I’m going again – with dreary eyes, with nowhere else to go, like a loser, like a bit player in someone Else’s nightmare.

That tree said
I don’t like that white car under me,
it smells gasoline
That other tree next to it said
O you’re always complaining
you’re a neurotic
you can see by the way you’re bent over.

Allen Ginsberg

The Volvo journey from Bangalore to Trivandrum is something I really enjoy on the national highway, especially the movie they play in the bus. I get to hear the audience react to each scene and dialogue. I note down the stuff I would need to avoid when I make a movie (not now, but after selling all my dad’s property). The other day,(after several rounds of offerings in the local temple), its a girl (my lord) sitting next to me. *How stuff works : Girl in the next seat-start conversation-bus falls into ravine-LOST (second season)- DHKMN – found – final scene – you, baggy jeans,100 cc bike,Pooja Bhatt*. So I start the conversation in T minus three seconds.

She : “blah blah”
Me : “I started the conversation, so i should talk more”
She :”blah blah…..you ought to do an MBA, otherwise you are a worm”
Me : “see..can I talk for the next five minutes?”
She : “blah blah….MBA should be in finance man”
Me : “Its 5:20 now, can I start talking at 5:30 at least?”
She : “Investment banking sucks man..they think girls are dumb…blah blah”
Me : “If you had so much to talk then you should’ve started the chat”
She : “…its not quant…its different….stats man stats….”
Me : “I’m deaf in both ears, I understand the words that come out of your mouth – not”
[after being mercilessly defeated in the conversation game, I say "bluha bluha" to myself so that I don't hear what she is saying]
By the time the movie started I knew everything about her except how she got that cute scar on her right elbow *Maybe fell off a cycle or something, wish it was a cliff or something*

It was a Dilip starrer movie, *He’s ok – just* but I made all kinds of noise *like everybody else* when the hero was introduced. And then she said,

She : “I hate malayalam movies”
I felt like the Volvo bus just ran over me.
Me : “hey but Dilip movies are fun” *I’ll never marry you now. Not only that – I’ll definitely kill you*
She : “but these are not my kinda movies…blah blah”
Me : “Its my kinda movies, I’m gonna watch now”

I sat there planning the murder, then I felt I was missing something. I knew I was being irrationally prejudiced, I could look foolish with such a wild guess, but I had to ask her that question.

Racing along the National Highway, you see these sad houses. They look dark from the highway, sad houses in the rain. Beautiful spaces covered by walls and filled by boredom. Husband is a wall, wife another, the son and daughter are walls, mother and father. They silently fight for defining the little space within; call it home. Our basic instinct is to break those walls and search for the sky, but when the lightness becomes too unbearable you want a confine, you need that comfort and warmth. Little houses by the national highway, each has a story.

Across dinner that night, I pop the question.

Me : “btw, you didn’t tell me – which school?”
She : “Holy Angels Convent”

The two eggs in my curry became ducks and ran out saying “quack!quack!”. I started laughing uncontrollably.

She : “what happened”
Me : “forget it…I get crazy on the national highway..hehe”