Read Online The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan by Alice Notley - Free Book Online Page A

dance.
    Ted        Ron        Dick         Didactic         un-melodic
    Roisterers here assembled shatter my zest
    Berrigan         secretly         HEKTOR             GAME ETC .
    More books!         Rilke        Stevens        Pound     Auden
    & Frank
    Some kind of Bowery Santa Clauses          I wonder
    Who am about to die         the necessary lies
LXI
    How sweet the downward sweep of your prickly thighs
    as you lope across the trails and bosky dells
    defying natural law, saying, “Go Fuck Yourselves,
    You Motherfuckers!” You return me to Big Bill Broonzy
    and Guillaume Apollinaire and when you devour your young,
    the natural philosophy of love,
    I am moved as only I am moved by the singing of the
    Stabat Mater at Sunday Mass.
    How succulent your flesh sometimes so tired
    from losing its daily battles with its dead! All
    this and the thought that you go to the bathroom
    fills me with love for you, makes me love you even more than
    the dirt
    in the crevices in my window
    and the rust on the bolt in my door
    in terms I contrived as a boy, such as
    “making it”        “fuck them”         and
    “I know you have something to tell me.”
LXIV
    Is there room in the room that you room in?
    fucked til 7 now she’s late to work and I’m
    18 so why are my hands shaking I should know better
    Stronger than alcohol, more great than song
    O let me burst, and I be lost at sea!
    and I fall on my knees then, womanly.
    to breathe an old woman slop oatmeal
    Why can’t I read French? I don’t know why can’t you?
    The taste of such delicate thoughts
    Never bring the dawn.
    To cover the tracks
    of “The Hammer.”
    Something there is is benzedrine in bed:
    Bring me red demented rooms,
    warm and delicate words
LXV
    Dreams, aspirations of presence! Innocence gleaned,
    annealed! The world in its mysteries are explained,
    and the struggles of babies congeal. A hard core is formed.
    Today I thought about all those radio waves
    He eats of the fruits of the great Speckle bird,
    Pissing on the grass!
    I too am reading the technical journals,
    Rivers of annoyance undermine the arrangements
    Someone said “Blake-blues” and someone else “pill-head”
    Meaning bloodhounds.
    Washed by Joe’s throbbing hands
    She is introspection.
    It is a Chinese signal.
    There is no such thing as a breakdown
LXVI
    it was summer. We were there. And THERE WAS NO
    MONEY                                                        you are like . . .
    skyscrapers veering away
    a B-29 plunging to Ploesti
    sailboat scudding thru quivering seas
    trembling velvet red in the shimmering afternoon
    darkness of sea
    The sea which is cool and green
    The sea which is dark, cool, and green
    I am closing my window. Tears silence the wind.
    “they’ll pick us off like sittin’ ducks”
    Sundown. Manifesto. Color and cognizance.
    Then to cleave to a cast-off emotion,
    (clarity! clarity!) a semblance of motion, omniscience
LXVII
    (clarity! clarity!) a semblance of motion, omniscience.
    There is no such thing as a breakdown
    To cover the tracks of “The Hammer”    (the morning sky
    gets blue and red and I get worried about
    mountains of mounting pressure
    and the rust on the bolt in my door
    Some kind of Bowery Santa Clauses         I wonder
    down the secret streets of Roaring Gap
    A glass of chocolate milk, head of lettuce, dark-
    Bearden is dead. Chris is dead. Jacques Villon is dead.
    Patsy awakens in heat and ready to squabble
    I wonder if people talk about me
secretly?
I wonder if I’m
    fooling myself
    about pills? I wonder what’s in the icebox? out we go
    to the looney movie         and the grace of the make-believe bed
LXVIII
    I am closing my window. Tears silence the wind.
    and the rust on the bolt in my door
    Mud on the first day (night, rather
    littered