Life in Progress

'America' by Allen Ginsberg

• 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 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'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 to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
• auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
• That no good. Ugh. 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?
• I'd better get right down to the job.
• It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
• factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
• America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.