America
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 f**k 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 supermarke
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
I'm not sorry
I smoke m*******a 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
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 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
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 1400mph
And twenty five thousand mental institutions
I say nothing about my prisons
Nor the millions of underprivileged
Who live in my flowerpots
Under the light of five hundred suns
I have ready 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 dollars down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco and Vanzetti must not die
I am the Scottsboro Boys
America when I was seven mama
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 playing
Everybody must have been a spy
America you don't 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 Readers' Digestses
Her wants our auto plants in Siberia
Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations
That no good Ugh
Him make Indian learn read
Him need big black niggers ah
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 a 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
America - Allen Ginsberg
