American Underground Prosa : Not for kids!

Ted Berrigan - Living with Chris

It isn’t exciting to carry a bar of soap
In your right breast pocket
It isn't boring either
It’s just what happens in America in 1965

If there is no peace in the world
It’s because there is no peace in the minds of men
However, you'd be surprised at how much difference
A really good cup of coffee and a few pills
Can make in your day

I would like to get hold of
the owners' manual
for a 1965 model »Dream«
(Catalogue .Number.CA-77)

I am far from being the unluckiest woman alive
I am far from a woman

An elephant tramping in my heart
there is nothing worse than elephant love

Alka-Seltzer Palmolive Pepsodent Fab
Chemical New York

Still, there is some peace in the world. It is night. You
are asleep. So I must be at peace.

The barometer at 29.58 and wandering

But who are you

For god's sake is there anyone out there, listening?
If so, peace

 

Philip Whalen - Further Notice

I can't live in this worid
And I refuse to kill myself
Or let you kill me

The dill plant lives, the airplane
My alarmdock, this ink
I won't go away

I shall be myself -
Free, a genius, an embarrassment
Like the Indian, the buffalo

Like Yellowstone National Park

 

Tuli Kupferberg - The Wheel of Fortune

Heads roll on the wheel of flesh
Sometimes I'm high
Sometimes I'm out of benzedrine
0h yes Ford!

Joy the only answer!
But one life to a customer
God wins Irish sweeps

Step right up & guess
the amount of red blood
corpuscles in a single drop
of Christ’s blood. The winner
will be awarded the corpse of Marilyn Monroe

It in the next universe
hate & loneliness
will be processed
out of the package

Run that up your penis & see how it comes!

 

Tuli Kupferberg - To masturbate is human . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . to fuck divine

I say the purpose of the revolution
is to eliminate masturbation.

I say fucking is holy
I say the revolution is holy

I say the family that lays together
stays together

I say that God & fucking are one
I say that sick sexless souls cause war
I say fuck or die

I say the Catholic Church is antifuck
& the Jewish Church
& The Church

I say governments oppose fucking
because old men oppose fucking
I say anyone who hates this poem is jealous

I say come all ye fuckful
I say fuck is beauty
Fuck is God

 

Tuli Kupferberg - Bayonet Drill

Fuck you President Johnson
No I mean love you
I mean isn't that what the war's all about?
I mean you're not gettin enough good lovin, are you
& I'm not
& Mao Tse Tung don't look like enough
or Ho Chi Minh
& you can't fuck too good on one bowl of rice per day
& what abt McNamara?

Let's have international fuck day
& have a corps of beatnik p (for peace) girls
Fuck for Peace
& after all that good lovin
Mr. President
Mr. Dictator
& mrs. Chiang Kai Nu
maybe we can agree
that breast on breast
is thrillier
even than bayonets

 

Edward Dorn -
The Song is Ended
  for Nellie L.

Lingers on
but the
melody when everyone goes
the moon
we sang, to say
too soon
and found that everyone
too soon
had gone
with the moon

Do you
love
me baby
like you used to now
I'd like to know
Oh I'd like to know

 

Charles Bukowski - Men´s Crapper

take this one:
first betöre he shits he wipes with
easy grace the
lid of the seat, he really shines the damn
thing
then he spreads toilet paper over the seat,
quite neatly, even
dangling a gob of it where his powerfui genitals will
hang, and then he lowers with
dignity and manliness
his shorts and pants
and
sits and
shits
almost without passion
scuffling an old dirty newspaper
between his feet and reading about yesterday's basketball
game -
this you see here is a Man: woridly, and no crabs for this
baby, and an easy
an real easy
shit, and he will wipe his ass
while conversing with the man who is washing his hands
at the nearest sink,
and if you are Standing nearby
his little mouse eyes will fall upon yours without a
quiver, and then -
the shorts up, the pants up, the hook of the belt, the flush of
toilet,
the washing of the hands
and then he stands before the mirror
surveying the glory of himself
combing his hair carefully in neat and
delicate swoops, finishing, then putting that
face
close to the mirror
and looking in and upon himself, then
satisfied
he leaves first making sure to give you the elbow
or the ponderous nightmare insult of his empty
eyes, and then with
the twirling of his dumbstruck egotistical buttocks
he leaves the men's room,
and I am left with facetowels like flowers
mirrors like the sea
and I am left with the'sickest of hopes
that someday the real human being will arrive
so that there will be something to save
let alone
shit
out

 

Charles Bukowski - Nature Poem

you are 50.000 Light Years
running through my brain in
tracksuits or
you are like sitting in a bar
with enough money
with a good drink
and looking through the window
at the snow

you are the dead fish of miracle
moving

you are the love-god of icecream
phantasy
you have diminished the screaming of
children as they drink my
blood
I think that you have killed landlords
wanting rent
and also bad
tigers

there is a white flower laying against
my screen
like a whore
like a cat
like a white flower

I could not go to work
tonight because I could not
stop shitting
and now I am in bed
looking at the white flower.

 

Jack Spicer - From: Thing Language

Heros eat soup like anyone else. Sometimes
the kitchen is so far away
That there is no soup. No kitchen. An open
space of ground recovered by
The sky.
Heros eat soup like anyone eise. False
ground.
Soup
Of the evening
Beautifui soup.
And the sky stays there not an image

But the heros
Like the image of an image
(What is made of soup from)
Zooms.

 

Jack Spicer - From: Homage to Creeley

When you go away you don't come home
On the mere physical level
There is a conflict between what is and what isn't
What is, I guess, is big
And what isn't, bigger
Metaphysically speaking
What aren't casts no shadow
And what are is bigger than the moon, I guess,
Bigger than that boy's pants.

 

Lenore Kandel - Love in the Middle of the Air

Catch me!
I love you, I trust you,
I love you
Catch me!
catch my left foot, my right
foot, my hand!
here I am hanging by my teeth
300 feet up in the air and
Catch me!
here I come, flying without wings,
no parachute, doing a double triple
super flip-flop somersault
right up here without a
safety net and
Catch me!
you caught me!
I love you!

now it's your turn

 

Ed Sanders - 15

Kill me & butcher me
kill kill kill me
she moaned

into the cbs microphone
after the Ustashi
Eye gouger
had knifed her eye
to squirt his come
upon her

shriek me freak me
kill me o murder me
flay, tear my mincy skin
& eat my guts
wrap my ass around your arm
tear off my tits!
lift me out of my body o god!
my brain please kill it
squish it munch
it in your
flaming teeth.

 

Ed Sanders - Coca-Cola Douche

My baby ain't got no money,
but her snatch it taste like honey
cause she makes that
Coca-Cola douche.

My baby she fizzes and she fuzzes,
but her pussy it snaps like a turtle
cause she makes that
Coca-Cola douche.

My baby she humps like a wildcat,
her pelvis got the coffeine shakes c
ause she makes that
Coca-Cola douche.

My baby is straight from heaven,
my baby you can sip with a straw
cause she makes that
Coca-Cola douche.

My baby sends me out for some ice cream,
she says,
»come on down for an icecream soda,
I just had that
Coca-Cola douche.«

 

Max Finstein - like a trooper

that tomorrow is tuesday is immense
that tomorrow tuesday will be äs last tuesday
as next tuesday will be äs tomorrow's
tuesday
äs the day the motherrucking
world
will be tuesday as tomorrow forever
next week will be tuesday
sticking in your crotch
as tuesday
without friday or wednesday or sunday afternoon
nor birthdays holidays thursday or monday
only tuesday tuesday

tuesday

tuesday

it was on a tuesday in november
in a year sharp as shit
that the united states
killed liberty

i don't know how but they did
with their flag
the red was okay and the blue
but tuesday was the white

end of white tuesday

 

Edward Field - Sweet Gwendolyn and the Countess

The Countess rode out on her black horse in spring
wearing her black leather riding costume.
She was scouting for disciples in the countryside
and flicked with her whip the rosebuds as she passed.

Sweet Gwendolyn in her white dress
was out gathering May flowers.
Under sunshade hat, her pale face
blushed to the singing bees,
and her golden curls lay passive on bent shoulders

as she stooped to pluck a white lily.

The Countess passing by took one look,
galloped up, and reined her stallion sharply in,
high over the modest figure
of Sweet Gwendolyn with the downcast eyes.
She leaped down from her horse and knelt,
laying the whip in tribute before the golden girl.

That foolish one swooned forward to the ground
in a great white puff of dress fabric
and a scattering of flowers. At that,
the Countess rose in all her black pride
and put her dirty leather boot hard on Gwendolyn's bent neck,
pushing down the golden head to the grass,
and gave her a smart lash across her innocently upturned behind.

Gwendolyn looked up with begging eyes
and a small whimper of submission,
äs the Countess pushed her over and threw the skirt up,
exposing legs and bootom bare,
and shoved the leather whip handle between squeezed thighs of
virtue
forcing them apart to reveal the pink pulsing maidenhood.

Poor Gwendolyn moaned with shame and pain
as she lay back crushing her May flowers, exposed and
unresisting -
until the Countess, in füll charge, pulled her to her feet,
tied the whip end around her neck,
remounted the big black horse
and slowly trotted off,
leading the sobbing girl a captive behind her
off to her dark castle.

 

Edward Field - Beauty Cure

When I was just a girl
I once took a beauty treatment
recommended by our medicine man:
Grandma took me out
and found old dried-up dog turds for me.
I had to put each turd on my tongue
keeping it in my mouth until it was soft,
then rub myself with it
all over my breasts and stomach.
That is where I got my lovely figure and vitality from.
For äs the medicine man said,
dogshit used in the right way
possesses magic powers
and is a kind of elixir of youth.
That is why I still look so young
in spite of my great age.
So for a beautifui complexion, ladies,
I do not hesitate to recommend dogshit lotion to you.
Try some today!

 

Edward Field - Giant Pacific Octopus

I live with a giant pacific octopus:
He settles himself down beside me on the couch in the evening.
With two arms he holds a book
that he reads with his single eye:
He wears a pair of glasses over it for reading.

Two more arms go walking over to the sideboard across the room

where the crackers and cheese spread he loves are,
and they send back endless canapes, like a conveyer belt.

While his mouth is drooling and chomping,
another arm comes over and gropes me lightly:
It is like a breeze on my balls, that sweet tentacle.

Other arms start slipping around my body under my clothes,

they wiggle right in, one around my waist,
and all over, and down the crack of my ass.

I am drawn into his midst where his hot mouth waits for kisses

and I kiss him and make him into a boy
as all giant patific octopuses are really
when you take them into your arms.

All their arms fluttering around you
become everywhere sensations of pleasure.
So, his sweet eye looks at me and his little mouth kisses me

and I swear he has the body of a greek god,
my giant pacific octopus boychik

So this was what was in store
when I first saw him in the aquarium
huddled miserably on the rock
ignoring the feast of live crabs
they put in his windowed swimming pool.

You take home a creature like that, who needs love,
who is a mess when you meet
but who can open up like a flower with petal arms waving around -
a beauty -
and it is a total pleasure to have him around,
even collapsible as he is like a big toy,
for as long as he will stay, one night or a liferime,
for as long as god will let you have him.

 

Aram Boyajian
- The Man Who Wrote The World's Longest Haiku

The man under the tree
was writing the world's longest
haiku.
I told him
haiku's are short,
like this:
Cranes flap wings.
The wind blows.
No connection.
He said,
Fuck you!
I replied,
Good haiku!
and walked away.