{"id":9308,"date":"2017-04-13T09:25:43","date_gmt":"2017-04-13T09:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.slow-words.com\/it\/?p=9308"},"modified":"2017-04-27T13:51:33","modified_gmt":"2017-04-27T13:51:33","slug":"america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slow-words.com\/it\/america\/","title":{"rendered":"America"},"content":{"rendered":"

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America I\u2019ve given you all and now I\u2019m nothing.<\/div>\n
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.<\/div>\n
I can\u2019t stand my own mind.<\/div>\n
America when will we end the human war?<\/div>\n
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.<\/div>\n
I don\u2019t feel good don\u2019t bother me.<\/div>\n
I won\u2019t write my poem till I\u2019m in my right mind.<\/div>\n
America when will you be angelic?<\/div>\n
When will you take off your clothes?<\/div>\n
When will you look at yourself through the grave?<\/div>\n
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?<\/div>\n
America why are your libraries full of tears?<\/div>\n
America when will you send your eggs to India?<\/div>\n
I\u2019m sick of your insane demands.<\/div>\n
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?<\/div>\n
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.<\/div>\n
Your machinery is too much for me.<\/div>\n
You made me want to be a saint.<\/div>\n
There must be some other way to settle this argument.<\/div>\n
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don\u2019t think he\u2019ll come back it\u2019s sinister.<\/div>\n
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?<\/div>\n
I\u2019m trying to come to the point.<\/div>\n
I refuse to give up my obsession.<\/div>\n
America stop pushing I know what I\u2019m doing.<\/div>\n
America the plum blossoms are falling.<\/div>\n
I haven\u2019t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.<\/div>\n
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.<\/div>\n
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I\u2019m not sorry.<\/div>\n
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.<\/div>\n
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.<\/div>\n
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.<\/div>\n
My mind is made up there\u2019s going to be trouble.<\/div>\n
You should have seen me reading Marx.<\/div>\n
My psychoanalyst thinks I\u2019m perfectly right.<\/div>\n
I won\u2019t say the Lord\u2019s Prayer.<\/div>\n
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.<\/div>\n
America I still haven\u2019t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.<\/div>\n
I\u2019m addressing you.<\/div>\n
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?<\/div>\n
I\u2019m obsessed by Time Magazine.<\/div>\n
I read it every week.<\/div>\n
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.<\/div>\n
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.<\/div>\n
It\u2019s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody\u2019s serious but me.<\/div>\n
It occurs to me that I am America.<\/div>\n
I am talking to myself again.<\/div>\n
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Asia is rising against me.<\/div>\n
I haven\u2019t got a chinaman\u2019s chance.<\/div>\n
I\u2019d better consider my national resources.<\/div>\n
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.<\/div>\n
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.<\/div>\n
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.<\/div>\n
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I\u2019m a Catholic.<\/div>\n
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America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?<\/div>\n
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they\u2019re all different sexes.<\/div>\n
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe<\/div>\n
America free Tom Mooney<\/div>\n
America save the Spanish Loyalists<\/div>\n
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die<\/div>\n
America I am the Scottsboro boys.<\/div>\n
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 the Silk-strikers\u2019 Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.<\/div>\n
America you don\u2019t really want to go to war.<\/div>\n
America its them bad Russians.<\/div>\n
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.<\/div>\n
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia\u2019s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.<\/div>\n
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader\u2019s Digest.<\/em> Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.<\/div>\n
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.<\/div>\n
America this is quite serious.<\/div>\n
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.<\/div>\n
America is this correct?<\/div>\n
I\u2019d better get right down to the job.<\/div>\n
It\u2019s true I don\u2019t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I\u2019m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.<\/div>\n
America I\u2019m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.<\/div>\n
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Berkeley, January 17, 1956<\/em><\/p>\n

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Allen Ginsberg (USA, 1926-1997) from Collected Poems<\/a>, 1947-1980.<\/em> Copyright \u00a9 1984<\/div>\n
Source: Poetry Foundation<\/a><\/div>\n
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The artwork on the cover is White Flag<\/em> (1955, Encaustic, oil, newsprint, and charcoal on canvas) by Jasper Johns (USA, 1930) that can be admired at Metropolitan Museum, New York<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  America I\u2019ve given you all and now I\u2019m nothing. America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956. I … Continua<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9310,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[2352,6338,1279,202,1087],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slow-words.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9308"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slow-words.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slow-words.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slow-words.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slow-words.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9308"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.slow-words.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9458,"href":"https:\/\/www.slow-words.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9308\/revisions\/9458"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slow-words.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slow-words.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slow-words.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slow-words.com\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}