Kenny, do you want to come?
Oh, that's it.
It's a friend of mine.
Do you want to read this?
What I read in the last reading followed one poem to another
in the development and illustrating the development
of a peculiar, personal kind of awareness or consciousness
that was growing on me but I think
is more or less common to all.
At one poem in 1956, I did some scribbling writing
and read a poem in San Francisco, which
after I had given a reading there,
Robert Duncan had a sign to me, that he
thought it was the right way.
So now, I would read that.
"30 Days Illumination."
Why do I deny my my to another?
Because I deny it to myself.
Why have I denied myself what other has rejected me?
Now I believe you are lovely, my soul, soul of Alan.
Alan, and you, so beloved, so sweet,
so recoiled to your true loveliness, your original,
nude, breathing Alan.
Would you ever deny another again?
Dear Walter, Thanks for the message.
I forbid you not to touch me man to man, true American.
The bombers jumped through the sky in unison of 12.
The pilots are sweating and nervous
at the controls in the hot cabin.
Over what souls will they lose their loveless bombs?
The campanile pokes its white granite, innocent head
into the clouds for me to look at.
A crippled lady explains French grammar
with a loud sweet voice.
Regarder is to look.
The whole French language looks on the trees on the campus.
The girl's haunted voices make quiet dates for 2 o'clock.
Yet one of them waves farewell and smiles
at last, her red skirt swinging shows how she loves herself.
Another encased in flashy scotch clothes clumps of the concrete
in a hurry into the door.
Poor dear, who will receive you in love's opposite?
How many beautiful boys have I seen on this spot?
The trees seem on the verge of moving.
Ah, they do move in the breeze.
Roar again of airplanes in the sky, everyone looked up.
And do you know that all these rubbings
of the eyes and painful gestures to the brow of suited scholars
entering Dwinelle Hall are holy signs, anxiety, and fear.
How many years have I got to float
on this sweetened scene of trees and humans clumping
above ground.
Oh, I must be mad to sit here lonely in the void and glee
and build up thoughts of love.
But what do I have to doubt but my own shiny eyes?
What to lose but life which is a vision today this afternoon?
My stomach is light.
I relax.
New sentences bring forth out of the scene
to describe spontaneous forms of time,
trees, sleeping dogs, airplanes wandering through the air,
Negroes with their lunch books of anxiety, apples
and sandwiches, lunchtime, ice cream, timeless.
And even the ugliest will seek beauty.
What are you doing Friday night?
Ask the sailor in white school training cap and guild
buttons and blue coat.
And a little ape in a green jacket and baggy pants
and overloaded schoolbooks satchel says, quartet.
Every Friday night, beautiful quartets
to celebrate and please my soul with all its hair, music,
and then strides off snapping pieces
chocolate off a bar wrapped in Hershey
brown paper in tin foil eating chocolate rose.
And how can these other boys be then happy cells
in their brown army study uniforms?
Now cripple girls wings down the walk
with loping fuck gestures of her hips askew.
Let her roll her eyes and abandon
and camp angelic through the campus,
bouncing her body about in joy.
Someone will dig that pelvic energy, for sure.
These white stripes down your chocolate cupcake, lady,
held in front of your nose, finishing sentence preparatory
to chomp.
They were painted there to delight you
by some Spanish industrial artistic hand and bakery
factory far away.
Expert hand in simple minded messages of white stripes
on millions of message cupcakes.
I have a message for you all.
I will denote one particularity of each.
And there goes professor Doughertys,
striding enlightened by the years through the doorway
and arcade he built in his mind and nose.
He, too, saw the ruins of Yucatan once.
Followed by a lonely janitor in a dove gray Italian fruit
peddler Chico Marx hat pushing his rolypoly belly
through the tree.
Neil sees all girls as visions of their inner cunts.
Yes, it's true.
And all men walking along, thinking of their spirit cock.
So look at that poor dread boy with two-day black hair
all over his dirty face.
How he must hate his cock.
Chinaman, stop shuddering.
And now, to bring this to an end with a rise and an ellipse.
The boys are now all talking to the girls.
If I was a girl, I'd love a little boy.
And girls giggling the opposite, all pretty, every which way.
And even I have my secret bed and lover
under another moonlight being sure.
In any minute, I expect to see a baby
carriage pushed onto the scene.
And everyone turn in attention like
to the airplanes and laughter like a Greek campus.
And the big brown, shaggy silent dog raising,
open eyed in the shade, lit up his head
and sniff and lower his head on his golden paws
and let his belly rumble away unconcerned.
The lion's ruddy eyes shall flow with tears of gold.
Now the silence is broken.
Students pour onto the square.
The doors are crowded.
The dog gets up and walks away.
The cripple swings out of Dwinelle.
A nanny, even, I wonder about her.
An old lady distinguished by a cane.
We all look up, silence moves, huge changes on the ground.
And in the air, flips, fly all over, filling space.
My grief at Peter is not loving me
was grief at not loving myself.
Huge karmas of broken minds in beautiful bodies,
unable to receive love because not knowing the self as lovely.
Fathers and teacher, seeing in people
the visible evidence of inner self
thought by their treatment of me.
Who loves himself, loves me, who love myself.
[APPLAUSE]