Quotes from Allen Ginsberg

Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns? This is my rocket my personal rocket I send up my message Beyond Someone to hear me there

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather boa!

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

Nobody wants to hear about your feelings, darling, tell me what you see!

You are a pot of gold, don't think I don' realize it.

The world knows the love that's in its breast as in the flower, the suffering lonely world.

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death, and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

and he imagines cars and rides them in his dreams, so lonely growing up among the imaginary automobiles and dead souls of Tarrytown to create out of his own imagination the beauty of his wild forebears - a mythology he cannot inherit.

It's too bad our problems are not solved more easily. But that is an old stupid complaint. Still the others are stupid. It is as if to save ourselves we had to save them too. That is why genius must suffer- it has to bear the burdens of the whole world. Our happiness and reality depends on the happiness and reality of others.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness

34 coming up — I suddenly felt old — sitting with Walter & Raquel in Chinese Restaurant — they kissed — I alone — age of Burroughs when we first met.

I'll finish this poem in my next life.

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. America is this correct?

Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters Pigeons shake their wings on the copper church roof out my window across the street, a bird perched on the cross surveys the city's blue-grey clouds. Larry Rivers 'll come at 10 AM and take my picture. I'm taking your picture, pigeons. I'm writing you down, Dawn. I'm immortalizing your exhaust, Avenue A bus. O Thought, now you'll have to think the same thing forever!

Sheep look up revolving their jaws with empty eyes, pacific gods little gods that look at me curious & keep distant from human fame. Creatures revolving thru births and deaths, unharmed horses in a tiny gigantic vale in Wales. I am Bard to my own nature nameless as the very Vast I look at. Lay down on the warm hillside & groaned release from my body sighed thru my breast a great Ooh!

Amazed Generation! Found Generation! Diamond Generation! Brainwashed Generation! Amnesiac T.V. Bureaucracy Voidoids! New Wave Punk Generation! Neutron Bomb blast Babies! Apocalypse Spermatozoa! Did you grow up imbibing Microchip sex waters? Will you marry me in the next Millennium? Must I wait for the Great Year? - Listening to Susan Sontag

the weight we carry is love. Who can deny? In dreams it touches the body, in thought constructs a miracle, in imagination anguishes till born inhuman

In this dream I am the Dreamer and the Dreamed I am that I am Ah but I have always known

If you must suffer, suffer nobly. Love, laugh through your tears, or cry, create and perhaps, perish.

Unspeakable King of the roads that are gone — Unintelligible Horse riding out of the graveyard — Sunset spread over Cordillera and insect — Gnarl Moth — Griever — Laugh with no mouth, Heart that never had flesh to die — Promise that was not made — Reliever, whose blood burns in a million animals wounded — O Mercy, Destroyer of the World, O Mercy, Creator of Breasted Illusions, O Mercy, cacophonous warmouthed doveling, Come

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion &the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality

I'm crying all the time now. I cried all over the street when I left the Seattle Wobbly Hall. I cried listening to Bach. I cried looking at the happy flowers in my backyard, I cried at the sadness of the middle aged trees. Happiness exists I feel it. I cried for my soul, I cried for the world's soul. The world has a beautiful soul. God appearing to be seen and cried over. Overflowing heart of Paterson.

Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.