you can call me Al...

[Mangrove]

America

    America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
    America two dollars and twentyseven cents January
         17, 1956.
    I can't stand my own mind.
    America when will we end the human war?
    Go fuck 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 supermarket 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 marijuana 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.
    My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
    I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
    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. Business-
         men 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 1400 miles an hour
         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 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
         down on your old strophe
    America free Tom Mooney
    America save the Spanish Loyalists
    America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
    America I am the Scottsboro boys.
    America when I was seven momma took me to Com-
         munist 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 sin-
         cere 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 plain. 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'
         Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.
         Him big bureaucracy running our fillingsta-
         tions.
    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.
    America this is quite serious.
    America this is the impression I get from looking in
         the 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.