The Charnel Ground

In honor of National Poetry Month, and in anticipation of tonight's Tenement Talk with poet Stephen Wolf, we're posting some of our favorite poems from his New York-centric collection I Speak of the City.

By Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997)

...Rugged and raw situations, and having accepted them as part of your

home ground, then some spark of sympathy or compassion could take place.

You are not in a hurry to leave such a place immediately. You would like to

face the facts, realities of that particular world...

Upstairs Jenny crashed her car & became a living corpse, Jake

sold grass, the white-bearded potbelly leprechaun silent

climbed their staircase

Ex-janitor John from Poland averted his eyes, cheeks flushed with

vodka, wine who knew what

as he left his groundfloor flat, refusing to speak to the inhabitant

of Apt. 24

who'd put his boyfriend in Bellevue, calling the police, while the

artistic Buddhist composer

on sixth floor lay spaced out feet swollen with water, dying slowly

of aids over a year -

The Chinese teacher cleaned & cooked in Apt. 23 for the

homosexual poet who pined for his gymnast

thighs & buttocks - downstairs th' old hippie flower girl gell

drunk over the banister, smashed her jaw -

her son despite moderate fame cheated rocknroll money,

twenty thousand people in stadiums

cheering his tattoed skinhead murderous Hare Krishna

vegetarian drum lyrics -

Mary born in the building rested on her cane, heavy legged with

heart failure on the second landin, no more able

to vacation in Caracas & Dublin - the Russian landlady's

husband from concentration camp disappeared again -

nobody mentioned he'd died -

tenants took over her building for hot water, she couldn't add

rent & pay taxes, wore a long coat hot days

alone & thin on the street carrying groceries to her crooked

apartment silent-

One poet highschool teacher fell dead mysterious heart

dysrhythmia, konked over

in his mother's Brooklyn apartment, his first baby girl a year old,

wife stoical a few days -

their growling noisy little dog had to go, the baby cried -

Meanwhile the upstairs apartment meth head shot cocaine &

yowled up and down

East 12th Street, kicked out of Christine's Eatery till police

cornered him, 'top a hot iron steamhole

near Stuyvesant Town Avenue A telephone booth calling his deaf

mother - sirens speed the way to Bellevue-

past whispering grass crack salesmen jittering in circles on East

10th Street's

southwest corner where art yuppies come out of the overpriced

Japanese Sushi Bar - & they poured salt into potato soup

heart failure vats at KK's Polish restaurant

-Garbage piled up, nonbiodegradable plastic bags emptied by

diabetic sidewalk homeless

looking for returnable bottles recycled dolls radios half-eaten

hamburgers - thrown away Danish -

On 13th Street the notary public sat in his dingy storefront,

driver's lessons & tax returns prepared on old metal desks -

Sunnysides crisped in butter, fries & sugary donuts passed over

the luncheonette counter next door -

The Hispanic lady yelled at the rude African-American behind

the Post Office window

"I waited all week my welfare check you sent me notice I was

here yesterday

I want to see the supervisor bitch do't insult me refusing to

look in -"

Closed eyes of Puerto Rican wino lips cracked skin red

stretched out

on the pavement, naphtha backdoor open for the Korean family

dry cleaners at the 14th Street corner -

Con Ed workmen drilled all year to bust electric pipes 6 feet deep

in brown dirt

so cars bottlenecked wait minutes to pass the M14 bus stopped

midroad, heavy dressed senior citizens step down in

red rubble

with Reduced Fare Program cards got from grey city Aging

Department officers downtown up the second flight by

elevators don't work -

News comes on the radio, they bombed Baghdad and the Garden

of Eden again?

A million starve in Sudan, mountains of eats stacked on docks,

local hangs & U.N.'s trembling bureaucratic officers sweat

near the equator arguing over

wheat piles shoved by bulldozers - Swedish doctors ran out of

medicine - The Pakistani taxi driver

says Salman Rushdie must die, insulting the Prophet in fictions -

"No that wasn't my opinion, just a character talking like in a

poem no judgement -"

"Not till the sun rejects you do I," so give you a quarter by the

Catholic church 14th St. you stand half drunk

waving a plastic glass, flush-faced, live with your mother a

wounded look on your lips, eyes squinting,

receding lower jaw sometimes you dry out in Bellevue, most days

cadging dollars for sweet wine

by the corner where Plump Blindman shifts from foot to foot

showing his white cane, rattling coins in a white paper cup

some weeks

where girding the subway entrance construction saw-horses

painted orange guard steps underground - And across the

street the NYCE bank machine cubicle door sign reads

Not in Operation as taxis bump on potholes asphalt mounded at

the cross road when red lights change green

& I'm on my way uptown to get a CAT scan liver biopsy, visit the

cardiologist,

account for high blood pressure, kidneystones, diabtes, misty

eyes & dysesthesia -

feeling lack in feet soles, inside ankles, small of back, phallus

head, anus -

Old age sickness death again come round in the wink of an eye -

High school youth the inside skin of my thighs was silken smooth

tho nobody touched me there back then -

Across town the velvet poet takes Darvon N, Valium nightly

sleeps all day kicking methadone

between brick walls sixth floor in a room cluttered with collages

& gold dot paper scraps covered

with words: "The whole point seems to be the idea of giving

away the giver."