HOW LIKE A GOD
85
the image we
all
keep in our secret minds, and its lack or its loss
can break our hearts. Once we are legally possessed of it, we hope,
once we own our
GED,
all things, all finer things, will come to us
like Noah's animals, of themselves. Perhaps it
is
our particular lot
to find that beauty and truth, our beauty and truth, are disparate
and even antagonistic to each other. They do not,
it
is
certain, in–
habit that part of ourselves that lives abroad in our institutions, and
whatever else there is of us, in our time and place, has yet to
be discovered.
READY TO ROLL
To Mexico! To Mexico! down the dovegrey highways, past the police
of atomic cities, past the fiery border to dream cantinas!
I see myself standing on the sunny metropolitan plateau, stranger
and prince on the street, dollars in my pocket, free, alone,
genitals and thighs and buttocks under skin and leather.
Music! Taxis ! Marijuana! Ancient sexy parks! Boulevards
in
America! Modern downtown for a nickel! A dime for Les
Ambassadeurs! Here
is
a hard brown cock for a quarter!
Drunkenness! and the long night walks down strange brown streets,
eyes, windows, buses, interior charnels behind the Cathedral,
lost squares and hungry tacos, a calf's head cooked and picked
apart for meat,
and the blackened inner roofs and tents of the market, street criss–
crossed on street, a naked hipster labyrinth, stealing, pausing,
loitering, noticing drums, purchasing nothing
but the broken aluminum coffeepot with a torn doll's arm sticking
up out of the mouth.
Haha! what do I want? Change of solitude, spectre of drunkenness
in paranoiac taxicabs, fear and gaiety of unknown lovers coming
round the empty streetcorner
dark eyed and watching me make it there alone under the new hip
moon.
Allen Ginsberg
