:::nostress::: ...(please?)

IGNU

 

On top of that if you know me I pronounce you an ignu

Ignu knows nothing of the world

a great ignoramus in factories though he may own or inspire

them or even be production manager

Ignu has knowledge of the angel indeed ignu is angel in comi-

cal form

W.C. Fields Harpo Marx ignus Whitman an ignu

Rimbaud a natural ignu in his boy pants

The ignu may be queer though like not kind ignu blows arch-

     angels for the strange thrill

a gnostic women love him Christ overflowed with trembling

     semen for many a dead aunt

He’s a great cocksman most beautiful girls are worshipped by

     ignu

Hollywood dolls or lone Marys of Idaho long-legged publicity

     women and secret housewives

have known ignu in another lifetime and remember their lover

Husbands also are secretly tender to ignu their buddy

oldtime friendship can do anything cuckold bugger drunk

     trembling and happy

 

 

Ignu lives only once and eternally and knows it

he sleeps in everybody’s bed everyone’s lonesome for ignu

     ignu knew solitude early

So ignu’s a primitive of cock and mind

equally the ignu has written liverish tomes personal meta-

     physics abstract

images that scratch the moon ‘lighningflash-flintspark’ naked

     lunch fried shoes adios king

The shadow of the angel is waving in the opposite direction

dawn of intelligence turns the telephones into strange animals

he attacks the rose garden with his mystical shears snip snip

     snip

Ignu with his wild mop walks by Colosseum weeping

he plucks a clover from Keats’ grave & Shelley’s a blade of

     grass

knew Coleridge they had slow hung-up talks at midnight over

     tables of mahogany in London

 

 

sidestreet rooms in wintertime rain outside fog the cabman

     blows his hand

Charles Dickens is born ignu hears the wail of the babe

Ignu goofs nights under bridges and laughs at battleships

 

 

ignu is a battleship without guns in the North Sea lost O the

     flowerness of the moment

he knows geography he was there before he’ll get out and die

     already

reborn a bearded humming Jew of Arabian mournful jokes

man with a star on his forehead and halo over his cranium

listening to music musing happy at the fall of a leaf in the moon-

     light of immortality

table-hopping most elegant comrade of all most delicate man-

     nered in the Sufi court

he wasn’t even there at all

wearing zodiacal blue sleeves and the long peaked conehat of

a magician

harkening to the silence of a well at midnight under a red star

in the lobby of Rockefeller Center attentive courteous bare-

     eyed enthousiastic with or without pants

he listens to jazz as if he were a Negro afflicted with jewish

     melancholy and white divinity

Ignu’s a natural you can see it when he pays the cabfare

     abstracted

pulling off the money from an impossible saintly roll

or counting his disappearing pennies to give to the strange

     bus-driver whom he admires

Ignu has sought you out he’s the seeker of God

and God breaks down the world for him every ten years

he sees lightening flash in empty daylight when the sky is blue

he hears Blake’s disembodied Voice recite the Sunflower in a

     room in Harlem

No woe on him surrounded by 700 thousand mad scholars

     moths fly out of his sleeve

He wants to die give up go mad break through into Eternity

live on and teach an aged saint or break down to an eyebrow

     clown

All ignus know each other in a moment’s talk and measure

     each other up at once

as lifetime friends romantic winks and giggles across conti-

     nents

sad moment paying the cab goodby and speeding away up-

     town

 

 

One or two ignus in the Pack

one laughing monk in dungarees

one delighted by cracking his eggs in an egg cup

one chews gum to music all night long rock and roll

 

 

one anthropologist cookoo in the Petén Rainforest

one sits in jail all year and bets karmaic racetrack

 

 

one chases girls down East Broadway into the horror movie

 

 

one pulls out withered grapes and rotten onions from his pants

 

 

one has a nannygoat under his bed to amuse visitors plasters

     the wall with his crap

collects scorpions whiskies skies etc. would steal the moon if

     he could find it

That would set fire to America but none of these make ignu

it’s the soul that makes the style the tender firecracker of his

     thought

the amity of letters from strange cities to old friends

and the new radiance of morning on a foreign bed

A comedy of personal being his grubby divinity

Eliot probably an ignu one of the few who’s funny when he

     Eats

William of Paterson a dying American ignu

Burroughs a purest ignu his hearcut is a cream his left finger

Pinkey chopped off for early ignu reasons metaphysical spells

     love spells with psychoanalysts

 

 

 

his very junkhood an accomplishment beyond a milliondollars

 

 

Celine himself an old ignu over prose

I saw him in Paris dirty old gentleman of ratty talk

with longhaired cough three wormy sweaters round his neck

brown mould under historic fingernails

 

pure genius giving his fiving morphine all night to 1400 passengers

     on a sinking ship

‘because they were all getting emotional’

Who’s amazing you is ignu communicate with me

by mail post telegraph phone streets accusation or scratching

     at my window

and send me a true sign I’ll reply special delivery

DEATH IS A LETTER THAT WAS NEVER SENT

 

Knowledge born of stamps words coins pricks jails seasons

     sweet ambition laughing gas

history with a gold halo photographs of the sea painting a

     celestial din in the bright window

one eye in a black cloud

and the lone vulture on a sand plain seen from the window of

     a Turkish bus

It must be a trick. Two diamonds in the hand one Poetry

     one Charity

proves we have dreamed and the long sword of intelligence

over which I constantly stumble like my pants at the age six__

     embarrassed.

 

NY 1958

 

(plagiated from kaddish allen GINSBERG)