Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I’m not sorry.
I know too much and not enough.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
Who’ll come lie down in the dark with me Belly to belly and knee to knee Who’ll look into my hooded eye Who’ll lie down under my darkened thigh?
You know me now. I’m only good at beginnings.
I have just discovered that I have no feelings, just thoughts, borrowed thoughts taken from someone I admire because he seems to have feelings.
I do not wish to escape to myself, I wish to escape from myself. I wish to obliterate my consciousness and my knowledge of independent existence, my guilts, my secretiveness.
You were right, I suppose, in keeping your distance. I was too intent on self-fulfillment, and rather crude about it, with all my harlequinade and conscious manipulation of your pity.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked... who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts...
Love is only a recognition of our own guilt and imperfection, and a supplication for forgiveness to the perfect beloved. This is why we love those who are more beautiful than ourselves, why we fear them, and why we must be unhappy lovers.
I have no other possessions of value but my soul.
I shudder, I see the love, I’m doomed, my heart melts again – can’t stand not to be in love, can’t stand not to be melting with real tenderness, childlike need sweetnesses, that’s what’s wrong with me.
I don’t want to suffer any more, I have had my mind broken open over and over before, I have been isolate and loveless always. I have not slept with anyone since I saw you, not because I was faithful but because I am afraid and I know no one. I will always be afraid I will always be worthless, I will always be alone till I die and I will be tormented long after you leave me.
If we don’t show anyone, we’re free to write anything.
Don’t you see that I cannot be composed, I cannot reconcile myself, because there is no other reality but loneliness for me and before I am dragged back into isolation I will clasp and grasp and claw in fright even at you without consciousness – even I – and I am afraid that I cannot survive if I have to go on into myself.
I am miserable now – not feeling unhappiness, just lack of life coming to me and coming out of me – resignation to getting nothing and seeking nothing, staying behind shell. The glare of unknown love, human, unhad by me, – the tenderness I never had. I don’t want to be just a nothing, a sick blank, withdrawal into myself forever. I just want something, beside the emptiness I’ve carried around in me all my life.
I write poetry because I want to be alone and want to talk to people.
I was so sick that I found myself worrying about the future of man’s soul, my own in particular.
Money! Money! Money! shrieking mad celestial money of illusion! Money made of nothing, starvation, suicide! Money of failure! Money of death! Money against Eternity! and eternity’s strong mills grind out vast paper of Illusion!