The Happy Birthday of Death |
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Common terms and phrases
Allen Ginsberg angels Arthur Rimbaud beauty beneath Bernadette Mayer Birthday of Death blood Bomb boys breath cats child climb Clog clown Collected Poems crack cried dark dead door dream dream children drear eggs eggs eggs electric chair Eternity eyes Ezra Pound feel feet Flash Gordon flowers gargoyles girl Greece GREGORY CORSO Hail hair hand Happy Birthday head heart heaven Heinrich von Kleist Hesiod Hider human inharmonious weird predicament John John Law joke king kiss kneel knees laugh laughter Lawrence Ferlinghetti legs light look magic married mouth Muriel Spark never night nose park Patton penguin dust Poetry police Sacré-Coeur Café sad inharmonious weird schemed escape scream Selected Poems shot sleep smile snow song Ted Williams tell there's tree unicorn vanity walk wars Waterchew weep Werewolf window yanked youth
Popular passages
Page 29 - What do you do for a living? Should I tell them? Would they like me then? Say All right get married, we're losing a daughter but we're gaining a son — And should I then ask Where's the bathroom? 0 God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded just wait to get at the drinks and food — And the priest! he looking at me as if I masturbated asking me Do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife? And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue!
Page 32 - Chest [30] grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky! And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him When are you going to stop people killing whales! And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust...
Page 29 - Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries and she going just so far and I understanding why not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel! Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky— When she introduces me to her parents back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie, should I...
Page 32 - ... sophisticated woman tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves holding a cigarette holder in one hand and a highball in the other and we lived high up in a penthouse with a huge window from which we could see all of New York and ever farther on clearer days No, can't imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream— 0 but what about love?
Page 61 - ... helly ringmaster cracks his whip! The circus's great mercy shoots fire! Acrobats gnaw their wires! Skeletal apes twist meatless bananas! The lion trainer's bony jaw clanks on the lion's bony jaw! Hotdogs and coca cola for the charnel! Elephant trickdust on the purgative scale! Fifty shrouded clowns pile out from a tiny tomb. 10 But I am an always clown and need not make grammatic Death's diameter.
Page 32 - Roman coin soup — O what would that be like! Surely I'd give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus For a rattle a bag of broken Bach records Tack Delia Francesca all over its crib Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon — No, I doubt I'd be that kind of father not rural not snow no quiet window but hot smelly tight New York City seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!
Page 30 - Everybody knowing ! I'd be almost inclined not to do anything ! Stay up all night ! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye ! Screaming : I deny honeymoon ! I deny honeymoon ! running rampant into those almost climactic suites yelling Radio belly ! Cat shovel ! O I'd live in Niagara forever ! in a dark cave beneath the Falls I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy a saint of divorce...
Page 11 - THE HAPPY BIRTHDAY OF DEATH Notes After Blacking Out Lady of the legless world I have refused to go beyond self-disappearance I'm in the thin man's bed knowing my legs kept to me by a cold fresh air Useless and not useless this meaning All is answerable I need not know the answer Poetry is seeking the answer Joy is in knowing there is an answer Death is knowing the answer...
Page 32 - I'm 60 years old and not married, all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!