Allen Ginsberg’s Wichita Vortex Sutra
February 14, 1966

Face the Nation

Thru Hickman’s rolling earth hills

icy winter

gray sky bare trees lining the road

South to Wichita

you’re in the Pepsi Generation Signum enroute

Aiken Republican on the radio 60,000

Northvietnamese troops now infiltrated but over 250,000

South Vietnamese armed men

our Enemy—

Not Hanoi our enemy

Not China our enemy

The Viet Cong!

McNamara made a “bad guess”

“Bad Guess?” chorused the Reporters.

Yes, no more than a Bad Guess, in 1962

“8000 American Troops handle the

Situation”

Bad Guess

in 1954, 80% of the

Vietnamese people would’ve voted for Ho Chi Minh

wrote Ike years later Mandate for Change

A bad guess in the Pentagon

And the Hawks were guessing all along

Bomb China’s 200,000,000

cried Stennis from Mississippi

I guess it was 3 weeks ago

Holmes Alexander in Albuquerque Journal

Provincial newsman

said I guess we better begin to do that Now,

his typewriter clacking in his aged office

on a side street under Sandia Mountain?

Half the world away from China

Johnson got some bad advice Republican Aiken sang

to the Newsmen over the radio

The General guessed they’d stop infiltrating the South

if they bombed the North—

So I guess they bombed!

Pale Indochinese boys came thronging thru the jungle

in increased numbers

to the scene of TERROR!

While the triangle-roofed Farmer’s Grain Elevator

sat quietly by the side of the road

along the railroad track

American Eagle beating its wings over Asia

million dollar helicopters

a billion dollars worth of Marines

who loved Aunt Betty

Drawn from the shores and farms shaking

from the high schools to the landing barge

blowing the air thru their cheeks with fear

in Life on Television

Put it this way on the radio

Put it this way in television language

Use the words

language, language:

“A bad guess”

Put it this way in headlines

Omaha World Herald—Rusk Says Toughness

Essential For Peace

Put it this way

Lincoln Nebraska morning Star—

Vietnam War Brings Prosperity

Put it this way

Declared McNamara speaking language

Asserted Maxwell Taylor

General, Consultant to White House

Viet Cong losses leveling up three five zero zero per month

Front page testimony February ’66

Here in Nebraska same as Kansas same known in Saigon

in Peking, in Moscow, same known

by the youths of Liverpool three five zero zero

the latest quotation in the human meat market—

Father I cannot tell a lie!

A black horse bends its head to the stubble

beside the silver stream winding hru the woods

by an antique red barn on the outskirts of Beatrice—

Quietness, quietness

over this countryside

except for unmistakable signals on radio

followed by the honkytonk tinkle

of a city piano

to calm the nerves of taxpaying housewives of a Sunday morn.

Has anyone looked in the eyes of the dead?

U.S. Army recruiting service sign Careers With A Future

Is anyone living to look for future forgiveness?

Water hoses frozen on the street, the

Crowd gathered to see a strange happening garage—

Red flames on Sunday morning

in a quiet town!

Has anyone looked in the eyes of the wounded?

Have we seen but paper faces, Life Magazine?

Are screaming faces made of dots,

electric dots on Television—

fuzzy decibels registering

the mammal voiced howl

from the outskirts of Saigon to console model picture tubes

in Beatrice, in Hutchinson, in El Dorado

in historic Abilene

O inconsolable!

Stop, and eat more flesh.

“We will negotiate anywhere anytime”

said the giant President

Kansas City Times 2/14/66: “Word reached U.S. authorities that Thailand’s leaders feared that in Honolulu Johnson might have tried to persuade South Vietnam’s rulers to ease their stand against negotiating with the Viet Cong.

American officials said these fears were groundless and Humphrey was telling the Thais so.”

AP dispatch

The last week’s paper is Amnesia.

Three five zero zero is numerals

Headline language poetry, nine decades after Democratic Vistas

and the Prophecy of the Good Gray Poet

Our nation “of the fabled damned”

or else ...

Language, language

Ezra Pound the Chinese Written Character for truth

defined as man standing by his word

Word picture: forked creature

Man

standing by a box, birds flying out

representing mouth speech

Ham Steak please waitress, in the warm café.

Different from a bad guess.

The war is language,

language abused

for Advertisement,

language used

like magic for power on the planet:

Black Magic language,

formulas for reality—

Communism is a 9 letter word

used by inferior magicians with

the wrong alchemical formula for transforming earth into gold

—funky warlocks operating on guesswork,

handmedown mandrake terminology

that never worked in 1956

for gray-domed Dulles,

brooding over at State,

that never worked for Ike who knelt to take

the magic wafer in his mouth

from Dulles’ hand

inside the church in Washington:

Communion of bum magicians

congress of failures from Kansas & Missouri

working with the wrong equations

Sorcerer’s Apprentices who lost control

of the simplest broomstick in the world:

Language

O longhaired magician come home take care of your dumb helper

before the radiation deluge floods your livingroom,

your magic errandboy’s

just made a bad guess again

that’s lasted a whole decade.

N B C B S U P A P I N S L I F E

Time Mutual presents

World’s Largest Camp Comedy:

Magic In Vietnam—

reality turned inside out

changing its sex in the Mass Media

for 30 days, TV den and bedroom farce

Flashing pictures Senate Foreign Relations Committee room

Generals faces flashing on and off screen

mouthing language

State Secretary speaking nothing but language

McNamara declining to speak public language

The President talking language,

Senators reinterpreting language

General Taylor Limited Objectives

Owls from Pennsylvania

Clark’s Face Open Ended

Dove’s Apocalypse

Morse’s hairy ears

Stennis orating in Mississippi

half billion chinamen crowding into the

polling booth,

Clean shaven Gen. Gavin’s image

imagining Enclaves

Tactical Bombing the magic formula for

a silver haired Symington:

Ancient Chinese apothegm:

Old in vain.

Hawks swooping thru the newspapers

talons visible

wings outspread in the giant updraft of hot air

loosing their dry screech in the skies

over the Capitol

Napalm and black clouds emerging in newsprint

Flesh soft as a Kansas girl’s

ripped open by metal explosion—

three five zero zero on the other side of the planet

caught in barbed wire, fire ball

bullet shock, bayonet electricity

bomb blast terrific in skull & belly, shrapneled throbbing meat

While this American nation argues war:

conflicting language, language

proliferating in airwaves

filling the farmhouse ear, filling

the City Manager’s head in his oaken office

the professor’s head in his bed at midnight

the pupil’s head at the movies

blond haired, his heart throbbing with desire

for the girlish image bodied on the screen:

or smoking cigarettes

and watching Captain Kangaroo

that fabled damned of nations

prophecy come true—

Though the highway’s straight,

dipping downward through low hills,

rising narrow on the far horizon

black cows browse in caked fields

ponds in the hollows lie frozen,

quietness.

Is this the land that started war on China?

This be the soil that thought Cold War for decades?

Are these nervous naked trees & farmhouses

the vortex

of oriental anxiety molecules

that’ve imagined American Foreign Policy

and magick’d up paranoia in Peking

and curtains of living blood

surrounding far Saigon?

Are these the towns where the language emerged

from the mouths here

that makes a Hell of riots in Dominica

sustains the aging tyranny of Chiang in silent Taipeh city

Paid for the lost French war in Algeria

overthrew the Guatemalan polis in ’54

maintaining United Fruit’s banana greed

another thirteen years

for the secret prestige of the Dulles family lawfirm?

Here’s Marysville—

a black railroad engine in the children’s park,

at rest—

and the Track Crossing

with Cotton Belt flatcars

carrying autos west from Dallas

Delaware & Hudson gondolas filled with power stuff—

a line of boxcars far east as the eye can see

carrying battle goods to cross the Rockies

into the hands of rich longshoremen loading

ships on the Pacific—

Oakland Army Terminal lights

blue illumined all night now—

Crash of couplings and the great American train

moves on carrying its cushioned load of metal doom

Union Pacific linked together with your Hoosier Line

followed by passive Wabash

rolling behind

all Erie carrying cargo in the rear,

Central Georgia’s rust colored truck proclaiming

The Right Way, concluding

the awesome poem writ by the train

across northern Kansas,

land which gave right of way

to the massing of metal meant for explosion

in Indochina—

Passing thru Waterville,

Electronic machinery in the bus humming prophecy—

paper signs blowing in cold wind,

mid-Sunday afternoon’s silence in town

under frost-gray sky

that covers the horizon—

That the rest of earth is unseen,

an outer universe invisible,

Unknown except thru

language

airprint

magic images

or prophecy of the secret

heart the same

in Waterville as Saigon one human form:

When a woman’s heart bursts in Waterville

a woman screams equal in Hanoi—

On to Wichita to prophesy! O frightful Bard!

into the heart of the Vortex

where anxiety rings

the University with millionaire pressure,

lonely crank telephone voices sighing in dread,

and students waken trembling in their beds

with dreams of a new truth warm as meat,

little girls suspecting their elders of murder

committed by remote control machinery,

boys with sexual bellies aroused

chilled in the heart by the mailman

with a letter from an aging white haired General

Director of selection for service in Deathwar

all this black language

writ by machine!

O hopeless Fathers and Teachers

in Hué do you know

the same woe too?

I’m an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas

but not afraid

to speak my lonesomeness in a car,

because not only my lonesomeness

it’s Ours, all over America,

O tender fellows—

& spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy

in the moon 100 years ago or in

the middle of Kansas now.

It’s not the vast plains mute our mouths

that fill at midnite with ecstatic language

when our trembling bodies hold each other

breast to breast on a mattress—

Not the empty sky that hides

the feeling from our faces

nor our skirts and trousers that conceal

the bodylove emanating in a glow of beloved skin,

white smooth abdomen down to the hair

between our legs,

It’s not a God that bore us that forbid

our Being, like a sunny rose

all red with naked joy

between our eyes & bellies, yes

All we do is for this frightened thing

we call Love, want and lack—

fear that we aren’t the one whose body could be

beloved of all the brides of Kansas City,

kissed all over by every boy of Wichita—

O but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me—

On the bridge over Republican River

almost in tears to know

how to speak the right language—

on the frosty broad road

uphill between highway embankments

I search for the language

that is also yours—

almost all our language has been taxed by war.

Radio antennae high tension

wires ranging from Junction City across the plains—

highway cloverleaf sunk in a vast meadow

lanes curving past Abilene

to Denver filled with old

heroes of love—

to Wichita where McClure’s mind

burst into animal beauty

drunk, getting laid in a car

in a neon misted street

15 years ago—

to Independence where the old man’s still alive

who loosed the bomb that’s slaved all human consciousness

and made the body universe a place of fear—

Now, speeding along the empty plain,

no giant demon machine

visible on the horizon

but tiny human trees and wooden houses at the sky’s edge

I claim my birthright!

reborn forever as long as Man

in Kansas or other universe—Joy

reborn after the vast sadness of War Gods!

A lone man talking to myself, no house in the brown vastness to hear,

imaging the throng of Selves

that make this nation one body of Prophecy

languaged by Declaration as Pursuit of

Happiness!

I call all Powers of imagination

to my side in this auto to make Prophecy,

all Lords

of human kingdoms to come

Shambu Bharti Baba naked covered with ash

Khaki Baba fat-bellied mad with the dogs

Dehorahava Baba who moans Oh how wounded, How wounded

Sitaram Onkar Das Thakur who commands

give up your desire

Satyananda who raises two thumbs in tranquillity

Kali Pada Guha Roy whose yoga drops before the void

Shivananda who touches the breast and says OM

Srimata Krishnaji of Brindaban who says take for your guru

William Blake the invisible father of English visions

Sri Ramakrishna master of ecstasy eyes

half closed who only cries for his mother

Chaitanya arms upraised singing & dancing his own praise

merciful Chango judging our bodies

Durga-Ma covered with blood

destroyer of battlefield illusions

million-faced Tathagata gone past suffering

Preserver Harekrishna returning in the age of pain

Sacred Heart my Christ acceptable

Allah the Compassionate One

Jaweh Righteous One

all Knowledge-Princes of Earth-man, all

ancient Seraphim of heavenly Desire, Devas, yogis

& holymen I chant to—

Come to my lone presence

into this Vortex named Kansas,

I lift my voice aloud,

make Mantra of American language now,

I here declare the end of the War!

Ancient days’ Illusion!—

and pronounce words beginning my own millennium.

Let the States tremble,

let the Nation weep,

let Congress legislate its own delight

let the President execute his own desire—

this Act done by my own voice,

nameless Mystery—

published to my own senses,

blissfully received by my own form

approved with pleasure by my sensations

manifestation of my very thought

accomplished in my own imagination

all realms within my consciousness fulfilled

60 miles from Wichita

near El Dorado,

The Golden One,

in chill earthly mist

houseless brown farmland plains rolling heavenward

in every direction

one midwinter afternoon Sunday called the day of the Lord—

Pure Spring Water gathered in one tower

where Florence is

set on a hill,

stop for tea & gas

Cars passing their messages along country crossroads

to populaces cement-networked on flatness,

giant white mist on earth

and a Wichita Eagle-Beacon headlines

“Kennedy Urges Cong Get Chair in Negotiations”

The War is gone,

Language emerging on the motel news stand,

the right magic

Formula, the language known

in the back of the mind before, now in black print

daily consciousness

Eagle News Services Saigon—

Headline Surrounded Vietcong Charge Into Fire Fight

the suffering not yet ended

for others

The last spasms of the dragon of pain

shoot thru the muscles

a crackling around the eyeballs

of a sensitive yellow boy by a muddy wall

Continued from page one area

after the Marines killed 256 Vietcong captured 31

ten day operation Harvest Moon last December

Language language

U.S. Military Spokesmen

Language language

Cong death toll

has soared to 100 in First Air Cavalry

Division’s Sector of

Language language

Operation White Wing near Bong Son

Some of the

Language language

Communist

Language language soldiers

charged so desperately

they were struck with six or seven bullets before they fell

Language Language M 60 Machine Guns

Language language in La Drang Valley

the terrain is rougher infested with leeches and scorpions

The war was over several hours ago!

Oh at last again the radio opens

blue Invitations!

Angelic Dylan singing across the nation

“When all your children start to resent you

Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?”

His youthful voice making glad

the brown endless meadows

His tenderness penetrating aether,

soft prayer on the airwaves,

Language language, and sweet music too

even unto thee,

hairy flatness!

even unto thee

despairing Burns!

Future speeding on swift wheels

straight to the heart of Wichita!

Now radio voices cry population hunger world

of unhappy people

waiting for Man to be born

O man in America!

you certainly smell good

the radio says

passing mysterious families of winking towers

grouped round a quonset-hut on a hillock—

feed storage or military fear factory here?

Sensitive City, Ooh! Hamburger & Skelley’s Gas

lights feed man and machine,

Kansas Electric Substation aluminum robot

signals thru thin antennae towers

above the empty football field

at Sunday dusk

to a solitary derrick that pumps oil from the unconscious

working night & day

& factory gas-flares edge a huge golf course

where tired businessmen can come and play—

Cloverleaf, Merging Traffic East Wichita turnoff

McConnell Airforce Base

nourishing the city—

Lights rising in the suburbs

Supermarket Texaco brilliance starred

over streetlamp vertebrae on Kellogg,

green jeweled traffic lights

confronting the windshield,

Centertown ganglion entered!

Crowds of autos moving with their lightshine,

signbulbs winking in the driver’s eyeball—

The human nest collected, neon lit,

and sunburst signed

for business as usual, except on the Lord’s Day—

Redeemer Lutheran’s three crosses lit on the lawn

reminder of our sins

and Titsworth offers insurance on Hydraulic

by De Voors Guard’s Mortuary for outmoded bodies

of the human vehicle

which no Titsworth of insurance will customize for resale—

So home, traveler, past the newspaper language factory

under Union Station railroad bridge on Douglas

to the center of the Vortex, calmly returned

to Hotel Eaton—

Carry Nation began the war on Vietnam here

with an angry smashing ax

attacking Wine—

Here fifty years ago, by her violence

began a vortex of hatred that defoliated the Mekong Delta—

Proud Wichita! vain Wichita

cast the first stone!—

That murdered my mother

who died of the communist anticommunist psychosis

in the madhouse one decade long ago

complaining about wires of masscommunication in her head

and phantom political voices in the air

besmirching her girlish character.

Many another has suffered death and madness

in the Vortex from Hydraulic

to the end of 17^th—enough!

The war is over now—

Except for the souls

held prisoner in Niggertown

still pining for love of your tender white bodies O children of Wichita!

February 14, 1966