YOU ONLY HAVE TO TELL ME ONCE

88. YOU ONLY HAVE TO TELL ME ONCE:

And one day I awoke and went outside at 7am and I saw the usual scurrying of workaday things - the trucks and cars and carts and people in each direction headed to something - a promise of fault or a fault of a promise and the dreary expectation - though seemingly a contradiction - was all it seemed that gave life to people and they all had already sacrificed so much for so little that my own paint-stained rags for clothes and carriage seemed to mean nothing in the early light and I mentioned to myself that the very idea of continuing seemed useless and I at once decided to head for the bridge nearby which would allow me both company and a jump and then I thought better of it along my way - for why should I be bothered to cancel a scene for which all the sets hadn't yet even been constructed and why - in the same sense - would I volunteer to be a footnote to something never read anyway so I continued and as I passed the buildings of the Supreme Court and the Metropolitan Council and all the rest (great chambered nautilus that too) I saw the rising ruins not yet built to completion of everything coming - the new Police Headquarters replacing the old and with it the end of a quaint and much more sensible form of living and the beauty and architecture which once went with it : but we were now amidst a much coarser age where nothing meant much and much for little and cadavers washed ashore were still singing some prolix song with broken hands or feet still bound in sailing cloth and rope with fiber and the Davy Jones locker I sensed creeping up was present to witness DEATH itself creeping up from the shoreline while at this edge - of time and place and money and story - ancient derelict sailors still stood with mouths agape and with wonder in their rotted eye-sockets calling back some oath while learning to master the craft of the new - but even THEY knew then it was hopeless and so did I so although I passed upon that jump from the bridge this time I decided anew to go forth and proclaim what I saw - and it's never easy doing that and it's never simple either - and I found myself enraptured once and once again as I walked along the oldest wharfside Manhattan buildings there were - rats scurrying too dog-fights and gambling hoodlums in the cellar-pits of every building while on the third flood ledge and window where I looked I saw perhaps the most beautiful something I'd ever seen - a girl of indeterminate grace and origin ruing her place and decrying her fate but it was not mine to mind nor mend for all life goes on and each person's got their role to play and winnow and alter and correct until some certain moment when a glorious appearing occurs and Paradise is seen - tha's what I would wait for I told myself - so I sat down on the rocks beneath the bridge and watched the river traffic passing by - eastriver cargo tugboats and steam Brooklyn Bridge overhead with its weird roadtop roar - some sort of hum from Hell - and sitting there I knew I'd live forever somewhere yet with or without a future message I'd be here in this place FOREVER too.
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So any good times JUST LIKE any bad times just passed away disappeared and were so soon forgotten (this here reminds me to remind you of some 1996 Ginsberg stuff I found amusingly right - 'Don't get angry with me / you might die tomorrow / I'm an empty ghost / any spare change I can borrow? / don't get angry with me / full of God tomorrow / could get sorry you got mad / wanna be the God of sorrow?' - of course I didn't know that then in fact it even then didn't exist yet and I knew Ginsberg for a few fleeting short times on the next block over the Peace Eye Bookstore and the place he lived and Tompkins Square Park and then that weird and odd conversation later in 1982 in the restroom at Rutger's University while I was pissing at the urinal and he was in the near stall shitting and he'd just arrived from NYC for a reading and performance on the stage at the Rutgers Student Center and what he'd said at first was 'hi hi everything's fine but all I gotta' do right now is shit really bad' and I ALWAYS watched for but never saw that those words ever became poetry anywhere somewhere else).