“Forty feet long sixty feet high hotelCovered with old gray for buzzing fliesEye like mango flowing orange pusEars Durga people vomiting in their sleepGot huge legs a dozen buses move inside CalcuttaSwallowing mouthfuls of dead ratsMangy dogs bark out of a thousand breastsGarbage pouring from its ass behind alleysAlways pissing yellow Hooghly waterBellybutton melted Chinatown brown puddlesCoughing lungs Sound going down the sewerNose smell a big gray BidiHeart bumping and crashing over tramcar tracksCovered with a hat of cloudy ironSuffering water buffalo head loweredTo pull the huge cart of year uphill”

“The madman bum and angel beat in time with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years”

“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.”

“Who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish.”

“Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?”

“Empire State's orange shoulders lifted above the Hell”

“Mothers weep and Sons be dumbyour brothers and children murder the beautiful yellow bodies of Indochina in dreams invented for your eyes by TV”