Autobiography

I am leading a quiet life

in Mike’s Place every day

watching the champs

of the Dante Billiard Parlor

and the French pinball addicts.

I am leading a quiet life

on lower East Broadway.

I am an American.

I was an American boy.

I read the American Boy Magazine

and became a boy scout

in the suburbs.

I thought I was Tom Sawyer

catching crayfish in the Bronx River

and imagining the Mississippi.

I had a baseball mit

and an American Flyer bike.

I delivered the Woman’s Home Companion

at five in the afternoon

or the Herald Trib

at five in the morning.

I still can hear the paper thump

on lost porches.

I had an unhappy childhood.

I saw Lindbergh land.

I looked homeward

and saw no angel.

I got caught stealing pencils

from the Five and Ten Cent Store

the same month I made Eagle Scout.

I chopped trees for the CCC

and sat on them.

I landed in Normandy

in a rowboat that turned over.

I have seen the educated armies

on the beach at Dover.

I have seen Egyptian pilots in purple clouds

shopkeepers rolling up their blinds

at midday

potato salad and dandelions

at anarchist picnics.

I am reading ‘Lorna Doone’

and a life of John Most

terror of the industrialist

a bomb on his desk at all times.

I have seen the garbagemen parade

in the Columbus Day Parade

behind the glib

farting trumpeters.

I have not been out to the Cloisters

in a long time

nor to the Tuileries

but I still keep thinking

of going.

I have seen the garbagemen parade

when it was snowing.

I have eaten hotdogs in ballparks.

I have heard the Gettysburg Address

and the Ginsberg Address.

I like it here

and I won’t go back

where I came from.

I too have ridden boxcars boxcars boxcars.

I have travelled among unknown men.

I have been in Asia

with Noah in the Ark.

I was in India

when Rome was built.

I have been in the Manger

with an Ass.

I have seen the Eternal Distributor

from a White Hill

in South San Francisco

and the Laughing Woman at Loona Park

outside the Fun House

in a great rainstorm

still laughing.

I have heard the sound of revelry

by night.

I have wandered lonely

as a crowd.

I am leading a quiet life

outside of Mike’s Place every day

watching the world walk by

in its curious shoes.

I once started out

to walk around the world

but ended up in Brooklyn.

That Bridge was too much for me.

I have engaged in silence

exile and cunning.

I flew too near the sun

and my wax wings fell off.

I am looking for my Old Man

whom I never knew.

I am looking for the Lost Leader

with whom I flew.

Young men should be explorers.

Home is where one starts from.

But Mother never told me

there’d be scenes like this.

Womb-weary

I rest

I have travelled.

I have seen goof city.

I have seen the mass mess.

I have heard Kid Ory cry.

I have heard a trombone preach.

I have heard Debussy

strained thru a sheet.

I have slept in a hundred islands

where books were trees.

I have heard the birds

that sound like bells.

I have worn grey flannel trousers

and walked upon the beach of hell.

I have dwelt in a hundred cities

where trees were books.

What subways what taxis what cafes!

What women with blind breasts

limbs lost among skyscrapers!

I have seen the statues of heroes

at carrefours.

Danton weeping at a metro entrance

Columbus in Barcelona

pointing Westward up the Ramblas

toward the American Express

Lincoln in his stony chair

And a great Stone Face

in North Dakota.

I know that Columbus

did not invent America.

I have heard a hundred housebroken Ezra Pounds.

They should all be freed.

It is long since I was a herdsman.

I am leading a quiet life

in Mike’s Place every day

reading the Classified columns.

I have read the Reader’s Digest

from cover to cover

and noted the close identification

of the United States and the Promised Land

where every coin is marked

In God We Trust

but the dollar bills do not have it

being gods unto themselves.

I read the Want Ads daily

looking for a stone a leaf

an unfound door.

I hear America singing

in the Yellow Pages.

One could never tell

the soul has its rages.

I read the papers every day

and hear humanity amiss

in the sad plethora of print.

I see where Walden Pond has been drained

to make an amusement park.

I see they’re making Melville

eat his whale.

I see another war is coming

but I won’t be there to fight it.

I have read the writing

on the outhouse wall.

I helped Kilroy write it.

I marched up Fifth Avenue

blowing on a bugle in a tight platoon

but hurried back to the Casbah

looking for my dog.

I see a similarity

between dogs and me.

Dogs are the true observers

walking up and down the world

thru the Molloy country.

I have walked down alleys

too narrow for Chryslers.

I have seen a hundred horseless milkwagons

in a vacant lot in Astoria.

Ben Shahn never painted them

but they’re there

askew in Astoria.

I have heard the junkman’s obbligato.

I have ridden superhighways

and believed the billboard’s promises

Crossed the Jersey Flats

and seen the Cities of the Plain

And wallowed in the wilds of Westchester

with its roving bands of natives

in stationwagons.

I have seen them.

I am the man.

I was there.

I suffered

somewhat.

I am an American.

I have a passport.

I did not suffer in public.

And I’m too young to die.

I am a selfmade man.

And I have plans for the future.

I am in line

for a top job.

I may be moving on

to Detroit.

I am only temporarily

a tie salesman.

I am a good Joe.

I am an open book

to my boss.

I am a complete mystery

to my closest friends.

I am leading a quiet life

in Mike’s Place every day

contemplating my navel.

I am a part

of the body’s long madness.

I have wandered in various nightwoods.

I have leaned in drunken doorways.

I have written wild stories

without punctuation.

I am the man.

I was there.

I suffered

somewhat.

I have sat in an uneasy chair.

I am a tear of the sun.

I am a hill

where poets run.

I invented the alphabet

after watching the flight of cranes

who made letters with their legs.

I am a lake upon a plain.

I am a word

in a tree.

I am a hill of poetry.

I am a raid

on the inarticulate.

I have dreamt

that all my teeth fell out

but my tongue lived

to tell the tale.

For I am a still

of poetry.

I am a bank of song.

I am a playerpiano

in an abandoned casino

on a seaside esplanade

in a dense fog

still playing.

I see a similarity

between the Laughing Woman

and myself.

I have heard the sound of summer

in the rain.

I have seen girls on boardwalks

have complicated sensations.

I understand their hesitations.

I am a gatherer of fruit.

I have seen how kisses

cause euphoria.

I have risked enchantment.

I have seen the Virgin

in an appletree at Chartres

And Saint Joan burn

at the Bella Union.

I have seen giraffes in junglejims

their necks like love

wound around the iron circumstances

of the world.

I have seen the Venus Aphrodite

armless in her drafty corridor.

I have heard a siren sing

at One Fifth Avenue.

I have seen the White Goddess dancing

in the Rue des Beaux Arts

on the Fourteenth of July

and the Beautiful Dame Without Mercy

picking her nose in Chumley’s.

She did not speak English.

She had yellow hair

and a hoarse voice

I am leading a quiet life

in Mike’s Place every day

watching the pocket pool players

making the minestrone scene

wolfing the macaronis

and I have read somewhere

the Meaning of Existence

yet have forgotten

just exactly where.

But I am the man

And I’ll be there.

And I may cause the lips

of those who are asleep

to speak.

And I may make my notebooks

into sheaves of grass.

And I may write my own

eponymous epitaph

instructing the horsemen

to pass.

Copyright Credit: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Autobiography” from A Coney Island of the Mind. Copyright © 1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, www.wwnorton.com/nd/welcome.htm.

Source: These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1993)