the streets wet you can tell by the sound of the cars

Three poems by Philip Whalen

The Life of Literature

"Wonder whether you or they hold the rights" and would you
care and I wonder what would you do if you had the chance

I just bet you would, you'd
take one look and run away
I bet you would, even if you had the chance
you'd be afraid
you wouldn't take it even then.

"even if it was set before you on a silver platter."

Where there was one there's more
a lot more where that one came from,
poetry,
to spurt right out the top of my head
"the come of the poem," as Ginsberg says.

Public Opinions

Peter Warshall says that the slow loris moves approximately
three feet per hour.

Donald R. Carpenter says, "I don't do ANY hot water numbers
in the morning."

Allen Ginsberg, reading a poem handed to him by a friend,
says, "AH, that's green armpit poetry."

Irving Oyle says: What did Chekov do but live in a small town
where everybody said, "Some day I'll go to Moscow?"

What I say is that in every toke you could taste the cold
slick throb of real DOPE: fine east india hemp.

Earthquake
Ducky Fault Slip
Ducky False Lip?

"no effect on me whatsoever"

I Told Myself

I told myself that I wasn't going to het high today:
and I told myself that if I did get high
it wasn't going to be on acid --
but I thought to myself, well maybe
if I just broke a little corner off it
there'd still be an awful lot of it left...
a corner off today