Velocity Of Money poem – Allen Ginsberg

I’m delighted by the velocity of money as it whistles through the windows

of Lower East Side

Delighted by skyscrapers rising the old grungy apartments falling on

84th Street

Delighted by inflation that drives me out on the street

After all what good’s the family farm, why eat turkey by thousands every

Thanksgiving?

Why not have Star Wars? Why have the same old America?!?

George Washington wasn’t good enough! Tom Paine pain in the neck,

Whitman what a jerk!

I’m delighted by double digit interest rates in the Capitalist world

I always was a communist, now we’ll win

an usury makes the walls thinner, books thicker & dumber

Usury makes my poetry more valuable

my manuscripts worth their weight in useless gold –

Now everybody’s atheist like me, nothing’s sacred

buy and sell your grandmother, eat up old age homes,

Peddle babies on the street, pretty boys for sale on Times Square –

You can shoot heroin, I can sniff cocaine,

macho men can fite on the Nicaraguan border and get paid with paper!

The velocity’s what counts as the National Debt gets higher

Everybody running after the rising dollar

Crowds of joggers down broadway past City Hall on the way to the Fed

Nobody reads Dostoyevsky books so they’ll have to give a passing ear

to my fragmented ravings in between President’s speeches

Nothing’s happening but the collapse of the Economy

so I can go back to sleep till the landlord wins his eviction suit in court.