Original subtitles

And I got my Central Intelligence gettin' rid of him right now!

Dear Gregory,

how can I say how I feel today, May 6th?

I have awoken from two days sleep and there is sunshine everywhere.

I've gone out to walk in the streets

and withdrawn my money from the bank.

I've quit the university and gone to buy honey donuts

and come home to sit in the sunshine.

I have four quarts of milk in the refrigerator.

I wisht he milkman would leave me alone.

He will. So will they all.

This is real now.

All these studies seem senseless to me now.

They teach me how to work,

but I don't get any answers to what really matters to me.

So, I sit in the sunshine and look at the pigeons.

Why did Frances commit suicide?

Why should one commit suicide?

Why does one commit suicide? Why?

Why does one commit suicide today?

I walked on the banks of the Tin Can Banana dock

and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive

to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.

I've spent forty years of my life on the seas.

All this is nothing now.

I still see the widened spaces of the ocean.

I look at the ocean.

There I can dream.

There I can still dream.

Bronx, factories,

Bronx.

Everybody in the Bronx is ugly.

I look at the ocean,

there, I can still dream there...

Take the police away, the army,

the navy, take the atom away, and they will have something else.

The minds of men must be changed.

We shall win only through the minds of men.

You think that people who live by appearances all their lives

will be capable of any basic changes?

Look, Frank...

St. Paul was a criminal before he was a saint.

Will our generation be capable of any acts of an essential quality?

Everytime I see a pregnant woman I want to greet her

as a friend,

as a conspirator in the plot of a new man...

What will he be like, our new man?

I don't know.

All I want is to dream dreams into him.

If we don't do it, nobody is going to do it.

Tell me what do we believe in, then? They don't care.

You have said too much,

but not enough.

What do you believe in then?

I don't believe in half solutions.

What solutions?

Makes no sense.

No sense.

Listen to the night...

Subway...

The cars...

The people...

Strange, unrecognizable sounds.

At night, though, everything seems

so mysteriously beautiful.

These will be the first sounds our child will hear.

Sounds of the night,

whispering behind venetian blinds,

sounds of people walking their night dreams...

As long as this child is in me

I will think into him only the most beautiful

and the most lovely thoughts...

Life itself is beauty and truth, Frances.

Life is just a daily agitation, agitation for the day,

it's just a bowl of only trivia.

- What do you learn by that? - But you should learn.

The small people don't learn from daily agitation

and trivial working, and so forth.

But people like you and me

should learn something from everything that happens.

Why should I learn to live with pain?

Do you always suffer?

Why do you always think of suffering, Frances?

Aren't you ever happy? Answer me that.

Aren't you ever, ever happy once out of three months?

One day out of three months, aren't you happy?

That's what you live for.

Live, that's all, forget everything.

Live, let your hair down, as they say.

Don't worry about it, baby, just live...

We are all the same in the rain.

I see myself

and all of us in the thick air,

the cold small park across the street.

I pity its benches over all the citizenry.

The beautiful, sweet pigeons there,

constant friends.

The stone and wood houses and stores

have magic in them in the dark afternoons.

The leaves fall off the trees,

and sparrows in the leaves all wam and damp from the rain.

We can stand by the windows andfeelthe music comingin...

Mr. Maciunas?

I'm Mr. Carruthers, from Consolidated Life Insurance.

Perhaps you would be interested in obtaining

one of these policies with Consolidated Life?

Would you be interested in obtaining such a policy, Sir?

Don't we believe in death anymore?

Well...

...millions of agitated fanatics in the bughouse

for the sake of the sceaming soprano of industry

Money-chant of soapers -

toothpaste apes in television sets -

deodoizers onhypnotic chairs -

petroleum mongers in Texas -

jet plane streaks among the clouds -

skywriters liars in the face of Divinity -

fanged butchers of hats and shoes,

all owners! Owners! Owners!

With their obsession on property and the vanishing Selfhood!

And their long editorial on the fence of the screaming negro

attacked by ants crawled out of the front page!

Machinery of a mass electrical dream!

A war-creating whore of Babylon bellowing over Capitols and Academies!

Money! Money! Money!

Shrieking mad celestial money of illusion!

Money made of nothing, starvation, suicide!

Money of failure! Money of death!

Money against eternity!

And eternity's strong mills grind outvast paper of illusion!

You know, you're still an idealist.

You have to grow up, or you won't succeed.

You know, sooner or later,

everybody gives up, everybody gives up...

Your mother's still up?

She can't sleep.

Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night

and I see her there, standing, staring.

Walk out into the land with me,

warmly clothed against the chilled brown sun,

and dance between these trees,

their arms thrust fearfully to the sky, their mouths scream.

Surely, in the background, out of human sight,

a gun is trained on them.

What is man?

The Chinese used to say, just a reed...

Perhaps just that. Just to be,

to sway, for a hundred years...

I don't want a hundred years of this life!

What I see and live with is not worth living.

Ugly, ugly, ugly...

Will this ever change?

What'd you say about my United Fruit?

Don't be nasty you lower class piece of trade.

I'll show you who's Miss Liberty or not-

I got what it takes!

I got the 1920s! (Snap your fingers kid!)

I got Nostalgia of Depression!

I got the N.R.A.! I got Roosevelt I got Hoover

I got Wilkie I got Hitler I got Franco I got WorldWar II!

I got the works(cha! cha!) I got the atom bomb!

Why, anybody stop being contained in my presence,

I got a big black, thousand foot long bomb!

I got cancer! I got fission! I got legal prohibition!

I got the works! I got the junk law! I got a hundred billion bucks a year!

Yassah! Yassah! I got Formosa!(Catch me man)

I got ChiangKai-Shek!

And I got my Central Intelligence gettin' rid of him right now!

I got a million planes flying over Siberia!

I gotten million upstanding young americans

chargin' on the rice fields of China

Jazzin' and waltzin' and shootin' and hollering all day! Whoopee!

I got cross-eyed yellow cuties in every corner of the world

I got my Guantánamo, I even got my own marines!

You'd think I was an old thing way back from the 19th century

With Isadora Duncan, Robert Duncan and the Floradora Sextette!

But I still got my old man, my handsome lovin' blond Marines!

I'm Miss America! I'm Mae West!

I'm the Sophie Tucke of Foever! I'm the red Hot Mama of Tomorrow!

Aint nobody gonna burn down my Miami Hotel!

This is my free country and I'll denounce my people all I want,

if it's going rotten and full of paid smug college boys

spying on my private life!

I dreamed J.Edgar Hoover groped me in a silent hallway in the Capitol -

...alamed. Drivers pull to the curb and take shelter.

Pedestrians go to the nearest air-raid shelter.

This is a test, repeat, this is a test.

Do not become alarmed.

Drivers pull to the curb and take shelter.

Pedestrians go to the nearest air-raid shelter for cover.

This is a test,

repeat, this is a test. Do not become alarmed.

What flowers will grow in the desert park of our youth?

You would like to burn it,

to burn the wild park of our youth.

Madame Chiang Kai-Shek?

The policemen? -The policemen!

The atomic pirates...

At 12 o'clock today, at 12 o'clock,

the atomic pirates...

The scientists...

The generals, the generals,

the world will be made yours, for the generals...

I am the eternal man.

Tabularasa...

I have begotten you all,

in my blind passion,

that you might live in blind passion.

I am eternal woman.

My womb brought you all

into the world.

The faceless ones,

the quiet ones.

Presidents.

The generals.

Anonymous and blank.

Weren't we born animals

and aren't we going to die animals?

There is nothing wrong with Fidel Castro.

You compare yourself to Fidel Castro?

No,

I identify with him.

You realize Fidel Castro is a revolutionary.

Are you revolting against something?

- Yes, I am. - What are you revolting against?

Against dishonesty, corruption.

What do you want? To change the world? Is that your idea?

I think everybody wants to change the world, no?

Well some people are willing to work...

What do you think of America? You who run America,

vote hypocrite, edit school books,

make foreign wars, appoint aldermen and football coaches?

You who there foe are America, the land that opens its mouth

to speak with 400 billion dollars of armaments

all for bombs and horor, fraud,dope fiends,Syngman Rhee,

Batista, Chiang Kai-Shek, madmen,

Franco -who else god knows. I refuse to read the paper!

You are not insane, you are harmless.

But you are asocial.

I don't know how to make you understand me.

I am what I am because I do care,

I passionately care about people.

I care about what I do and about the consequences.

For me, this is the only way of living.

Tell me: do I have any choice?

My only choice is between one corruption and another,

between one lie and another,

between one pretension and another.

Bubbles, bubbles, bubbles.

- Bubbles? - Yes, bubbles.

I always have this feeling when I speak with people like you.

Like speaking under water.

A wall of water.

We speak, we listen,

but we don't understand each other.

Why then don't you speak up clearly?

There is nothing the matter with me, don't you see?

There is nothing the matter...

More bubbles...

What is it the matter of?

I remember the day she was born, in the hospital.

The nurse brought her in,

the milky little thing.

And there she was,

awake-asleep,

with her dreaming child's fingers touching mine

for the first time,

changing the color of the morning.

I said to myself:

Who am I? Who is she?

As I lay there, I suddenly felt a solemn earthiness

fill my soul and my body,

as I touched her,

I'll never forget that ecstasy, that serenity.

...but I heard music in boxes

and sweet calls eclipsing an afternoon bright

...believe me, I have seen what the window shows.

...I have not died yet.

...beautiful hatred into this fierce sky.

It is hurting us.

I want to go home

and have cookies in dull kitchens and glasses of milk.

I wonder what his eyes are like...

It's strange

how one remembers nothing from this small age...

...where are the snows of yesteryear...?

When he looks into my eyes, I tremble.

It's almost as if he knows more about life than we do.

It's so humid...

He's sleeping now. He cried and cried all morning.

But maybe it's his teeth, too, you know...

Yes, he is just getting them.

I think they usually get the ones in the front first...

Because there is a little tiny white thing showing on his gum...

So that must be the tooth...

It's so funny, I don't know anything about...

Eat, eat. Good...

Is anybody going to die here tonight? - Yes.

- I can't eat this much... - Honey, this is good, isn't it?

- You like it, Gregory? - Enjoy it?

I dig it. I dig it more than anything

because it only costs less than two dollars. That's why I dig it.

- What do you call it? - Pot luck.

You have a spoon?

Who killed Frances?

Nobody commit suicide!

Nobody commit suicide!

Mayakovsky, Lorca, Crane,

Neruda, Essenin, Appolinaire, Artaud -

suicided, mudered prophets!

Damn the world from your great graves!

Utter the poet's curse from death for its starvation and hypocrisy -

I will be with you soon.

None listens to the howl of wolf from the deepest voices of the age.

None hears the cry of famine of the soul -

I will be with you soon in that dark grave that gapes for ...

We sat by the lake eating apples.

I said: "What do you propose? What's the way out?"

Leo said:

"What is the way out for an asp tree?

Or an apple?"

We sat silently.

The apple is passive. "

Leo said:

"Tell me, if you know, what is action?"

And then Leo said: "Let us not talk.

I don't trust words, not any longer, or not yet. "

Leo finished his apple and threw the core into the lake.

We watched it.

I said: "Don't you see?"

"Why did Frances really commit suicide, " I said.

"Why does one commit suicide?

From strength or from weakness?"

"But then, what's the way out?" he said.

I've lived 22 years! 22 autumns.

Still, to watch the autumn come so automatically is painful.

It is vulgar, how it forces itself through the trees and sky and windows.

I'll not accept it.

Let it rain!

Let it come down! Let it rain and fall!

Let it rain!

Let it rain on the harbor, on the trees, on the city.

How it rains!

It will probably be the last pure rain.

The next rain will be full of strontium.

Chessman dies in the gas chamber!

An atomic missile explodes in New Jersey!

80% of the budget is spent for war industries!

Nixon is running for president!

And Argus is gonna have a baby!

Let us drink to this beautiful, beautiful atom bomb...

Stop it. Stop it, Benny. I can't stand it anymore.

Let us drink then, this flower of the clouds!

- Let us drink. - I can't stand it anymore...

Pale hot days retreat now

full of wild leaves in the window

and the pleasant river.

I've been there today,

It was ninety degrees sitting on the bank -

and I watched dark clouds pass the sun.

I am burnt

and go home dizzy as the light is lengthening along the street

and there are old leaves and last year's newspapers,

cars and cars going...

Home I guess.

It's the whole system.

We have to destroy and burn the whole system.

A man, a man must live here and now,

and here and now!

Why don't you go home? You know you're drunk.

We were born pure.

We were born pure, goddamit!

- You're getting really drunk. - I'm not drunk.

I'm not drunk. But I will be drunk.

You've had enough.

That's enough now.

Come here, come here, how much for the beer?

Let's you and me, let's you and me,

just forget about it, and go out and have a little toot.

I'm a wolf. I'm going back to the woods.

You are, huh?

"Our policy is one of trust."

You think it would be alright if I make a deposit, right here and now?

- I think I'll make a deposit then. - It will be safe and secure!

Right here and now.

You can't piss on the bank here. Come on, come on! Let's go.

Brothers, brothers, we are all brothers,

but we are brother wolves.

Where are we over here, where are we going?

Where do you live?

What are those plants?

What is that?

Leave them alone, Something growing there.

PIants in the middle of the ruins.

Come on, get away from them. Let's go, let's go home... Iet's go.

Only the roots are clean...

Only the roots are clean...

Only the roots are clean...

Roots boots schmoots, let's go home.

You're flat!

It is we who fool ourselves

with every little insignificant change,

every new president, new words...

It's I who fool myself with every new president,

every little insignificant change,

new words...

I'm losing gound, getting weak. Ugliness is taking over.

I no longer have the strength to resist it.

To conform or be free?

To commit lies every day or be free?

Should I give way to it or get out before it crushes me?

Tell me: my being or my life?

I need your help. Help me.

Darkness is taking over.

Don't be kind, be truthful. Have you faith?

I am searching.

I'm trying to keep my faith.

The minute I find it, that minute it's gone.

And I'm searching for it again.

Autumn. Frances says: "You never talk. "

Gregory says: "I used to. I'm silent now.

Everytime I open my mouth I feel bullets would shoot out.

There are too many things that anger me. "

Frances stops.

"You can take it with silence! But I'm a woman!

I'm a woman! I'm a woman!

Woman! Woman! Woman!

But I am a woman!"

I am the defense early warning radar system.

I see nothing but bombs.

...Fortunately all governments will fall.

The only ones which won't fall are the good ones

and the good ones don't yet exist.

Butt hey have to begin existing, they exist in my poems.

They exist in the death of the Russian and American governments.

They exist in the death of Hart Crane and Mayakovsky.

Now is the time for prophecy without death as a consequence.

The universe will ultimately disappear.

History will maket his poem prophetic

and its awful silliness a hideous spiritual music.

I have the moan of doves and the feather of ecstasy.

Man cannot long endure the hunger of the cannibal abstract.

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower

O my soul, I loved you then!

The grime was no man's grime but death and human locomotives,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin,

that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis'ry,

that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance

of artificial worse-than-dirt -industrial - modern -

all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown -

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes

and ends and withered roots below,

in the home-pile of sand and sawdust...

...and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul too,

and anyone who'll listen,

-We're not our skin of grime,

we'e not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive,

we'e all beautiful golden sunflowers inside,

we are blessed by our own seed

and golden hairy naked accomplishment-bodies...