Pook is here

In 1958 Burroughs was arrested in New York for writing "Ah Pook is Here" on a subway wall, for which Simon and Garfunkel later sang, "The words of the prophet are written on the subway walls and tenement halls".

"And the people bowed and prayed To the neon god they made And the sign flashed out its warning In the words that it was forming And the sign said "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls And tenement halls And whispered in the sound of silence."

Ah Pook is Here was a collaboration between author William Burroughs and artist Malcolm Mc Neill. It began in 1970, when Burroughs was living in London and Mc Neill was in his final year of art school. It first appeared under the title The Unspeakable Mr. Hart as a comic strip in the English magazine Cyclops. When Cyclops ceased publication, Burroughs and Mc Neill decided to develop the concept as a book.After a year of research and preliminary design the text of the book had expanded from 11 pages to 50, and a complete mockup had been produced. By this point, the work had been renamed Ah Puch is Here in reference to the Mayan Death God. Straight Arrow Books in San Francisco agreed to publish the proposed work in 1971 as a "Word/Image novel" which was to comprise 120 pages, some of integrated text and image, some of text alone and some which featured only pictures.In 1973, Mc Neill moved to San Francisco from London to finish the project. However, the small advance proffered by the publisher made any more than a few months of working full-time on the project impossible, and when Straight Arrow closed in 1974 the book was without a publisher. Nevertheless, Mc Neill moved to New York in 1975 to rejoin Burroughs and continue the work. They were unable to find another publisher and after seven years on and off, the project was finally abandoned. It was subsequently published in 1979 in text form only under the original title of Ah Pook is Here.Burroughs reads from Ah Pook is Here on his 1990 recording Dead City Radio; this recording, in turn, formed the soundtrack to the animated short Ah Pook is Here directed by Philip Hunt.