Motherhood Quote by Gregory Corso

A whole childhood is compressed into a sentence that refuses to perform grief “correctly.” Corso’s bluntness isn’t lack of feeling; it’s a Beat-era strategy: strip the lyric mask off and let abandonment sit there, unadorned, like a bruise you stop noticing because it’s always been part of the body. The first clause is almost bureaucratic - “went into the armed service” - the kind of phrasing you’d find on a form. Then the second clause detonates it: “and I never saw my mother.” War doesn’t just take soldiers; it rearranges family architecture so thoroughly that the mother can disappear without even a narrative to explain it.

“I don’t know what happened to her” lands as both confession and indictment. The subtext isn’t simply personal loss; it’s institutional neglect, the way poor and immigrant kids (Corso’s Italian American background matters here) can fall through the cracks of churches, welfare offices, courts, and kin networks. The sentence’s emotional force comes from what it withholds: no melodrama, no timeline, no villain, not even the comfort of certainty. That absence mirrors the speaker’s lived reality - not tragedy with a plot, but trauma as missing data.

In the context of Corso’s work and the Beat scene’s obsession with origin stories, this line reads like an anti-myth. Instead of the heroic “I came from somewhere,” you get a haunting administrative blank. It’s a personal history shaped by public systems, and it dares you to feel how normal that erasure can become.