Poetry is
about to take form, become an animal;
poetry is
a shorter, heavier word.
The poem’s a small room;
poetry
will gain access.
a small room
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Tag Archives: beat poetry
what / should I fly
what
should I fly
unto
my senses
delight
with
crowns and rich apparel
dance and then depart
show
what magic can perform
and do
a thousand
deeds?
I
shall
as a kid i always knew the wind was up to no good
as a kid i always knew
the wind was up to no good
for all it never did me any harm
in the stories it was always
driving the hapless schooner on the shoals
then becalming the shipwrecked sailor
who clung to a spar a ragged shirt for a sail
or it was sidling down back alleys
and through the branches of landlocked trees
under moonpale clouds in the dead of night
squirreling away skeleton leaves
ghosts of plastic bags
and stale shreds of news
to deliver them unlooked for
months and county lines away
or it was whipping up prairie dissent
sometimes slamming a straw straight
into a phone pole
like a hammer drives a nail
or it was snooping up water for later
then freezing it to hail
the size of golfballs
pelting houses and cows
and fleeing into the stratosphere
so i knew not to trust the wind
even though it might never get around to
marooning you or
slamming a soda straw into you
ponder the still eye of the storm
you ll see what i mean
Under the hood:
If I Was Ever Going to Say It
Last night, everything still,
I still, all the people still, the world still,
A dream slipped in
Like a memory, not a dream.
He didn’t say Hello
He just said, Hey.
Hey. I got over it,
He said. The way you do.
It wasn’t so hard, or so bad.
And the time we live in now
Is the important thing
When nobody has to say I love you
Which is really Goodbye
Because nobody’s dying.
Then he told a joke.
Then I learned there wasn’t
A single moment
I could have changed.
Just all of them.
Later the stillness broke,
I waking, the whole world waking
As the line of dawn runs around the world
And the sky brightens and then
Everything starts to hum
Like there’s something inside everything.
That was the time to say Goodbye,
If I was ever going to say it.
Don’t pretend you don’t know me
This morning when you passed
Me and I followed
You on the sidewalk
Your shadow after you’d passed
Was right there in my way,
So I stepped on your shadow’s
Head. All the way down the sidewalk
I secretly followed,
Skipping discreetly, your shadow’s
Trail, stepping and stepping the whole way.
A Letter to the Late Allen Ginsberg
Around this time, Ginsberg also had what he referred to as his “Blake vision,” an auditory hallucination of William Blake reading his poems “Ah Sunflower,” “The Sick Rose,” and “Little Girl Lost.”
So tell me this one thing,
Old poet, mad saint,
What will it take to make the world strike me with its great magic?
What will it take to hear
William Blake declaiming Sunflower
in Harlem tenement?
William Blake declaiming Sunflower
in Harlem tenement?
Litany of drugs, poetry, masturbation, family history of insanity, criminal friends, jazz bars cosmic gaze smoky poet’s beard?
Is it typewriter, telegram, radio wave death that killed the voice of William Blake?
I process words, spell check, send beat poems by email. But I can type! send telegram! I seek out old radio shows, flat voices, analog tape hiss, all! I stay up all night! I embrace limitations! I cry up camp!
I sleep with many men, urge each one to grow out his beard!
I contemplate marijuana, ayahuasca, beer, peyote!
But alas contemplate as well a family unremittingly sane, professors, doctors, scientists, lawyers, old criminal friends respectable now, work for Boeing, Disney, partners in law firms,
Anyway these days you have to be good or you’ll never afford to retire you’ll have to work till you drop and who wants that?
And it’s all too easy to be good we have jazz bars you can’t even smoke in, we have digital TV, smart drugs, drive by shootings but they’re not somebody’s fault just bad luck, now it’s okay to masturbate everybody masturbates now it’s not even fun anymore, we have internet porn, mandatory capitalism, avant garde paranoia, sophisticated bigots armed with DNA and Right Guard
But we wonder what it’s all for, we didn’t tune in, we can’t drop out, we can’t get out the vote. We want something or other but what?
Only I seem to know what I want & I want what you had Allen Ginsberg
I want William Blake
declaiming Sunflower in my room
not to give answers to cosmic questions
but to show me he still can.
Bag of Anything 