What will it take to hear
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.