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Stimulus: Mugging City Lights |
| Bob Donlin, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Robert La Vigne, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco, 1956 |
| Posted on 05/22/2006 |
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| [Respond To This] | [View All Stimuli] |
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ALL RESPONSES |
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Why not revolt or at least bash some heads? Because we've had enough of that. In the face of death, let us take pictures of the faces of life. Out of chaos, order (or so they say), and in their case it was the ordering of chaos. The words brought forth the beauty of Brownian Movement, the arabesque unkowing in the eye of the storm! Of course, they'd find wisdom in wine, light in darkness, spodee-odee nickels for the juke slot of enlightenment.
"Gather 'round, fellas. This guy's got a camera that'll pick up our souls! Ever hear of such a thing?"
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Poets go,
The building stays.
Illuminated not by bulbs
But souls
Wandering between words
Searching for the wordless worlds
Within worlds
That whirl and swirl
Like the waters of the bay
The hue of jazz and groin
The moaning salt, the wind, and howl
Eat. Drink. Bridge. Forge, friend, forge. |
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If you go to San Francisco, you can see us
standing there in sun, in front, bookstore
faces halfway between smiles and death
Time on the meter running out, no one
willing to dig out a dime, or a quarter
frozen like a photo, part of the landscape
Five guys, motionless, for hours, years
our hair grows longer, grayer
please notice, we have no beards
Still, they grow, the bookstore closes
the sun sets, dogs pee on us, it rains
we get wet, people walk in raincoats
past the bookstore, going home, or
to the bar, shopping, walking, thinking
we are works of art, just standing there
with haircuts, cigarettes, polished shoes
on curb, statues in gray tone marble
waiting for reasons to wait for reason
books for sale
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Ginsburg, of course, would be bald by the end
of the decade. Shame, too, with that beautiful
hair once his. Kerouac and Neal, best friends
feuding, would hold their coifs till earthly toils
involving alcohol and Mexican whores
took them down hard, but damn their hair looked fine.
Ginsburg, sleek upstairs, stayed around for more,
writing on even after his muse declined
to let his hair remain in place, restless
genius harvesting silken locks then spun
into images of beauty, of rage, of love's cruel loss.
Could poetry ever Time's cruel shears make blunt?
No. Beats could free our minds with shocking prose
But when Dharma whims for baldness, the hair goes.
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Faux leather bits, a gum wrapper,
shaved off like age,
cursing, cigarette butts, Susie Q,
plastered the holes of our soles.
The end month faded peculiar,
the old men boomed,
our surnames,
“It’s them!” they run away with ball gloves,
anchored to their handlebars,
anon, braking for sensibility.
Our teenage reflection,
across on the bakery’s window pane,
whose tipping of old,
berets, caps, bucket caps,
salute a solemn detachment of shoulders to forearms.
Chums strumming away the banjo of yesteryear,
while the final babyhood sun
bounced down Market Street,
its antipodal rays perpetuating adages of old.
We share a few pages,
behind from where we stood,
some limericks, a fiction, a mystery,
cementing the voids in the dusty bookshelves,
behind from where we stood.
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They were the new Romantics, only
not as talented.
Out in the open country.
The roads and the wine and the sentiment.
Shoe laces missing. Late nights on the docks.
Living by some shack or campfire,
some friends' parents' house.
Worth a postcard?
Buy it, darling, but let's not pretend:
Snyder only dug up
what Wordsworth had buried
somewhere up in the Lake District
and Coleridge was deeper than Ginsberg
and Shelly's mind held more of the sky
than the best of them on drugs.
Keroac only went once on the road.
Byron led a revolution in Greece.
Let's blow this bookstore, baby.
Pick up a copy of Keats - if they have one.
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