What thoughts have you tonight, Allen Ginsberg, as you walk through the
spontaneous spittle trails of shell-shocked trees. snug in carl solomon’s boots as a
moloch weathered monger, you ship out for the peyote skull
super-marquee, howling at Gestapo editorial eyes! What long, breathless lines in
checkout! Complete chaos, you deli devil without meter! Aisles ravaged
with highbrow cavefuckers of the new criticism! Repetition in the waste. Repetition
in the waste? Repetition in the waste! – and to the spice rack,
for we all need flavorings and friends. What do you crave tonight?
I see you, Allen Ginsberg, formless, lonely with jazz and dope, nosing through
self-destructive prizes in material cereals and eyeball kicking haiku and Cezanne
paintings. I hear your krishnaism, the humming anima in your psychic wand
absorbing the all:
the “hydrogen jukebox”,
the “Dexedrine clown”,
the who, the America.
I stumble through your piles of empty heartgut cans scraped of their ichor
following your free wheel in paranoia of pursuit by the academic shame-on-you.
We pass through in our delicate defiance inhaling the junk art, the art junk, the
junked art, and push ourselves through the checkout lanes.
What of your discount on free verse, Allen Ginsberg? Coupons expire farther this
direction. Is there any use in asking where we’re going?
You pass under a shade tree and disappear for moment to momentary,
and I try to force out our pilgrimage through your supermarket
and digest this insurrection toward our father who art in traditional verse…

I am not concerned, convinced, or disturbed by any America lost or found, Al.
my pen dreams move as yours might have
            a loose n’ free scribble stream screaming fishtails and stormshout
and my strolling at times dips with a similar swagger
as I brush against the other patrons of the street to
pickpocket any scrap of their condition that
I can exercise with these keys.
However, I renounce only the cold irons you broke out of, Allen Ginsberg,
you are not my father and my teacher
is a mandrake root beneath my heels.

 

[Title taken from line 9 of Ezra Pound’s “A Pact”]