My Second Letter to Allen Ginsberg
Dear Allen,
Almost five years ago, I wrote you a letter, and in
That letter, I purged my drunkenly woeful cries
That seem so first-world now and naïve –
The things I grimed over with luxuries I didn’t
Realize that rubbed against my plump limbs
Like millions of felines poised at the
Tombs of pharaohs.

Oh, Allen, I’m so tired –
These politics, and poly ticks, so many ticks that
Annoy my tics. Allen! I smear your name so liberally
Against this paper like primer because the easiest way
To coerce someone into listening to you like
A mother
or predator
tugging or nibbling on your ear –
Swatches of velvet scalped from a ****’s coat
Are you and I talking to ourselves again?
Candid insanity : Smoky hesitance.

Dear Allen, I’m so tired –
Yes, I love wearing my ovaries on the outside like
Some Amazonian soapbox gem glistening from beneath
The iron boots of what the newspapers tell me while
I cough at them with the hurdled delicacies of alphabet soup.
Give vegetables a gender and call them onions, Allen.
Sullied scratch-hicks pinioned feet from slapping
Society’s last rung on the ladder.
Ignore the swerve of small-town eyes.
Scapulas, stirrups, pap smears, and cervical mucus – now do you know who we are?

That fingernail clipped too short, Allen. We’ve all got AIDs
And AIDs babies, haven’t you heard? Hemorrhaging from the political
****** and out – they haven’t reached the heart.  
Since when have old white men given a **** about some
13 year old’s birth control? I’m riding on the waves of the
Parachute game and I swear this abortion-issue is just a veil outside Tuskegee University
Being further shove over plaintive eyes, swollen and black.
Pay up and
shut up.

I still remember my first broken *****, Allen.
Can you tell me all about your first time?
The vasodilatation that made veins rub against skin,
Delirious brilliance : unfathomable electricity.
I made love during an LSD experience, Allen,
And I am not sorry. I see cosmic visions and
Manifest universal vibrations as if this entire world is
A dish reverberating with textiles and marbles, and
All are plundering the depths of the finished wine
Bottle roasting in the sink like Thanksgiving Turkey.
The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you.
The opening, between you and you, occupied,
zoned for an encounter,
given the histories of you and you—
And always, who is this you?
The start of you, each day,
a presence already—
Hey, you!

Ah, Allen, if you are not safe, then I am not safe.
And where is the safest place when that place
Must be someplace other than in the body?
Am I talking to myself again?
You are not sick, you are injured—
you ache for the rest of life.

Why is it that I have to explain to my students that
sometimes what I'm spouting is prescribed by a pedagogical pharmacy --
but all they want to know is "what do the symbols on the television mean?"
I am completely aghast against the ghosts of future goners --
I am legitimately licensed to speak, write, listen like some mothers --
I am constantly cajoling the complex creations blamed on burned-out educators --
I am following the flagrant, fired-up "*******"s tagging lockers --
Pay up and
shut up.

Yes, and it’s Hopeless. Allen.
Where did we get off leaping and bounding into
The dogpile for chump change jurisdiction, policing
The right and the left for inherent hypocrisies when
Poets are so frightful to turn that introspective judgment
Upon ourselves?
We didn’t see it coming and I heard the flies, Allen.
Mean crocodile tears. Flamingo mascara tracks
Up and down : up and down: bow – bow – bow – bow
Buoyant amongst the misguided ******* floating around
In the swirlpool of lackadaisical introspection.
What good is vague vocab within poetry?
Absolutely none.
Would you leave the porchlight on tonight?
Absolutely, baby.

Dear Allen, would you grow amongst the roots and dirt
At the knuckles of a slackjawed brush of Ever-Pondering Questions
Only to ask them time-and-time-and-time-and-time-again.
Or pinch your forehead with burrowed, furrowed concentration upon those
Feeble branches of progression towards something that recedes further
And further with as much promise as the loving hand
Attempts to guide a lover to the bed?

Allen, I wish to see this world feelingly through the vibrations of billions of bodies, rocking and sobbing, plotting and gnashing like the movement of a million snakes, like the curves collecting and riding the parachute-veil.

Ah, Allen! Say it ain’t so! Sanctified swerve town eyes.
And everything is melting while poets take the weather
Too personally
And all the Holden Caulfields of the world read all the
*******’s written on the walls and all the Invisible Men
Eat Yams and all the Zampanos are blind and blind
And blind and blind and blind and blind
Yet see as much as Gloucester, as much as Homer,
As much as Oedipus.

Oh, Allen, do you see this world feelingly
and wander around the desert?
Colored marbles vibrating on the curtailed parachute paradox.
Lamentation of a small town’s onion. Little do we know, Allen,
That what you cannot see, we cannot see, and we are bubbling
Over in the animal soup of the proud yet weary. I can see,
However, how the peeled back skulls of a million
Workboots and paystubs may never sully the burden
Of an existential angst in miniscule amounts.
Pay up and
shut up.  

My dearest Allen, there is always a question of how
The cigarettes became besmirched with wax to complement
What was once grass, and
What was once a garish night drenching doorknobs.
The night's yawn absorbs you as you lie down at the wrong angle
To the sun ready already to let go of your hand
As you stepped, quivering, on to
The shores of Lethe.

The green combusts, the cherry sclerotized mask dances above
the invisible paper carapace.
Stuffed full with Rotten skunk innards and burning,
tongues of heat sweat away its crystalline hairs.
Aren is hunched and crooked, all teeth and lungs,
under the mixed halogens of suburban porchlight,
being bathed in bluescale waves from the
strobe of the neighbor's telescreen.
Ropes of smog pour from the slats between his picket fence ivories and get frayed.
I drink the filth, choking down the viscera of the vermin.
It doesn't seem to get easier.

Stumbling inside, my feet detach and I throw myself on the door
until I've locked out the sickly tide pool light of dawn,
and I'm rolling toward his bedroom.
Jolting and sputtering, and
grasping at the hands of the clock,
listening for the steady metronome to
count me through.
And then numbness.
I know the feeling, and next come the
pins, digging into my
fingertips and the pads of my
toes, and then I'm all body and silent prayers.
And I'm whispering sick thoughts to Aren -

"Those adrenaline demons
will do me in,
and if only I could relax,
and my dear mother
used to have a stalker,
and I almost got run down
by a car on the highway when I was five,
and asthmatics are five times as likely to have a
generalized anxiety disorder."

The adrenaline demons gather my tendons in pincushion palms,
tugging at the strings,
panicked arthritis and my fingers are
twitching and curling backwards
while I glare on with shallow breaths and cataracts.
The organs moan in the cavern of my body,
with thick wet air pouring from the opening.
I'm standing now,
a fetishized devil doll,
shaking out the pins
and the needles
and the sick splinters of glass
and the long holy skewers
and I'm breathing again
and I sit and
I breathe.

What’s the difference between hate and love
When they are two sides of the same blade.

Sharpened brandished waving wildly in ghost columns
against the disfigured, burning-white face of abrasion.
Then,
march home with square, taut shoulders – slightly bony –
Body swelled and puffed with
the blood-red energy of something desperate to naked pairs
ramming themselves against each other in an effort to
release.
These colorless concepts, abstract words
that hang in the air the same as
smoke-rings – ghost columns.

Could it give You a religion;
a belief that there is some guiding force in the universe
binding the two of you together by
touch, smell, scratching, grinding --
And he and You quelled
each other’s pleading prayers within
the folds of each muscles
the steeple of each elbow,
the hollow of each throat.

Some spiritualists call this the Kundalini – feel this world through a material base
A Love religion – fixing body and body together
because it’s the one thing that seems to make sense in this crude moment
when the ashes settled to fossilize inside
His and Yours brains.

“My God. His chest, his belly,
the riding and the falling, the moans.
How he clung to me, how he struggled --
Life and death! Life and death!”

The circle of arms is the gateway
to some emotional dry-heave:
the swelling, purging, and crashing
of grief, rage, love, and comfort
those same abstract, colorless concepts
teetering on the edge of a beaten-down slave gospel.

We can give our vegetables a gender:
Female onions. Peel only when ripe then
ferment in a closed plastic bottle.
Color sensations that can only pass between illuminated palms on an
angry evening.
Shakespeare’s Gloucester could only see this world feelingly, woman:
How will you cope after being blinded by his tears?
And when the ream is spent, write a poem on the back.

After your limbs searched for each other after years gone, searched underneath the covers for a comforting hand that could save the loneliness from shaking your souls out of your bodies?
When limbs stretched forward to hold both bodies together,
the backbones that ****** you both pressed against the skin --
The very skin that ****** you, too.
That dream baby bearing the handprint of his ghost --
his skin on your skin on baby skin
Against undifferentiated dark, it may glow beneath the cradle’s mobile.
“Another illegitimate black baby.” Let’s call it Smoke and Mirrors for maybe just a second.
Don’t pay attention to the swerve of small-town eyes.
Then, we can see the light through the parenthesis.
Call it the ghost of his Love. The ghost of meat love. Delirious brilliance.

Ghost of mouth-on-the-screen-door Love.
The same taste of nickels, of iron, of blood --
Leave the porchlight on if you want him to find his way back.
Hang the water-filled jar from the tree to ward away the evil ghosts.
Light it, love it, leave it. Light it, love it, leave it.
Who’s going to guide the insect-feelers
to the light
on the nights
When words split, scatter, and sift
into labor-streaked pyramids between these fingers?

Now do you know where you are? We see a little farther now, a little farther still.
Staked in fury, can we recognize red ants on a red ant hill, now?
Shrouded in a glory-cloud, at least you knew you fit somewhere.

As Women, We know the gospel well. A little farther now and a little farther still.
The maddening dances around *** and Song – it is possible for the rest of Us to understand
and know how You’ve been bleeding.

Peeking out the window
On all Hallow's Eve
Watching little Globlins
Skip about with glee.

Witch's and warlocks
traveling the streets
Looking so scary
Asking for treats.

Dinos and gators
fairies and elves,
scurry about
frightening themselves.

The sun grows dim,
the porchlight shines,
the ghouls and monsters
scowl just fine.

Creatures a-plenty
Come out to play
Once each year
for All Hallow's Day.

I'll throw myself under the bus every now and
again to see how I take it, an
      interesting game for a bit, but
                                 having watched this new man come to terms with
                    my self, I am joyous,
                                        elated,
                                            sprung up like a forget-me-not from the
lack of a pillow, misty mornings, love over my
              head like a river

                            still, rains are heavy - every single night changes something, the comfortable
                   shades of wet, defined puddles reflecting porchlight

do memories really die with us?
  
         no.
                   they are twin steps ahead to immortality, Westward smiles like plains and hills rumbling
                      as mountains of epiphany

            I'm trying to make certain of things that are impossible, goodness
that's enough of that, suppose stubbornly a
                                 change of scenery and open heart can achieve
                anything worth trying

      and she'll never know the picture half strung-out on forgetful
                    chemistry, unless I
                                  paint it just right
at least, that's my
          point of view

i have survived
storms.
i have survived a father's voice like thunder;
handprint lightning flowers petal over my skin
like i am a garden to sinners-
adam and eve call my grassroots their home and hum lullabies-
i have survived
anger.
pros and cons of
clock-ticking therapy sessions where money is thrown at my gaze,
fixed on the wall,
dollar-a-second drumming fingers
screaming so loud that heaven shuts the blinds and hangs a "closed" sign on the door.
pros and cons of
stumbling home,
under a murky peerless crowd of smoke,
slurring words trail around and behind me like moths to a porchlight.
morning headaches,
angry adults
damaging drywall and breaking family portraits
exhausting search for answers
exhausting search in a silence that lengthens the disconnect from child to mother
where your mind goes red and the honest truth that stays stuck to the roof of your mouth falls out
where you become an overflowing mailbox and your hands shake
the absence of parents who never taught you to hold your tongue
i have survived
hurt.
i have survived the specific type of loss that you feel in the pit of your stomach
the one that lies next to you
when you stare at the ceiling and your face hurts from crying
tears scrub your eyelids raw and you promise,
"if i ever make it through this,
i will never be here again."
i have survived giving up,
taking it all back, throwing it all away,
parallel structures of contemplation and decision
i have survived
lonely.
angry storms of abandonment, melodies of the lonely and the hurt
i reprise to the ones that add injury to insult,
you are not the worst thing that has ever happened to me.
i echo choruses to the people that force me to grow up at sixteen
i have destruction embedded into my neurotransmitters
i have shooting post-traumatic pain in my memories
i have survived
a hell that your hands are not stained enough to touch.
i assure you,
my love,
i will survive
you as well

Such a strange thing
Standing perfectly in Night and Light

Such a strange occurrence
on a porch at night

Seeing both the options of life
Enter in blinding light
or embrace the shadow of night?

The known
The seen
Bathed in comfort
Bathed in Light

The Unknown
Shadows hold their nightly ball
Night becomes Darkness

Ones own being torn in two
Embrace the known
or face the Unknown

where everything is challenged
but only in darkness
can the smallest lights
burn the brightest

and one finds comfort once more
in the company they hold

I cry in the face of the moonlight
and watch as the firelight
dances in spite of the porchlight
I know that this is just right

Your memory taunts
haunts and flaunts
while my breath
is caught

I laugh in the face of distance
and giggle as resistance
is ironic in this instance
and I know this is a good trance

Your memory taunts
haunts and flaunts
while my breath
is caught

I am in need of no other
these miles won't bother
all because I would rather
have you than another

*Your memory taunts
haunts and flaunts
while my breath
is caught

Tender heart and a night not over
tinder-box cast off
once the fire was blazing
and I miss that love now
in the fragile moments
when my mind can find nothing to cling to
where once I could say
  "let's call this day done
  and curl together in our shared bed"
now I simply make another coffee
and cough through another cigarette

And I'm sad, I guess
but not so sad about it
write under porchlight; backed by The Dead.

Such power does a porchlight possess
That it lures a thousand insects
To fry in the dewy-white comfort of its glow

Where we see the mundanity of a helpful object
Moths see beckoning beams of moonlight
Like Icarus soaring too high at midnight

Perhaps God in all his alleged wisdom
Could never have imagined the horror wrought
By positive phototaxis and the electric lightbulb

Perhaps this whole **** world is the unintended
But deadly consequence of a God who could not
Predict the ways that lightbulbs and moonlight
Merge to Mock him.

Visiting orange cat
belongs to Shirley
across the street
now without John
her porchlight
a reminder
of another aspect
of life
a glow within
each of us
residue from flowing
bloodstreams of
light.

i stand on the grass,
and above me tonight.
the sky an upturned bowl,
no.. a collander,
with stars streaming
bright...through the blue
metal sky...
and thus the moon is, dinner plate big
and  cottage cheese lumpy.

and i hear the sea sighing
and fretting away...

but not too hard.
there is, enchantment
in the air.. .
and i wait a few moments
more,
in the crisp, winter
night's air... for magic
to happen....
before walking inside,
to a child asleep,
a husband reading
and a little blue, grey cat
washing the day away,
in front of the fire...
and i thank the night,
for the magic...
it has sent,
as i turn off,
the porchlight.
and enter into
my haven.

The coyote in the street,
the long lingering memory
on the edges of our town,
where the night is dark
where the moon is bright.

His blood is our blood,
we forget him quickly;
standing in the porchlight,
losing him to time.

Coyote watches us
watching the treeline,
and he understands.

Hodge-podge of strangers
looking at my door
I welcome you.
Let this time in here
turn us to friends.

Let me serve you
on my finest china.

Please come into my door.

Let me take your coat,
tell me, how fine is this house?
and I can tell you
it is truly better
for having you in it.
For every smile shared
under my roof
For every laugh
had in these walls
has given me a home
when I was once homeless.  
For that, this humble one thanks you.
Please come in, for you too are home.
Let it be known
That this is not a dim porchlight
but a beacon
come in, come home
dear stranger
let's go home.

All I know about love is the pain
All I know about the blue sky is that sometimes clouds gather and it rains
I'd hoped that you'd cover me from the rain like an umbrella
The grief blows like a strong wind and am just an umbrella
In loneliness, I drink much wine and think of how it's made from grapes off the vine
Same slow song on repeat, music is beautiful and I think of how it's surely proof of the divine
I was only artificial, a porchlight compared to the sun
If forgetting is a line , can i go before my turn

i want your porchlight to beacon me home,
your body pressed against mine like warm yellow light at kitchen time, when darkness swathes its all-consuming, hungry self around the houses to sneak a bite, open-mouthed and unrelenting.
but you see, it is you, i want, to swallow me whole. i want the dishes to clatter, slice open our heels as we dance barefoot across the floor, cold-tiled, but smooth, so smooth,
and quiet.
no music, just the television,
not muted, just low.
do you remember touching your fingertips to the screen and feeling the static?
a vibrato, your mouth against mine, murmuring, mumbling, your slippery-warm words, watery coffee and oven heat, your twelve o’clock shadow at six-thirty, rough, not allowed to shave. you yield, you're compliant, it is me who wields the razor, up on the bathroom counter, legs dangling, precarious, your throat, all bared and foamed-over, like the *** we forgot, neglected on the stove.
we threw it out, all black-bellied and cancerous.
remember how we aired the stench out and let the cold in?
a little too alike those everyday scents,
of vacuumed carpet, of bleached clean bathtub. whiten the tiles, tug hair from the drain, throw away evidence, excavate the remains.

i can still smell your seven dollar hair dye, though you claimed you never had grays.

Watch the rain shatter on the ground
Or crash against the windowpane;
Lightning on the glass or maybe
Just the porchlight burning wetly,
Swarmed by insects searching, desperate
For stars they can no longer see.

Watch the hair shatter on the floor,
Dead strands containing memories
Swept thoughtlessly into the trash
Amid strands from other lives, tangled
Together; books stacked on bookshelves
With lives that can no longer be.

It is 4 a.m.,
and a black dog breaks
crust on old snow - stumbles.
And a full moon looms
to reveal just east
a crackling of limbs felled
by gathered frosts and west
a barn owl arcs silent - a slurry
of cream, hunger and brown
winter **** hovered and plunged
by moon and yellow porchlight.
A black dog stiffens and sniffs -
limbs give no more crack.

I know only this:
It is 4 a.m. - something bled
and something fed
in the moon and yellow porchlight.

Can anyone tell me what it means when you have dreams within your dreams and the dreams are of dreaming dreams.

I am stuck so it seems in the cycle of dreams within dreams trying to hang on to the seams of my life.

Who knows how the story goes and how does it end?

I am writing books on vellum
thinking
that'll sell them, but
it turns out that it won't.

Can you still see me under the porchlight,
holding a torch for you?

these things that we do we do
because
and for no other reason than
the heart.

And when I start to unwind will you find me
or finish me?

I remember and that's all there is to it.

you remind me of

a shadow eternity. remember how we
sat in emergency. glass linoleum and plastic and surgery
rat in a cage escaping wordlessly. see: cat in a burglary
house of mirror manifold she matches me perfectly
satin curtain collective passé theatrical major
playing savior, overacting both as master and maker
your odds are infinitesimal die cast into favor
Snake eyes roll like my saliva gave the apple its flavor
our catch-you-later never manifested, painfully true
Graceland cemetery afternoon parading our youth
Zombie on repeat red cups of ***** and juice
stepping stones like dead roses on anonymous tombs
stop me if i'm stopping too soon. lost in your music
strumming loosely on guitar strings to soften the grooves
mountainside Montana rainstorm, clover and wheat
frozen peaks, molten beneath. we die so vultures can eat
open deeply, soul discrete. woven woefully neatly
we're strangers with our lovers from the moment we meet
throat bleeding, choke/breath please queen cobra release
taste that venom sink slowly float to total reprieve
under the knife, over the needle. call me Mopey Knievel
stunts include both waking up and going to sleep
eau de repeat. doomed to resurface, funeral dirt
rebelling intently against immediate purpose
albatross across me like a soldier of fortune
amassing omens hoping for the locusts to swarm
smoking by porchlight oil-painting a portrait
reminisce compulsively until we're reborn
manifold origami we are egoic reform
i'm sorry nobody warned you
but here we are

you learn from icarus,
this time, and instead of
flying too close to the sun,
you simply pluck it from
the sky like a ripened peach

eaten in one bite,
you laugh through the
blood running down your
chin like sticky nectar

and when what remains
of those great wax wings has
been sufficiently cauterized,
almost matching the scars
stretching across your chest,
you decide it’s time
to go home

there’s no porchlight left
on for you this time, and
the bed is unmade just like
you left it

but you’ll turn the lights on
as you go, moving through
the house like a ghost,
finally the one
doing the haunting

and you’ll fall asleep
alone, and wake up
much the same way,
but that’s okay

alone but never lonely,
you tell yourself,
and even if it’s through
clenched teeth sometimes,
it’s the truth

so you say your own name,
feel it on the tongue like you
imagine a lover would,
and let that sun in your belly
keep you warm on the coldest nights