[I snicker                 quietly
to myself -                          when I
think                        what it might
have been                 like if
the                                 New York         School of Action Painters
                                        |                       ­       & confessional poets
had had                  social media available to them];
what           if Hefner       in Chicago          &
Mencken in NYC                             had been                   beat,
instead of                  a corporate
Asian                                         profit                               munchers;
[the comment              section]
would be an                                    |     essay section -
           &                 at some point The New Yorker
would                   have                    been written by
   actual                                               New Yorkers:
there would be pin-ups              beside
the           abstruse                                                mental gymnastics & hilariously ***** kosmic                  comix:
Kerouac would have                                           loving odes on Bettie;
Plath,             strange sonnets to Ginsberg:
&                   Hart Crane at the Stonewall
                      having survived the leap &
                       swimming to shore            
             [if not for (                        ) McCarthy & Kefauver,
                         the Mattachine      Revolution           would
have happened during WWII];           the zoot-suit riots
                   would have been             a mass gay outing:
           burly blond                   Midwestern-bred          
           sailors back
           from the war; some dead,              some only    seeming so,
beating down               effeminate                              Chicano men
&         dragging them            back into the ally;
                   ******* them                
    in the back alley                [lesbian fascists
    would have  come a lot sooner
    as                                            |  the solution to the problem]           & openly in the streets  [                    ], [           ] [                    ]|
throughout San Francisco &
     in Texas: along                    w/  thirty other migrants:
   Crane is             the poet-spokesperson for them all - -