Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
  Jul 2017 River
Allen Ginsberg
For
              Carl Solomon

                   I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
      madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the ***** streets at dawn
      looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
      connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
      ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
      up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
      cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
      contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
      saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
      ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
      hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
      among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
      publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
      skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
      ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
      to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their ***** beards returning through
      Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
      Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
      torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
      cohol and **** and endless *****,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
      lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
      Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
      tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
      dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
      storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
      blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
      vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
      lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
      ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
      until the noise of wheels and children brought
      them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
      battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
      in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
      floated out and sat through the stale beer after
      noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
      of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
      pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
      lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
      down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
      off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
      and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
      and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
      and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
      Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
      trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
      City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
      ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
      drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
      railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
      leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
      through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
      father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
      athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
      stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
      ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
      angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
      gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
      homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
      light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
      seeking jazz or *** or soup, and followed the
      brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
      and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
      to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
      behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
      and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
      place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
      F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
      eyes **** in their dark skin passing out incom-
      prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
      the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
      Square weeping and ******* while the sirens
      of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
      down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
      wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
      and trembling before the machinery of other
      skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
      in policecars for committing no crime but their
      own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
      dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
      scripts,
who let themselves be ****** in the *** by saintly
      motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
      the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
      love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
      gardens and the grass of public parks and
      cemeteries scattering their ***** freely to
      whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
      with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
      when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
      them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
      the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
      the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
      and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
      sit on her *** and snip the intellectual golden
      threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
      beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
      dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
      the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
      on the wall with a vision of ultimate **** and
      come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
      in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
      but prepared to sweeten the ****** of the sun
      rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
      in the lake,
who went out ******* through Colorado in myriad
      stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
      poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy
      to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
      in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
      rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
      gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
      ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
      solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
      dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
      picked themselves up out of basements hung
      over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
      Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
      ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
      the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
      East River to open to a room full of steamheat
      and *****,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
      cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
      blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
      be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
      the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
      Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
      pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
      bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
      their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
      with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
      by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
      incantations which in the yellow morning were
      stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
      & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
      kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
      an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
      for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
      fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
      fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
      stores where they thought they were growing
      old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
      on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
      & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
      of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
      fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
      ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
      drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
      pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
      into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
      ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
      the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
      saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
      danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
      phonograph records of nostalgic European
      1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
      threw up groaning into the ****** toilet, moans
      in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
      whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
      to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
      watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
      if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
      a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
      came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
      watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
      Denver and finally went away to find out the
      Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
      for each other's salvation and light and *******,
      until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
      impossible criminals with golden heads and the
      charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
      blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
   &nb
River Jul 2017
To see life through new eyes,
To witness the ocean drink up the sunset
To truly live again,
And breathe deep within my lungs
Is my definition of paradise

To hold a lover close
To follow my heart and
Forget the rules
To revel in pleasure
And despise pain
To live genuinely
Without masks

Is to live life with new eyes,
And a renewed heart
To turn away from what is killing me
And embrace this life,
With every fiber in me.
  Jul 2017 River
Jack Jenkins
this is the core
of my prayer to You:

all I have is a scrap
deeply wounded faith
darkness tries to swallow me whole
the devil & his demons flay me

Throughout my trials and tribulations
the Lord has wounded me greatly
as I have also wounded myself
& been wounded by life

Still the Lord carries me daily
as He carried me on a Cross one Passover Day
I am slain daily by things within and without my control
the pain too burdensome to bear

Yet He gifted me stubbornness of spirit
to not give up in spite of the hurt
I thank Him for the gift of making me a warrior
to fight in this brutal spiritual war

His Spirit renews me daily
even when I turn away
lost amongst carnalities of life
until I am broken again

*Jeremiah 17:7-8

Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord,
And whose hope is the Lord.
For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters,
Which spreads out its roots by the river,
And will not fear[ when heat comes;
But its leaf will be green,
And will not be anxious in the year of drought,
Nor will cease from yielding fruit...
Today is my parents 31st anniversary. It's been a year since my father's sins were brought to light and my life began it's decent into the valley.

I've seen domestic abuse, my parents get arrested, 5 friends commit suicide, a failed relationship with somebody I loved, the internal turmoil and moral conflict of a man I hated getting murdered, the loss of countless friendships due mostly to just life, the loss of my best friend of 7 years because I was suicidal and she in essence told me to ******* because it was my fault, helping the misfits of life just by being a friend and shoulder to lean on, a job that could be going belly up in a few months because we're hemorrhaging money without any gain, the hard decision to quit staffing at the local youth group because I am so totally drained emotionally and physically 24/7, and dealing with severe chronic depression and PTSD...

well, as you can tell it's taken a toll on me... and like I already said, it's all happened within 365 days... I'm not a perfect Christian; I cuss like a sailor and struggle through a *** addiction. But I know God ain't gonna leave me. Because no matter where I am, He is there. No matter how I am, He is greater. No matter who I am, He is still Father. Nothing in this fallen world or the eternity thereafter will ever change Him.
River Jul 2017
I am deserving
And I don't need to produce reasons
For why I am
I just am,
And I know it,
I'm convinced of it,
And nothing is gonna put out
This fierce fire
Of my new found self love.
River Jul 2017
Thank you for destroying me,
Dear ex
I had never loved another so deeply,
Or let down my walls more
Than I had with you
And what did you do with me?
You tortured my soul
And burned me like embers
You toyed with me
Making promises you knew deep down you would fail to keep,
But still,
I thank you
For destroying me

Because, you see
You were the fire I needed
To burn away
All the parts of myself that were inauthentic,
Turning to ash all my ego,
Obliterated my sense of self
Losing you and all of the promises you made
Was like losing one version of my life,
That I had come to cherish so much
It was like being the captain of
The sinking titanic,
Choosing to die
With the damaged ship

But I reemerged from that icy misery I existed in for so long,
Realizing that **** happened
And I couldn't do anything to change that
But what I could do
Was take the actions required to have the life I want,
Instead of wasting my time wallowing over how someone I once loved
Hurt me,
Almost destroyed me,
And we called that love
But it WOKE ME UP
It destroyed me and woke me up,
Do you understand?
Yes,
I lost something I had invested so much time and love and care into,
But I can't control that
And it's time to reconcile with the pain,
By making peace with the past,
So I can live in the right here, right now,
In the present.
River Jul 2017
Last year I was inert,
A desert of my own
A planet out of orb
I saw things from a distance
I felt things, only safely
And I only did things
When no one was looking

But I grew, boy, did I grow
Like a ***** breaking forth
From a sidewalk crack
I externalized a long held internal scream
And I let,
Yes, I allowed
Myself to beam
To show the world
The very best and the very worst
Parts of me

These days,
I refuse to feel shame
For the things about me
That are less than
I am broken and beautiful
Incomplete on my own, yet strong
And I refuse to hide myself
In fear of being attacked by an onslaught of criticisms,
Telling me of everything about myself that is wrong
But I choose to take the risk,
Everyday,
To walk out into this world,
Armorless and brave
So maybe I will have the chance
To reach out to an ailing heart,
Like I once had,
And help those hurt people to see that
They are so loved,
By Jesus
And that in Him we are made complete.
  Jul 2017 River
Sophie Monigatti Lake
the moment on the top of Mount Shasta,
           peering over the vast green landscape,
walking beside the Yuba river,
           bubbling and overflowing in blue and green hues
underneath the willow tree in my back lawn,
          it is reaching down to envelope me.

It is silence.
         more than all the clatter of noiseless gongs trying to prove worth
It is goodness.
         more than the righteousness we believe we have
It is oneness.
         more united than the waters on the surface of this earth.
Next page