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.

honestly, just a good beat
and a breath of air
can sometimes mean the world
to a suffocating soul.

I want to write it all; all of it. Every last word, sentence, phrase, poem, story, tale, feeling, joke, song, garbled hunk of nonsense streaming from my mouth hole like from a tap until the whole world drowns in just what I want to say; to let them know that expression is here, in my mind, in theirs, whispering in the trees outside, singing from every atom that can bump and grind and make things feel or see or sigh.

I want to sit within friends late in the night heads bobbing nod nod nodding as we agree or disagree or pedigree our intellect as we refine the phrases that make us sound like we know. Cos when you sound like you know, that's when you get heard, and if anyone's gonna get heard, ain't no one better nor worse than us. Cos nobody really knows; no Oxbridge don could ever write the wind, measure my kiss on my darlin’s skin, capture what the rosy points of her cheeks do to my brain, my body, my soul, my Attachment to this world.

So Hear me, O merry gentlemen! For I am alive and feeling and that is all the PhD I need.- If only you could see what’s dancing around in my skull... but you don’t have to! Use your own ivory mug! Really stop and think and you’ll see more than in a million poems roar within an eyeblink. Know it and feel it and see it all; the whole stupid shining racing roaring- untameable- restlessness of it all! Put down your pen and paper and rush out in the air and rejoice truly in the warm company of lovers and friends, in the sweet hum of guitar strings and in the savage itch of the insect's bite. In loneliness and mourning. In boredom and steady working with clever hands. And love, never stop loving, or hating, or appreciating, or caring, or crying, as long as you are feeling. For sometimes it seems we should always be in pain from one thing or another, yet mostly from the bubbling exasperation of positive go-get-em ***** for life.

For we read this clunky tongue of ours and say it’s what should be but there is more! For life through all its prisms can impress upon your vision a beauty neverending, yet to sense it quivering within a page is a spectacular sight indeed. So let’s leave the rigid, the impersonal, the stymied words behind and let's form a new expression, devoid of convention, one that cries joyous face-first directly into our souls!

So, Cry, onwards! And let's weave this tender tongue of ours, golden! Let's stack this world full of less-than-sane streams of speech tangled images driving shards of true experience into each other’s minds, until we drop dead deep in our bones from exuberant exhaustion. Let’s follow Kerouac to the grave; cheering, and keeling and full of tender feeling and find a meaning in words that can transcend into being. Let’s **** and watch and listen and do and learn and laugh and notice laughter and mark it for the concentrated joy that it is. Let’s sit quietly and attend to those things around us and ruminate without ever forgetting our surrounding- which include, of course, the ever flipping ever spinning and unwinding tapestry of our mind and others'.

Let’s find joy, or the maker, or whatever, same-meaning trap clap-trap of a name he (or she) has in your sticks, in what we can touch and feel and see, and inside those we know and those we don’t. Let’s make language a human thing that radiates warmth for all, and bridges us to those around us so that none may feel alone or scared unless they long to for glorious masochism, or curiousness, or any things they so do please. Let us travel, and dance, and loose hope, and find it, and live it.

And write tenderness into this world.

dear
1957,
*******
and take him with you.

Isn't it so beautiful
To see something as simple as a heart beat
Come alive?

Not just the steady thumping
The thumping that keeps you alive
But something more

The quickening pace
As you heart enters this race
That occur as soon as you see your lover's face

The little flutters it emits
Right from your soul
Making those empty spots whole

Isn't it incredible how it goes to your smile
Your eyes
Your very mood

Oh don't you wish
With all your heart
That you can see it again soon

Of a night on a battered red leather sofa
It's moved with us three times
It sits in a room with a broken bay window
And we sit on it too
And we sit on it too

Drinking yellow anise from mismatched glasses
With ice, not warm water
Singing stories, spinning yarns with broken bottles
Of girls with leopard-print hands
And the straw man in the moon
The straw man in the moon.

The cord hangs on the wall:
A symbol, but not symbolic
As chords rise, break off and fall
All a sham, but not shambolic
A sham, but not shambolic.

Swapping tales and anecdotes of cars parked between cake stalls
And days with names that don't suit them
People dying for causes they don't understand
And war is an island; a land hyperbolic
A Green land, a war land; unplanned hyperbolic.

Linguistics are twisted and brass tales are dropped
A cork is unwrapped from the web where it popped
But the darkness is rising, the hours are ticking
The side is hitched up so we all know we're doomed.
We hear children singing in the guitar strings,
Their screeches rising as they fall,
Our speeches diving as they fall.

And speaking of speeches, he says, a performance is mine
But in France, man... in France the markets are open
And the fields of Provence roll down to the menhirs of Carnac
And Brocéliande lies to us all,
And Brocéliande lies to us all.

Lithium, light they write,
Like it’s right, white delight
Striking bright, better tight:
Fine and dandy.

Glamourised in our eyes
The surprise as you rise
****** heroised,
Bitter candy.

Pump the ***, dump the dot
******* it hot, spatter spot
Sing a lot, dream but not
Craving luncheon.

Skagging sweet sweaty meat
Blisters well under heat
Take a seat, come compete,
Beating truncheon.

Vie d’artiste, or at least
Rising yeast, bubbling beast
Trickling triste down your cheeks,
Ever daring.

Rising up, sup the cup,
Acid drop, fizzle pop,
Shoobie-doo-doobie-***,
Death to caring.

All my late night rendezvous
Have since been eclipsed
By stable days and nights with you.
You save me from the spiders in my shoes,
And when storm clouds start grumbling, I save you.

And I know that this sounds cheesy--
But I don't care. I don't care!
Because I happen to know you ******* love cheese.
And for you babe,
I'll be the best cheese.

I'll be thy holy Swiss cheese,
I'll be your buttered Brie.
And when we've aged 50 years?
Well then babe,
I'll be your ******* Gouda.

At least, that's what I want to be
If you'll let me.
I want to be the finest cheese your tongue has ever tasted.
So lay your wine-stained lips on me;
Let's see how we pair.