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st64 Apr 2014
If I were doing my Laundry I'd wash my ***** Iran
I'd throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in the jungle,
I'd wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,  
Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska,  
Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos,
Flush that sparkly Cesium out of Love Canal

Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain Sludge out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again,
Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little Clouds so snow return white as snow,
Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie  

Then I'd throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood & Agent Orange,
Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state,
& put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an Aeon
till it came out clean.




                                                     Allen Ginsberg
                                                    Bou­lder, 26 April, 1980








.
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997)


One of the most respected Beat writers and acclaimed American poets of his generation, Allen Ginsberg enjoys a prominent place in post-World War II American culture.
He was born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in nearby Paterson. The son of an English teacher and Russian expatriate, Ginsberg’s early life was marked by his mother’s psychological troubles, including a series of nervous breakdowns.
In 1943, while studying at Columbia University, Ginsberg befriended William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and the trio later established themselves as pivotal figures in the Beat Movement. Known for their unconventional views, and frequently rambunctious behavior, Ginsberg and his friends also experimented with drugs.

On one occasion, Ginsberg used his college dorm room to store stolen goods acquired by an acquaintance. Faced with prosecution, Ginsberg decided to plead insanity and subsequently spent several months in a mental institution. After graduating from Columbia, Ginsberg remained in New York City and worked various jobs.

Ginsberg first came to public attention in 1956 with the publication of Howl and Other Poems.
“Howl,” a long-lined poem in the tradition of Walt Whitman, is an outcry of rage and despair against a destructive, abusive society.
Kevin O'Sullivan, writing in Newsmakers, deemed “Howl” “an angry, sexually explicit poem”, considered by many to be a revolutionary event in American poetry.
The poem's raw, honest language and its “Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath,” as Ginsberg called it, stunned many traditional critics.

Richard Eberhart, for example, called “Howl” “a powerful work, cutting through to dynamic meaning…It is a howl against everything in our mechanistic civilization which kills the spirit…Its positive force and energy come from a redemptive quality of love.”
Appraising the impact of “Howl,” Paul Zweig noted that it “almost singlehandedly dislocated the traditionalist poetry of the 1950s.”
In addition to stunning critics, Howl stunned the San Francisco Police Department. Because of the graphic ****** language of the poem, they declared the book obscene and arrested the publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Ginsberg's political activities were called strongly libertarian in nature, echoing his poetic preference for individual expression over traditional structure.
In the mid-1960s he was closely associated with the counterculture and antiwar movements. He created and advocated “flower power,” a strategy in which antiwar demonstrators would promote positive values like peace and love to dramatize their opposition to the death and destruction caused by the Vietnam War. The use of flowers, bells, smiles, and mantras (sacred chants) became common among demonstrators.

Sometimes Ginsberg's politics prompted reaction from law-enforcement authorities. He was arrested at an antiwar demonstration in New York City in 1967 and tear-gassed at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968.
In 1972 he was jailed for demonstrating against then-President Richard Nixon at the Republican National Convention in Miami.
In 1978 he and long-time companion Peter Orlovsky were arrested for sitting on train tracks in order to stop a trainload of radioactive waste coming from the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant in Colorado.
Ginsberg's political activities caused him problems in other countries as well.

Another continuing concern reflected in Ginsberg's poetry was a focus on the spiritual and visionary. His interest in these matters was inspired by a series of visions he had while reading William Blake's poetry, and he recalled hearing “a very deep earthen grave voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn't think twice, was Blake's voice.”
He added that “the peculiar quality of the voice was something unforgettable because it was like God had a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.”
Such visions prompted an interest in mysticism that led Ginsberg to experiment, for a time, with various drugs.
After a journey to India in 1962, however, during which he was introduced to meditation and yoga, Ginsberg changed his attitude towards drugs. He became convinced that meditation and yoga were far superior in raising one's consciousness, while still maintaining that psychedelics could prove helpful in writing poetry.

Ginsberg's study of Eastern religions was spurred on by his discovery of mantras, rhythmic chants used for spiritual effects.
During poetry readings he often began by chanting a mantra in order to set the proper mood.
In 1972 Ginsberg took the Refuge and Boddhisattva vows, formally committing himself to the Buddhist faith.

In 1974 Ginsberg and fellow-poet Anne Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics as a branch of Trungpa's Naropa Institute.
“The ultimate idea is to found a permanent arts college,” Ginsberg said of the school, “sort of like they have in Tibetan tradition where you have teachers and students living together in a permanent building which would go on for hundreds of years.”

Ginsberg lived a kind of literary “rags to riches”—from his early days as the feared, criticized, and “*****” poet to his later position within what Richard Kostelanetz called “the pantheon of American literature.”
He was one of the most influential poets of his generation and, in the words of James F. Mersmann, “a great figure in the history of poetry.”
Because of his rise to influence and his staying power as a figure in American art and culture, Ginsberg's work was the object of much scholarly attention throughout his lifetime.

In the spring of 1997, while already plagued with diabetes and chronic hepatitis, Ginsberg was diagnosed with liver cancer.
After learning of this illness, Ginsberg promptly produced twelve brief poems. The next day he suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma. Two days later, he died.

How would Ginsberg have liked to be remembered?
“As someone in the tradition of the oldtime American transcendentalist individualism,” he said, “from that old gnostic tradition…Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman…just carrying it on into the 20th century.”
Ginsberg once explained that among human faults he was most tolerant of anger; in his friends he most appreciated tranquility and ****** tenderness; his ideal occupation would be “articulating feelings in company.”
“Like it or not, no voice better echoes his times than Mr. Ginsberg's,” concluded a reviewer in the Economist.
“He was a bridge between the literary avant-garde and pop culture.”
Homage Kenneth Koch

If I were doing my Laundry I'd wash my ***** Iran
I'd throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap,
       scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in
       the jungle,
I'd wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,
Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska,
Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly
       Cesium out of Love Canal
Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain the Sludge
       out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again,
Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little
       Clouds so snow return white as snow,
Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie
Then I'd throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood &
       Agent Orange,
Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out
       the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state,
       & put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an
       Aeon till it came out clean
Our explosive behaviors where the water you which you were mixed with the cesium i am , or you claimed me to be

the atmosphere which we claimed to breathe from was hydrogen sulfide and yet that angiosperm which we claimed was poisoned with love never spouted.

however both of us being from the biosphere you acted like something that fell off of saturn full of air and water

you say my attitude was the reactant from which your heart thawed and combusted
though i believed other wise because your brain was made from only 1 cell and your heart was made of arsenic which flowed through my veins the night your lips infected mine.

Our relationship was not a commensaism and you did not harm me while i harmed you

your foolish frequencies flopped me right to the bottom of your food chain where fugus flourished and fooled me right into falling for you
our love was the hypothesis proven correct of Romeo and Juliet killing both of us in the end

you were an invertebrate that sent lighting through my limiting factor dressing me with barium
but too much pressure on my heart caused a reaction that Einstein himself couldn't solve
Dan Filcek Apr 2015
What then is time?
time is a measure
time is what keeps everything from happening at once
time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe
time is not any kind of container
time is neither an event nor a thing,
time flows and can be measured.
time is a judgment
time is the motion of the sun across the sky,
the phases of the moon,
the swing of a pendulum,
and the beat of a heart.
time is radiation emitted by cesium atoms
time is money
time is each day and each human life span
time is the clock
time is a central reference point.
time is faulty
time is the shadow cast
time is an integrated circuit
time is the basis for modern civilization
time has been defined with exact numbers
time is offset
time is a measurement relative to a distant star
time is limited by two instants
time is a wheel repeating between birth and extinction.
time is linear
time is the right moment
time is an old, wise man with a long, gray beard
time is a paradox and an illusion.
Both the future and the past are simultaneously present.
time has no value;
time itself ceased
time does not exist
This year for Poetry Month, I decided to post a "found poem" every day. If writing a poem is like painting, a "found poem" is like sculpting. - source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time
LeV3e Nov 2016
Rotting as the Wheel turns
Watching as the fields burn
Flesh is falling down from heavens
Graces never known by man, but
Devils rip and tear at fire
Breathing smoke and
Hanging rope a'
Round my ankle cause I
Think its time to reconsider
Our positioning between
Reconciliation and...yet another *******.

Bet a dollar that you scream
When the seas all fill with cesium
Call the Father to the scene but
We can't clean up the chemical, so
I'll continue bleeding out my eyes
Eyes can't see their own demise
Look through me as we decay
Together in lifeless harmony.
ManVsYard Dec 2014
Big rock falling to the land?
From the sky, no one knew,
how to stop, or divert it.
So, they came up with a plan.
Phew!

Shoot, a rocket thru the clouds.
Fill it with Cesium.
Blast until, there’s just dirt.
Chicken Little! Peeps loud!  
“RUN!”

“Mammasita,  mama, see:
stuff, falls from, up above.
Boinked me on my skull as,
I was dozing in the tree;
with the dove.”

“Hit me on my feathered head
so hard, it made me cluck.
Pebbles, powder, wafting down.
Looks like sand, is blood red:  
DUCK!”

Like manna, for the live stocks.
Covering the whole grounds.
Every field, river, lake.
Hickory’s dickeries, docks and towns.

Mouse’s growing, with one eye.
Hen eggs glowing, in the dark.
Moo’ers: All sprouting wings.
Birdie, birdie, in the sky,
Elsie’s now a meadowlark.
Sharon Talbot Sep 2018
If spirits can walk the earth after life ends,
Or even before, to soar in flights unhindered
By physics, let me dance then!
To reel, arms out, on a vivid green lawn
In a garden before a comfortable house,
Where lush flowers grow and summer reigns,
Touching rows of Constable trees that tower, emerald,
And violet-shadowed even at noon or painted
In twilight, soft before a rising moon.
I would skip over roads and find that field
That lies, protective, above the Connecticut,
Watching as it winds lazily northward.
Then, being sure that all is right,
That the corn is tall and full,
I would speed up to a rounded hill
Above a Victorian barn in Leyden,
Ten acres of rye grass for the cows.
I would stand at the summit and gaze
Far away, down the sleeping valley in its haze,
To the little towns and glittering in
The sun, my alma mater, towers
Of attempted wisdom, of spires and dreams.
Then I might then bathe in a little lake
Where I once romped with friends
After a wedding, **** and laughing
While puzzled farmers watched and leered.
As before I would flee to the river that wound
Down between the hills, splashing through
Pools in shade and sun, basking on smooth stone
Whose marbled veins glow in the canyon light,
Remnants of an ancient era, of pressure and time.
Then on I’d go, bounding from one hilltop to another,
Turning north from the cesium-laced Deerfield,
Passing Vermont’s border to stroll the streets
Of Brattleboro, Putney and Newfane.
I might find a canoe and glide up the West River,
Somehow floating above the rapids and dam,
To rest on the flat water as the sun sets,
Skimming lightly, watching the trout rise
To sip dancing insects or hear the splash
Of a bass as it flicks the surface with its tail.
And then I would sit with the ones I love,
Silently, breathing in the mist that rises
As the sun slips below the hills;
Sunset-colored, elliptical echoes
Catch the low swells like waving glass.
I would wait here until morning returns,
Not ready to leave this beauty or the world.
Reverie about the places I love.
L B Jan 2022
Smokey the Bear tried
to warn us
not to play with fire
nor matches
Never any carelessness
so near the flames
A Bunsen's burner
licks the glass
cesium
rubidium

I listened
till the dare
undid the bear
Consumed us
with its hunger
for the science
and the gases
instability
of it

Flicked us out the window
of a sunny day
Cricket dry
the grass
Knee deep in *** butts
in litter
by the underpass

Flames trespass
explode beyond us
After wind-driven flames ripped through Colarado

The scientist for whom the Bunsen burner was named also discovered the volatile elements cesium and rubidium.
Vane glorious and absolutistic,
     though I defiantly,
     cavalierly, and blithely attest
Yukon bet your (laugh-in) sweet bippy
     mine acidic breast

houses anarchic, anti-poetic ballistic,
     barbaric, and bubonic
     cannibalistic demons within thy
     safely guarded Pandora chest
atomic cesium clock

     timed to trigger avast
     burst of anxiety, frenzy, and
     (What me worry
     Alfred E. Neuman) blast
ting mental quietude at most
     inappropriate, inconvenient,

     inopportune, out classed
adrenaline rush, nausea,
     palpitating heart, vertigo
besieging, corrupting,
     endeavoring fractured arrant

cleft daemonic gripping
     hellishly psychic chant
rendering unto sieze ****,
     a choking vise grip extant
yule hiss sieze indomitable

     banshee fully controlling grant
diabolic, dogmatic, and dynamic,
     anguished corporeal ache
easily, egregiously, and emblematically,
     exemplified historically

     graphic fatalistic, and ecstatic coup,
     (koo), when I caused furious frantic flight,
     and/or fight betake
king angst causing just desserts
     for Marie Antoinette,

     who got her humble pie cake,
thence dispensing with formalities,
     where a joshing drake
     (named Gill O. Teen)

also known (solely known
     to mine selfish source error ways)
alias i.e. as; the Lewis (loose)
     lunatic, heady harvester,
     and decapitation Deacon trumpeting,

     trouncing, and triumphing tranquility
     for fifty three Tuesdays,
thence sea king punishing psychotic
     pre pound payment
     basking in glory (re: gory us)

     amidship crashing quays
music to mine ears hearing plaintive neighs
high pitched straining
     vocal chord hamstrung keys
regaling oceanographic
     lambent hagiographic essays
and keeping at bathos bays.
Robert C Ellis Oct 2016
A butterfly of cells
Mexican coffee
Distending tephra in cascading reds
Above Chikurachki
“Sip from this side of the café”
The tick tock of Cesium 133
Who imagines eternity?
My left eye’s infected
My Youth, neglected
Malnourished to older age
Like Titan’s dance: a slow degrade

Torched with acetelyne
The conversation shivers with caffeine
As comets snap at the human dream
“Everything”, she says, “is manufactured mean”
the improbability factor
attracts her
like a moth to the flame

am I bad?
what's my name?

play the music
make the song

the words go
solo
so long
singledom.

I am decaying
like Cesium on an
atomic table

if you think that wouldn't send you crazy
don't
because it does.

anyway they say a half life is
better than none
play the music
make the song.
Brian McDonagh May 2018
I should have known better:
The Catholic all-boy camps,
Themed with talks on vocations,
Never truly acknowledged prayer,
But the clock
And its ticking weighing all
With its cesium hypnosis.

“Regulars” expand beyond religious culture, though.
When I go to meet people casually or formally,
Regardless of age,
I am time’s pawn
That never understands when it’s time to end
Unless I want that time to end.
When I don’t like an event,
An hour can feel like an eon.
When I enjoy moments so much,
An hour is a blissful breath-second.

Due assignments,
Ugh! Perfect focus never exists then,
Only “****, ****, ****” in tapping my skull
To assess the situation
And submit a ******* draft, ******!
Don’t be late…too late,
The white rabbit’s time is on schedule:
I’m always late.
Time to start over.
Time's never on my side, I'll say that lol.

— The End —