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.

you are
the heckler in the crowd
trying to rip out
the rug from
beneath my toes

silent was the treatment
firm was my resolve
indifference
between books,
tables, & legs.

it lasted until
the viewing party

preening, fresh
dye, a new luster to
your slick, sheared visage
you smile & draw
a little bit of blood

it comingles with your own
hot & thick,

(they await
with baited breath
the proper demise
of union that never was)

& slackjawed, wide
eyed, resolve dis-
solved

I set you
on a pedestal again

i thought for a long time
long enough to hear the ocean
being swallowed by all the salt
long enough to hear the earth speak
in its original dialect;
drawl'd, drawn out
patient as molasses.

i thought long enough that i could hear every sound
ever made.  Dead sounds
decayed as cicada shells
even the ones in the forest no one was around to hear.
And i thought
it sounded like a fire alarm in some basement down the street.

i thought for a long time
with my eyes shut
i thought for a long time
with a power drill pressed against my neck
i thought for such a long time my insides dried out
decomposed
and fermented my blood
into gas
trapped in fleshy canvas.
My corpse was a blimp now
and i thought about having nothing in my head.


and then i was weightless.
my dead self floating into space
like a christian *******
all i saw was objects
objectively
getting smaller
like collectibles over years
And all i could think was How does carbon taste?

and I could see the world
as objects standing next to other objects
standing next to nothing unless there's
an object.
Like something that exists
and that's it.
And that's that.


i thought for a long time
slackjawed
with carbon stains on my teeth
thinking without thinking about meaning
without meaning
writing down a dream
and throwing it under a bus before you read it.
being without meaning
is not the same as meaningless
how pointless a meaning feels
until you name it.
So i wrote down everything i could think of
that meant nothing to me
straight down like a list
and I called it a poem.
And suddenly i didn't have to think anymore.

A race of people whose bones tolled like bells when the traveler shed bliss upon their world early each solar cycle.
I watched them with slackjawed edge from my little corner of universe with unholy, godly rhetoric.
Through my scope of foresight I saw their futile attempts at peace, love, war, and all things human.
Warm illusions of grandeur filled their view oftentimes as I stretched my ancient tendons.
I blew staunch breezes and razing storms that shook a world to the core with reckless abandon.
And they returned to me, nothing more than fizzled essence.
Honeyed words, broken culture, and finally, wasted life itself.

With what is yours, do what you fancy.

But forget not what is fiction, and what is firm.

While out on a walk with a seer,
The maid froze while on the first mile.
"This is not a good place to remember,"
She said with a nervous smile.
~
A fearsome crack
A cry of wrath
A bright red droplet on the path
~
"This is not a safe place to be stepping,"
The maid said, with a frightened glance.
"We had better run home and regroup, friend;
We shouldn't leave this to chance."
~
A cheshire grin
A shatt'ring cry
A nightmare socket with a bloodshot eye
~
"Now, now, dear seer!" I told her.
"Calm yourself, you seem so distressed!
Retreating would be a failure indeed,
To press onward would surely be best."
~
A vicious slice
A gushing flood
A vital veinage, sweet lifeblood
~
I quelled her fears and she followed,
Despite her persistent doubt.
"Honestly," I softly muttered
"There's nothing to be frightened about."
~
A lifeless maid
A slackjawed bride
A headless creature with arms splayed wide
~
We travelled deeper and deeper
Through the path into the dark wood
We travelled so far,  that if we were to shout
No creature would come if they could.
~
A loneliness
A fading light
A blackness like the dead of night
~
Here we stopped. "I need a rest,"
I said to her. She acquiesced.
She turned around. Such woe betide.
And so that foolish seer died.
With all her gifts
She could not see
That I was her true enemy.
My knife did slash.
And she did wail.
I grinned a grin.
I watched her flail.
I watched her fall
Down to the ground.
She made a scream,
Melodious sound!
My work was done.
Her head was gone.
In mine her song
Sung on and on.
I turned and left
That empty glade,
Where no one was
Except the maid.

wild lonely heretics
we mighty few charge heedless
past the ruin of this feckless despot
and into the unbounded

we do not mourn
slackjawed pleading apostles
festooned in dismal agape piety
no!  

unbidden, we scorned
leap reckless & ******
hurl angels body & soul
o’er yawning trenches

(dissolute drunken muttering wretches outstretched prurient caresses  
upturned voracious maws)

brazen i name you
lay upon you  
this fierce hasty  
gasping injunction

fervent orison spew
lest hapless festive kings frivol away  
our stolen fertile prayers
and

--our sisterly love spent,  our maiden voyage waste--

decree the shapeless unmolested
in their firmament stained spire
ruinous royalty.  

o, young one, tremble not
but bury the smoldering detritus
of the fallen jackals
and rise

we accompany one another  
bawdily where it all began.