[New-Poetry] Happy Birthday Ginsberg

[David Graham]

Ginsberg born this day in 1926.  Here's the poem I wrote after he died:


Goodbye Allen Ginsberg

Old truth-goof, garrulous
and canny crow, finally
you're at one with polluted skies,
sidewalk grit, neon buzzing
messages to the Absolute,

all those clippings of your face
candidly sweet, decently weary,
all your archives and footnotes
and tapes full of scat. . . .

What use the FBI, CIA
keeping tabs on your slant self?
What did they ever learn
you hadn't already published?

You printed come cries, vanities
and regrets, droopy-fleshed lust
and despair hard as a curb.
Farts of savvy delirium.

Chanting your wet dreams
as if they would dissolve
the Pentagon, you bombed
the White House with squads
of paper airplanes, scribbled
all over with holy jokes

--to no avail, no avail,
you big phony failure,
you stand up comic singing off key
in eternity's lounge, raking in
prizes like Miss America, sprawling
all over the anthologies at last.

Yes, you were queer, start to finish
in every way, jabbering stowaway
on the flound'ring ship of State,
crazy angel of the honorarium,
philosopher goat.

Goodbye to your smoldering ashes,
goodbye to pages of yellow gibberish
and their sudden shafts of pure sun
warming the forest floor . . . .


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David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
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