[New-Poetry] Happy Birthday Ginsberg

[Michael Snider]

Wonderful, David!

On Jun 3, 2006, at 2:49 PM, David Graham wrote:

> 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 . . . .
>
>
> ==========================================
> 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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