[New-Poetry] Happy Birthday Ginsberg

[Bob Grumman]

> Wonderful, David!

Yes, a good one.  A Ginsberg better than any Ginsberg.

--Bob G.
 
> 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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