Cleaving Allen Ginsberg



Thoughts On Not Breathing
—for Allen Ginsberg

I stopped breathing—held my breath, let the Red Sky scudding night pass over me, over Skyway, over the Red Cliff, over Rainier Avenue…

I stopped breathing—closed my eyes, held my breath, letting my Third Eye glide over the love shack, old bungalow down by the beach, dumpy cabana down by the rotting dock, out over the Lake cloaked in the Night of the Living Dead…

I stopped everything— Klaatu barada nikto, sick of breathing in & out, sick of thinking thoughts going around and around in my head, sick of my broken-record existence, the same old regrets, boyfriend worries, memories inside the mirrored closet of my mind…

I was sick of poetry—especially that prick Ed Dorn, sick of cowboy macho, calling me faggy fatuous, unable to breathe fire and brimstone like a man, unable to grab an audience by the balls, inspire the hot black anger inside the mob, finesse them with the dagger of white cool bliss, down in the basement of the Elliott Bay Bookstore, enough to sell a pile of crummy books and entertain some nervous pimply-faced students from the University of a Thousand Tears…

I finished the reading—took the best-looking one home with me—took him for a ride in my boat, sleek 19’ Bayliner speedboat, let him drive it nude, standing up catching the summer air off the lake, slicing through whitecaps, zipping around Mercer Island, stopping in Andrews Bay for a tall cool one, leaning back and enjoying the starry night sky, the Seward Park skyline, jagged cedars, gnarled madrona, scraggly Douglas fir, mixed with the sexy smell of the fish-hatchery up past the waterfall, nothing was forbidden out on the lake at midnight…


Thoughts on Breathing
—for Allen Ginsberg

Cars speeding by fast—Rainier Avenue South rush-hour traffic, trees stripped naked February cold, Boeing jet-city denizens, past the Why? Grocery, past the Renton airport, Red Cliff staring down at me, shooting baskets in Lakeside Park…

Seagulls with bent wings—curved like sleek Stukas, checking out the Sturtevant beaches, keen-eyed for dead salmon, for garbage and flotsam, for used prophylactics floating like limp balloons in the shallows under the dock, the Crow Clan flying over from Dead Horse Canyon, waking up to dawn over Cascadian Eastside condos, fog creeping thru carefully manicured backyards, suburban ennui…

Oh Walt Whitman—you put your queer shoulder to the Wheel, you knew the young laborers, the sexually intelligent young Union and Confederate soldiers, the ones that greased the axles of Capitalism, not yet dumbed down by hallucinated Beltway fascist types like Kissinger and Nixon, not yet sucked into the skanky orbits of steel barons, railroad barons, oil barons, not yet breathing in the Samsara smog of Generalissimo jive and Klingon knitted brows, contemplating Apocalypto for dingy Domino City…



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