Ginsberg’s boomers ramble on
Micromanaging the muse
Inflicting on poetic crowds
Futile and postmodern views.
Born of crackpot meditation,
Formless poems, hippie dreams.
Useless psychedelia-lite:
Poetry as empty as it seems.
MFA meets beatnik-Buddha
(Lord, what fools these mortals be)
Fouling the Colorado air
Forcing on us weak green tea.
Punk-rock poetry is dull—
Neo-Buddhism much worse;
Please do not conflate the two
By bigging-up your boring verse.
Once I hoped to write like Ginsberg—
but Allen Ginsberg went to hell.
His bolder Buddhist poetry glitters,
then opens like an empty shell.
In vain one searches for the pearl
within the lyric art he showed us.
Open wide his rotten oyster –
seek the center of the lotus.
Perverted lost Semitic soul,
lyrical ranter, mind unhinged…
He celebrated sin and shame
while crew-cut culture cringed.
His beatnik aircraft took off fast,
flew into bardos of the damned
promising enlightenment—
but the cockpit was unmanned.
Enough of angry fixes, negro streets
incoherent poems and arrhythmic beats,
drug-addled mystics and feminized fools
who compose no further than breaking rules.
Junior Dadaists, after the fact;
dull poetry’s second, third, and fourth act.
Actual poetry exists for the page
and ought to be able to last an age.
Real poems are NOT composed on the tongue,
as are the ravings of the angry young.
Diarrhetic voidings, awash in words
that rain down upon the poetic herds
are not the same as life-giving waters
fit to refresh our sons and daughters.
Suck it up with your existential vacuum
from off the floor of that San Fran backroom.
Bitter Poetaste in Mouth
Lightweight free-verse exploration,
withered ghosts and wisps of phrase,
breezy unamusing musings
barely raise
a titter, tear or lyric warning –
fail to reach a middling height;
then subside to shallow murmurs
(not quite).
Teenage existentialism
cryptic, dull confessional mush;
suitable for a poker-faced
unroyal flush.
Must you set this stuff in motion
fizzling through our universe:
half-bright comets leaving trails
of boring verse?
Incoherent thoughts meander
through your words like fish through nets
unable to ensnare your reader.
One forgets
whatever it was you started saying
(weirdly spaced, unpunctuated).
Could it be such thoughts are better
left unstated?
Beatniks got hip until hippies got beat
by their own rock’n’roll and by riot cops
as they made love and war in field and street:
spoiled rebel children, psychedelic flops
who thought their youth made them immune
to lies from gods that pipe that tune.
Beatniks leaned first toward hip existential,
breaking out of the fifties mental mold.
Culture’s Petri dish turned pestilential;
drugs, deviance and rebellion: dull as old.
Yet novel did it ever seem
to souls exploited for their dream.
The Hippies took that bongo tea-house scene;
added acid’s naked technicolor:
freak-outs, love-ins, the normalized obscene;
politics of outrage, now made duller.
Impulsivity their passion.
(Sin is never out of fashion.)
Youth’s dissident victory incomplete
they glimpsed on flowery fields of battle
kaleidoscopic visions of defeat:
the psychedelic baby’s death-rattle.
Allen Ginsberg’s perverted freak.
Now reached its Himalayan peak.
Trace back in time this cultural malaise;
the poisoned sources where doubt first enticed.
In retrospect we diagnose their ways:
anti-God, anti-family, anti-Christ.
Oh no, you say; that was just youth—
we had to follow our own truth.
What did we learn in your San Fran cafés
poetically dense in plume-clouds of smoke?
That arty nihilism’s just a phase
and transgression of morals a tired joke.
(The Man will always make a buck
off fools who live to smoke and fuck.)
That mystic idols are not Truth . . .
blown minds will never save a soul;
Faith and Wisdom, both alien to youth,
in child’s-play, play a minor role.
That beats burn out and hippies age;
we’re no wiser for their excess.
Unwashed ravings, Bohemian rage
contain no truths—much less, success.
What did they teach us while tripping and stoned ?
Could it nourish at all, their cosmic brew—
their cult of youth, their dying gods bemoaned,
their howls, their road trips, their breakings on through?
Only this, Daddy-O — now dig my writ;
my be-boppin’ speed rant, my acid rock:
that drug-addled rebels who scrawl half-lit
fumble with a key that cannot unlock.
CONNECT/HOOK 