An Anonymous Submission

brocade of the soul (a poem in the style of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”)

I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, bodies burning like sockets for transcendence, waiting to be plugged into a Nirvana where it is always night
iridescent, beetle bright clubfarers swilling the sea of crowd with heads held high and
stomachs sucked in, pausing to vomit up the white matter of dreams or brains or White Russians, looking in the pools for reflected stars and the thin fragility of their own stork legs in party shoes
dreary solipsists sucking off cigarettes and smearing goose poop kohl beneath their eyes
to express the longing for despair, knowing it is pretty to look wan gaunt stricken with a poverty more than moral
rubbing flavored oil into aching sex-starved seed-stripped teenage skins in the back of
Virgin Records Megastore because the first time should always be that way, sticks ‘n stones ‘n weed ‘n bombs blasting over the loudspeakers
as the equations of the investment bankers on Wall Street all simultaneously conclude
love = hedonism
life’s too short to waste it with responsibility let’s kill those motherfucking jihadists of
the Axis of Evil and have another round of Bacardi on the house
and midnight throwing up of bowels into scum-spattered toilets (kegstand following
vodka following beer) fucking up against the wall in a holy paroxysm of angeltoangel fleshtoflesh and am I crazy or is heaven missing its angels tonight
they are exchanging needles underneath the Brooklyn Bridge because modern medicine
means death of disease, or jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge because the headlights look most beautiful muted in the water
the purity is in the marijuana river that makes the pseudo beat poets, angel-headed
hipsters crouched in the woodwork like cockroaches, stay up to four in the morning with wild typewritten pages for yr own joy wanting to die
they’re not as extreme as they used to be but they still exist although
the glory days are over, it’s cool to be inchoate now but hard to retrograde once you’ve
come, hard to pretend nonconformity when everything conforms, including rebellions without causes, revolutions in the middle class
if James Dean knew he was an icon he’d wish he’d been buried alive, he’d say
“the ‘50s already happened, stop publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull ”
the true rebels live inside the prisons of their own mind, driven to madness by
the post-bomb generation of madness, keening to the refracted sounds of honeyless bees, the combs with their hexagonal cells of sex ‘n drugs ‘n rock ‘n roll and blissful unconsciousness within which yesterdays last till tomorrows in slippery reality-induced hazes reclining on a couch spotted with last night’s cum and beer and abandoned panties in the deepest recesses of the mind
and am I crazy or are the angels missing their heaven tonight, the best minds of our
generation cowering abject in the valley of the shadow of the porcelain bowl where one must lose his lunch dinner breakfast too in the sweet outpouring of concrete regret and last week’s beer and the bilious desire to remember last week’s beer
and am I crazy or is heaven missing its angels tonight, the last of the hipsters in their
primal squalid dens seeking the starlight beneath the gray of pretended shared dreams & Buñuel films in a language they don’t speak, loving the way it sounds to say I have been to Hell and back
and am I crazy, I often wonder whether it is better to walk the middle line or not to walk
at all, it’s enough to make anyone want to jump, screaming out benedictions silently for only the pope of the private mind to hear;
blacks & whites can fuck each other now, but not in commercials or on the News;
so what you think you heard last night through the walls is irrelevant
it is no more real than the slow saccharine drip of time through the knobbed vertebrae of
the spine and the knotted ache of the genitals, feeling every moment as though it were an eternity, thinking only its unbearable to be here, rather be anywhere but here
everyone nowadays is uncomfortable in their own skin, soft skin that’s been ripped in
beaks, teeth and sex and hot gums pressed against seminal fires
and all the children left behind can all fuck themselves, right, the pregnant teenage girls named
after Christian virtues who dye their hair with red Kool Aid
reciting “I’m no more your mother than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own
slow effacement at the wind’s hand”
yearning to have a flat stomach again and alcoholic tipsy blood flowing to the beat of the
moon
and am I crazy or is heaven missing one of its angels tonight, did she jump (still chaste)
from the window, floating down like a shift loosed on wind
or did she come down like bra thong boxers torn off frenzied at the top of the building so
that they could fall to their death fucking
(but on TV they only showed the clothes and the bloody stain in the shape of a fist and
the words to a Taylor Swift song scrawled beneath the sidewalk)
there’s no place for prudes anymore, even the virgins burn to be cool, write elegies to lovers who
could not bear the heaviness of love because as Ginsberg knew, the weight is too heavy, yes, yes, that’s what I wanted, I always wanted, to return to the body where I was born
and am I crazy or is heaven missing all its angels tonight, how heavy it is to love without
knowing why, well what if
heaven is missing its angels, and in all the world it seems normal (at least, this is the
impression I get from looking in the television set) only to think of cum
cuntbucket cum phallus until it is the new Buddha’s mantra cumcuntbucketcumphallus, cumcuntbucketcumphallus, the whole meeting the part, interior to exterior, folding out the inside of a dissected joint to glitter in the light like the metallic stoned fascination of a gum wrapper
heaven is missing its angels, they are fashion models on asphalt runways wearing gum
wrappers as dresses, stretched over their mountainous breasts and waists pulled in too tight and sewn there
pinched anemic anorexic bulimic dancers with their pink tights hurling into the
vomitoriums of the School of American Ballet, then dragging themselves back for
more food and more vomiting and the conviction to be skinny if it kills, when it kills
and the creamy-skinned girls who party in Brooklyn say they love only black boys but
it’s not true, pulling the chains to flush the toilet so that their nocturnal lovers will not hear their own fingers’ aid to reach that final point, that ecstasy like a lighthouse illuminating waves of solitary cum
and am I crazy or have all the soldiers in Iraq lost their calico camouflage fatigues, clap your hands if you believe in soldiers, the same way heaven has lost its angels and the angels have lost their heaven and there’s no God and everyone is confused
the world must be fucked up if the only lucid ones are the stoners, the only ones who still
pray
genuflecting before some altar from which one cannot draw enough subsistence for life,
that altar, it is life
and ultimately to keep going one must conclude life is holy even if it makes no sense
sometimes
holy is life, even if words and spirits and pictures and numbers meld into a blue mist and
make no sense
holy is the pavement beneath the tromp of a thousand feet traveling to work at 9, and
staggering home from clubs sick into the dawn
and even if the stars are blind, people will keep singing to them and that is holy, that is
sanctified, that is beautiful, and even the alcoholic teenagers vomit in praise of the sky, and even the suicides love wanting to die,
and even the most insincere, self-deluded, masquerading thought is sincere in insincerity,
and it is only in the depths of sober irrepressibility that pretends at intoxication that this wisdom is found
and wisdom is not dreary but holy, as is every light that ever graced the dust-filled gloom
of a warehouse, every sun that ever opened up the surface of the moon with its excoriating eye, even if it doesn’t make sense every wrong step is holy, every footprint left in concrete, every falsity promulgated in speech, every politician’s stock gesture, every whore’s mascara smeared beneath dry eyes, every sentence of a poem that falls with fire and lets you know, though condemned to the inferno, you are alive
and in the silence of retreating glances all thoughts find their meaning, all waters their
stillness, crooning the lyrics to a computer chip, wrapping nails around cabled concrete jungle vines, willowing away in the darkness of inessentialism, brocade of the soul,
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing America, I’m no more your mother than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the wind’s hand America I’m putting my holy disgusted shoulder to the wheel.