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Old 11-09-2002, 05:13 AM   #1  
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Thanks Virginia ~ such talent! Here's one back at you.....


The Breast - A. Mohan


I'm awake.
Very suddenly, and without opening my eyes, I realize
this is not my bed.
And there's someone else in it.
I try to remember last night, but a haze of champagne allows only the
faint recollection of a birthday party and a game of truth or
dare...oh no.

That explains the headache.
I'm not quite willing to face the sunlight streaming in,
obscenely bright, so I reach with eyes still shut.
Hoping to find something familiar...Matt's beard,
Joseph's muscled arm,

A breast.
A woman's breast?

I freeze. Then gently, cautiously draw my arm back, trying not to
think about the sensation of warm smooth skin under my fingertips.

The sledgehammer attack suddenly doubles, threatening migraine.
Perhaps I could just go back to sleep and this will all go away?

But I gather all of my courage, such as it is,
and open my eyes, braced against the sunlight.
When they recover from the glare I see...

Masses of curly red hair,
Smooth, pale limbs on a gymnast's body,
Small, but definitely female breasts,
And very bright, very worried green eyes, set in the heart-shaped face
of a stranger.

So what else can I do?

Just calm the concern on that face with a smile (only slightly forced)
Reach out a friendly arm and draw her close,
Begin perhaps to enjoy the odd sensation of breast against breast.
And try to relax.

They say the difference between a straight man and a gay man
is a six-pack of beer.
Well, I guess the difference between a straight woman and a bi woman
must be a couple of bottles of really good champagne.

At least we have better taste.
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Old 11-09-2002, 07:24 AM   #2  
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Terrigrrrrl, that's great.

Virginia hon, you missed your calling, but it's not too late. Love your poem. Keep em coming.
xoxo
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Old 11-09-2002, 08:56 AM   #3  
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Terri
I loved that poem. It was grrrrreat!
Virginia
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Old 11-14-2002, 07:21 PM   #4  
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Here is a song/poem

Mystery
Somewhere there's a soccer game.
I can hear the wild crowd moan.
It's not that life here is distasteful to me
it's just that I'm all alone.
I wanted what took a lifetime to learn
and that determined then
with no more pause than a sigh
turn and start again.
It's not that it's such a mystery.
I saw it from miles away.
In time I'll only think of you
when I'm buttering my toast
or in some other reflective moment
when I expect the least
or the most.
It's not that it's such a mystery
it was practically on display
We've got "world enough and time"
and "wither youth" comes or goes.
I hope you'll always think of me as "mine"
and not one of those.
It's not that it's such a mystery
this new-found malaise.
It's just that this mystery
has taken your place.

~Gord Downie

and one more:

Wheat Kings


Sundown in the Paris of the prairies
Wheat kings have all their treasures buried
And all you hear are the rusty breezes
Pushing around the weather vane Jesus
In his Zippo lighter, he sees the killer's face
Maybe it's someone standing in a killer's place
Twenty years for nothing, well that's nothing new,
Besides, no one's interested in something you didn't do
Wheat kings and pretty things,
let's just see what the morning brings.

There's a dream where the high school is dead and stark
It's a museum and we're all locked up in it after dark
Where the walls are lined all yellow, grey and sinister
Hung with pictures of our parents' prime ministers
Wheat Kings and pretty things,
wait and see what tomorrow brings.

Late-breaking story on the CBC,
A nation whispers, "we always knew that he'd go free"
They add, "you can't be fond of living in the past,
'cause if you are then there's no way that you're gonna last".
Wheat Kings and pretty things
let's just see what tomorrow brings
Wheat kings and pretty things,
that's what tomorrow brings.


~The Hip


That one is based on a true story of a murder in Saskatoon
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Old 11-14-2002, 09:25 PM   #5  
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Very cool, Squeak!
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Old 11-16-2002, 03:37 AM   #6  
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Ok, I don't know if this on here already or not, or even if you want it to be but I just love this poem. It's Howl by Allen Ginsberg.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night,

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, I listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballa because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels,

who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the E.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,

who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be ****ed in the *** by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccupped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blonde & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her *** and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate **** and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930'S German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steam-whistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity.

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddhas or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive' or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisy-chain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin metrasol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally * * * * * *, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 AM and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time--

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

1956

Last edited by VelvetCyberpunk; 11-16-2002 at 11:15 AM.
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Old 11-16-2002, 08:09 AM   #7  
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Wooooah, Velvet! That is GOOD! I've never seen it before... I'm checking out Allen Ginsberg now. Thank you. Another little opening in my world.
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Old 11-16-2002, 11:21 AM   #8  
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Thanks Ellis, yeah it is a great poem, and it's even better when Ginsberg recites it himself. Unfortunately he died in 1997, but you can get recordings of it. I highly reccomend it. I have been facinated with the Beat writers eversince I first saw The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and asked my Mom what Maynard G. Krebs was supposed to be. She did tell me that he was just a caricature and that not to take him too seriously. I just started to learn what "Beatniks" were, and that led me to the Beat writers, and I have been hooked eversince.
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Old 11-16-2002, 01:13 PM   #9  
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Actually, as soon as I read it I started looking him up, and found a site where I could listen/see Ginsberg reading. He read VERY well. He was very expressive.
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Old 11-16-2002, 09:31 PM   #10  
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Ginsberg is GREAT! Whenever DH is lucky enough to get a creative writing class he does a section on the Beat Poets. Here is another one:

A SUPERMARKET IN CALIFORNIA

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt
Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under
the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at
the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for
images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket,
dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole
families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands!
Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!-and
you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the
watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely
old grubber, poking among the meats in the
refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who
killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you
my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks
of cans following you, and followed in my imagination
by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together
in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing
every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors
close in an hour. Which way does your beard point
tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll
both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to
our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old
courage-teacher, what America did you have when
Charon quit poling his ferry and you gort out on a
smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear
on the black waters of Lethe?
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Old 11-16-2002, 09:49 PM   #11  
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Here is a poem written by a local (Detroit area) poet:

ELEGY FOR ALLEN GINSBERG

I

O Allen
your beloved mother Naomi
went mad
had visions
cried them out to the waiting ears of
fellow-mad fellow-patients in the booby hatch and
died alone on the psych ward

You yourself
went mad
had visions
wrote them down
cried them out to the waiting ears of
fellow-mad fellow-artists in the Gallery Six and
were proclaimed a genius

Is that what talent is:
writing stuff down and
choosing your harkeners carefully?

II

O America
did you listen when he howled
loud and long
for forty years or

Did you avert your ears
your eyes
from this ragged-assed prophet of the present
this con man extrordinaire
this inverted dervish
this smirched, smutty angel?

Did you hear him growl
his scatalogical beauty
across the land?

Did you hear it sing
like graybeard Whitman's before it
with the resonant truth of living?

III

O Freedom
you are pared today
O Art
you are dwindled today
O Life
you are faded today
on this day the Dharma lion
howls no more.

Copyright 1997, Michael Barney
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Old 11-17-2002, 03:47 AM   #12  
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Woof! Those are great, Den! Thank you!
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Old 11-18-2002, 10:28 PM   #13  
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I'VE BEEN PART OF THESE WALLS FOR SO LONG


I've been part of these walls for so long

An eternity waiting
For that spark of life that never came.

Now it's time to let go
Float down
Squeeze out

Time to make room

For that new uterine lining.
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Old 11-19-2002, 07:29 AM   #14  
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Den, who wrote that?

Hey girlies... look at this...

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/bo...odaysheadlines
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Old 11-19-2002, 12:11 PM   #15  
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I did! My 15 year old read it for the first time lately. Got to the last line and practically ran away in horror!!
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