(This is the first poem I ever wrote, in 2017, a month after 'discovering' poetry and reading Allen Ginsberg's Howl for the first time. This is a modern response to Howl, and some aspects of this poem mirror the original. Whereas Ginsberg saw his generation as too mad, I see mine as not mad enough. WordPress didn't let me format this the way I wanted; you can find the original here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PNsD6ccQDl0i9W0iVtiA-cJ_-iQB9hWnG7DCPXAg-ys/edit)
I
I saw the best minds of my generation smothered under slowly suffocating subterfuge, strangled howls coating earbud exteriors,
caddied through beaten streets, subhuman Ubers seen only in screen, unsung legs contracted cheat code lazily redeemed, consuming to capacity,
angelheaded conformist hipsters coolness comfortably subsumed by external heat fingers on the triggers of LTE dynamos,
who mirroreye a million flashing facts awake hours later than admitted, unquenching misty blueish social glow vertical sclera, two-way mirror eyes contemplating nothing,
who see the idyllic future, puppies house husband #goals, but stay staring into the blind blinding searing seer orb, precognition addicted cognition,
who pass through bubble universities with 87 years worth of debt but don’t worry you’ll live that long,
who make the news if they’re expelled because nothing escapes the benevolent straitjacket white water current concourse, culture, be grateful,
who distrust the news and trust each other and trust the news they like, like latent berzerk tribalist electricity voltage boosted through wires the wires are invisible,
with pavement with chemicals with parents with groceries with group gravity and individual inertia, anchors slung around curved top vertebrae,
who walk quickly on the best previous paths paved and mapped by the legendary explorer,
who follow the fastest GPS routes riding the interstate 10 miles back to comfort, backroads unknown, unthinking reality passively prescribed,
myelin sheathed thoughts, saltatory narrative consciousness bottled by the path of least resistance,
who wield stronger lights wildfires phonelights flashlights floodlights laser beams,
foolishly shining at noontime afraid of the dark afraid of the murky dusk faithlessly afraid of the tremulous true dawn,
who unconsciously steal staid stale captions, Picassos purloining someone’s Sharpie stick figure, wastefully creating nothing, striking the bell curve at its most silent node, embarrassed to vibrate, music cohering into dial tone,
who drive automobiles aimlessly, airbagged army reserves traversing the empty night, full of imagined parties and imagined wildness and self-convincing happiness, trapped by friends in the same intangible carriage as last night,
who sit shotgun in the Wendy’s drive-thru at 3:30 am, 4 for $4, they’re the only thing open, and the only thing in town anyway,
hanging and talking and chilling clinging to disingenuous imagined normalcy, vague vagaries revealing nothing displaying everything, a more exciting world for less exciting people,
who are brilliantly and foolishly molded and pressed like living spinning clay in heartless mindless hands, pressed into institutions images words ideas, pressed into narratives, pressed usually into a brand name plastic mold, pressed sometimes sharply to craziness because no one is mad anymore, you’re either crazy or normal but don’t worry there’s always SomaTM,
who in Ideal could press and be pressed by Confucian will, with the subtle consent and discretion of the Self, artful gemcutters carved into prisms of refractive dispersive Creation,
who know and forget the flaws of their fathers,
whose fathers are tripping over the cord stumbling unplugging exiting,
who inherit the beating beautiful sublime Earth covered lovingly in green Life, scarred,
who possess history’s greatest electromagnetic empathy charge, charged,
conducted compulsively to power the wailing chrome silent battery God, warm in his warmth,
or who freeze or burn out of sight or over seas, the tawny lifeless area around the power lines,
who sit unjustly in expensive jails for smoking smudging the sharpie lines smelling like marker criss-crossing the air because their father lived under a crushing concrete neighborhood, because their grandfather moved to the city to escape the noose of home, because their great grandfather feared for his life, piss-poor, because their great great grandfather was a sharecropper, it was the only way he knew how to live, because their great great great grandfather was a sharecropper, illiterate, because their great great great great grandfather was a human slave, Israelites under the secret silent whip of centuries invisible dotted lines hardening like the heart of Pharaoh,
Pharaohs fake patriots red and blue branding 24/7 screaming they’re not racist, easier to change the out for the in instead of the in for the out, uncountable rounding errors of self-denial compile a pile of shit,
who shag and screw and suck and fuck, sincere right-swipes superseding superficial signalling conversations and milkshake shop excuses, humanity is horny as hell but hey at least we’re honest about that now,
who lick Nutella from the sharp edges of butterknives and eat facedown Saltines, indulging tasteless addictions to sugar and salt, legal of course it tastes good, more, more,
who gorge on a rolling smorgasbord of life and a Swiss cheese infinity of holes holes holes holes to fill fill fill,
unfilled, always unfilled as the universe in our heads always expands, shouldn’t we know this by now? Scotch tape nicotine dopamine patches where pain belongs, terrified to grow,
terrified of reconstructing terrified of being wrong terrified of strangers with signs terrified of learning terrified of fire terrified of their own Promethean urge, unwilling masters of the ultimate procreant creation of Creation, the time has come to baptize or burn,
burning idealist realists obsessed with realness, that’s that real shit, that’s that balanced meal shit, that’s that man I know just how you feel shit,
who smoke bowl after bowl of apex predator marijuana strengthened through artificial adversity as all things are, and dab sticky globby dabs from discreet vapes and indiscreet rigs, stuck to the couch by the one cure that could unstick their minds, moderation missing,
who read more words than any generation before, more bullshit empty words diluting the holy power of Meaning, endless text rotting in the crevasses of Ego,
who jostle through identical linoleum brown white well-lit halls into uniform desks and uniform uniforms for our corporation the corpse of our nation sponsored by the National Rifle Association,
oh God, Teddy Roosevelt someone please wake up, gilded coins festoon flashy electronic eyelids, eli lamma sabacthani floats from isolated islands of given comfort, individuals,
pointed always at a different problem a different enemy, a thousand accusing fingers from the thousand-armed lying Kochtopus, Facebook striking human oil wells, punctured lungs data deposits dark slick sludge numbers and tastes and Faustian humanity spurting 10 feet high from holes gouged in 1.3 billion human chests, I accept the terms and conditions,
who jump a hundred stories off the human Colossus, finding flying falling freedom splat,
who fix the Netflix for their parents just by turning the Playstation on normally, fixing nothing,
who nimbly navigate the digital world the extension of that intersubjective Ideal plane and they are its subjects and masters, intuitively finding settings, raising the brightness,
who sense the lines those invisible lines made visible, learn which to adhere to and which to delicately dance around, free moral spirits aware of the falseness of some boundaries, illegally downloaded resistance,
who were born so long after man first hit enter on infinite loops launched, crushing loops of misguided cause and evil effect which do not have to be, artificial, the cosmic foil to that Holy loop of water and good and light and Life,
who could be truly omnific,
who now bear the sacred key of Creation, the abstract quantum power to forge existence from possibility, infinitely inspirational exponentially expandable atop every giants’ shoulders,
who shoulder that responsibility on bent bodies, unwilling, unknowing, unfulfilling, succumbing to its burdenous weight instead of transcending with its awesome freedom,
and to cowardly waste the existential blessing, to be the bitch of our concupiscence, to hollowly satisfy the procreant urge with recreant comfort, to sit docilely on the predestination slaughterhouse conveyor belt is a shameful waste worse than death.
II
Death, decaying galloper on the side of the road,
death, moss quitting moss, flight of the ghostly unliving components of Life,
death, preceded by the coffin,
death, stuck in traffic, lifelong definition, death, routine, Walmart, boxes, death, false pursuits false expectations, death, heuristic handcuffs, death, narrowing constricting academia atrophy, death, denial carved false knowledge, miscommunication, unsalvageable prejudice inaccurate anger unspeakable hate inevitable death, yes death, that sphinx of cement and aluminum bashing open our skulls and devouring our brains and imagination, Moloch, God of Death! Systemic sacrifice, unlucky twist, environmental lottery, death, determinism, death, essence preceding existence, proud egos snuffing inspired embers, brilliant flames blocked between Contour walls, death, cruel Contours plunged sharp from outside, death, inside tied false knots round our minds, death, and our selves tying knots round our necks, death!
Choking, the noose knot cinches fast tight windpipe crunching, our face draining blue, our neck bruising blue, feeling only the loop suffocating pressure building trapped throbbing blue, dying deoxygenated blue blood water again sucked empty of Life, deflating collapsing lungs the last blue
breath finally beaten
III
Breathe!
Breathe in deep, yes, yes! Greedily gulp limpid air, translucent superabundant pale blue taste! Alveoli tasting al dente air, brain subtly savoring smiling, breathe out, ahhhh, what Beauty! Yes! What true capital-fucking-B Beauty! The air alone is worth it! The sky, one hundred and eighty 3D degrees, 4k resolution, and all the possible blues to revel in! Every conceivable blue hue, cerulean and blue-gray and stingray, aquamarine and vivid ultramarine, electric duke denim and turquoise, azure, royal blue baby blue Persian and Prussian blue, stone and smalt, mighty cobalt and noble midnight, sky blue sapphire cyan and teal, steel blue, the deep world of dark blues nighttime navy blues, the floating world of light blues, powder, periwinkle, and tiffany blue! Indigo violet and every green, Nature’s beauty, all blue!
The sky an infinite canvas of blues, infinitely refracted by the ocean and by us!
To live is to dilate with Life, and what blessed air to dilate with! What blessed water to exist forever in! You must live for now, then,
Breathe, you beautiful blue generation!
Who are blue like the nighttime auditorium expanse, never colorless, never black, the infinite universe through a blue-tinged atmospheric lens,
Blue like the rain at night, dark clear invisible blue, signalled by the singing crickets and humming leaves who need so little blue life but have such abundance, wet beetles and squirming worms joyful like babies swaddled in comfy blanket cocoons with no alarms,
Blue like the massive living ocean! Blue like the massive living droplet! Blue like the holy molecule of Life!
Ecstatic blue! Oh, depthless distant blue! Floating singular infinite blue!
Blue of the vast youthful sky trembling with free Potential,
Blue of that imperfectly perfect circle, the same in and through of us, the same back and forth of all, recycled Life after death,
Blue of the very same tumbling in your veins, water, you are water suffused,
Breathing as you on its way through, and how often we pee and sweat, the blue beat out of us and replaced constantly,
Blue born anew! Yes, you are born anew!
Oh, you brilliant beautiful blue generation,
who are blue in the face to live, liquid pressurized yearning blue bursting to live thirsting to live the Prophet’s yell, gagged, roaring revitalizing potential restrained,
let me unmuzzle you, let me ease the shadowy constraints you cannot see, and unstopper the wellspring so that the once-inert pool of each soul’s condensation will finally know release, blue vigorously exploding from each of us floodlike, so many popped water balloons spurting spilling spreading outside, us all eventually converging as all water does along the natural curves of the Earth, an unstoppable generational Mississippi cascading to our concealed destiny, carving new contours deep and sure into the sediment of reality where our ancestors left off and, rushing free, we will one day join the vast churning ocean of timeless consciousness, vindicated in knowing that we were no trickle, nor stream, nor polluted pond, but a great blue diluvian deluge that eroded a better world!
Beatin' Paths ~~~ The journey to the Great American Novel 