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The Last Flowering Before the Fall
(For Allen Ginsberg)
I see you floating there, back lit in white, tripping out on America's mad habit of mainlining plastic and petroleum,
Almost forty years ago you said our failing ecological systems were a reflection of our polluted consciousness,
You warned our addiction to the American Way would lead to the country's downfall and the destruction of the planet itself.
How intent your expression was, gazing into the television camera with such knowing, uncertain whom you were speaking to, yet aware that your words would resonate with someone like me.
Even then you understood the power of the medium–camera as time machine–drawing me back to where you wiggle and sing, while propelling you forward, into my room, where I rake my head with garden tools for an answer of what to do.
Poet of lovely rebellion, flower bearer who mystified “the establishment” with a resonant “Om!”
You, who with a single poem, frightened those bleak architects busy laying gridlines over the world in heavy shades of dark and gray,
What would you say to the children of a century you never lived to see?
How would you address our defeatism, our ambivalence, our acceptance of the world burning up?
What would you make of our lack of imagination, our lack of experimentation, our lack of gumption to live and breathe and burn alchemical sparks?
Man of movements, jumper of generations, digger of dirty avenues where poetry and music mixed–as did semen with saliva–and the smoke spiraling above the gallery of heads,
Where today are the escape artists who paint a way out from the prison of conventions?
In what gallery, warehouse, village, neighborhood, or cabin are the caressers of the future’s transformation busy groping?
Where are the café’s that host them? The basements where they writhe? The parties where they gather to dance this mess around?
In what woodlands do they howl, or sing in tongues to birds, or make tiny circle alters on the banks of wild rivers in sweet hope that another will see?
To hear them, which direction should I listen:
(East, West, South, or North)
For their tone, for their dialect, for their language distinguished by its extraordinary subtleties,
For the sound of their laughter, toothy and careless, liberating themselves as if their lives depended on it,
For their wails, of abandon, for after all, we’re dying anyway,
For their late night whispers–those of humans and crickets alike–pledged beside frothing water gushing over rocks, with the threat of poison ivy ever present.
I have seen glimpses of them:
A sunfrog hopping through a broken window on a warm Cass Avenue night,
Piles of punk rockers in the nation’s Capital, with “tears in their ears from lying on their backs while looking at the stars,”
Kaleidoscopic visions of Vermin, and the heady smell of Myrrh as a lock of knotted hair was woven snakelike, around the finger, again and again.
Banging on bottles, banging on buckets, banging on trashcans, even banging on the tailgate–at lunchtime, on a suburban dead end road,
Where attraction morphed into adhesion, fostering kinship that crumpled isolation, so we could conspire for the sake of our collective selves.
How to find them now, Allen, if they exist at all, outside the white rooms where patrons drink prescription cocktails so nothing can be felt too much?
Like some plastic surgery nightmare the face of the institution got a maximum lift,
Modern psychiatry has a remedy for its malcontents,
Less jolting than the electro shocks that sizzled your friend’s synapses, prettier than a zippered cranial scar, yet nullified nonetheless,
Chemical candy glazing the over active mind, caramelizing the breakthroughs of feeling–with all their revelatory brilliance and horror–with artificial sweeteners that don’t hamper one’s ability to work, bargain hunt, or sniff out a sale.
Now, no attention span is too great, or felt sense too strong, nor recalcitrance too pathological to overcome the pacifying effects of Percocet, Prozac, Zoloft or Wellbutrin,
None of which mix well with marijuana, or should ever be swallowed with dandelion wine.
Are we now entering another dark age like the one you emerged from?
Like your generation’s mushroom cloud, we cower beneath the threat of “another attack,” with the ever-present panopticon haunting the figurative and physical shadows, “for our own protection,” of course.
Yes, it seems like “the beat’s on repeat,” but back then you had a culture to lean upon, the cohesiveness of “co-thinkers,” engaged in the common endeavor to get free by any artistic means necessary.
But dear Allen, is it possible now, as it was before, to use art, or music, or verse to any effect when the corporate castle dispatches its cultural vampires to feed upon every new upwelling of thought, each new progression of chords, any bit of exposed artistic flesh and blood?
Who than, after thoroughly digesting it, offers up the liquefied corpse for the mass public market mind? (nothing but empty calories)
And of our 21st Century attempts to stop war and total global environmental collapse, what flower of advice might compel us to turn back on and go unbridled from bedrooms to streets?
Allen,
The nightmare of Moloch has become a reality.
He peers at the masses without warrant, from space, via satellite, using machine men and women to destabilize the bridges citizens construct, between countries, over his dragon mote,
By his power he kennels his dissenters, far away and obscured from public eye–information blackout, like the black hoods he pulls over their heads,
His steel arm now reaches forth to sweep up the last of the great forests and, clutching them to its chest, hisses…
…Mine!
His metal teeth gnash the mountains–chewing rock, biting gold,
His slavering tongue laps the rivers and the oceans,
His gaping mouth swallows all the fishes that swim in there,
Biomechanical Giant. Genetically modified Thing.
Hatched in the basement of an unmarked lab–where the results of torture are trademarked,
And whose digestive juices are toxic, and whose belching is pollution, and whose excrement is poison to us all,
Unlike the bird fertilizing the soil, unlike the salmon whose fluids replenish the stream, unlike the bees constructing the hive
to honor Mother Queen,
Unlike nature at all, he erects monuments to honor the power of his totality, the strength of his rule symbolized in every single cinder block, in every single brick, in every blanket of concrete that rises from earth to heaven.
Teacher, we need a new mantra, the “Om” you chanted is too subtle to awaken the contemporary catatonic, its meaning redefined by an industry selling tank tops and yoga panties worth billions.
Even your “Fourth of July–Ahhh,” spacious as it was when you sung it, is now chanted by those who meditate upon which thing to plunder next, blissfully, from high-rise lotus palace.
You found your people in the fifties, crossing country and ocean for need of each other, for visions, for the poetry of it all,
And the music–its gravity pulling each of you in, then suspending you there over sloppy floors wet from toppled beers and warm ebullient sweat,
Seeing the holiness of kinship, the holiness of each other, the holiness of experience, the holiness of life lived as art, you found your way to your people…
…But could you now…
…point me toward the ones who envision “the possibility of a sacramental society,”
To the one’s shaking off the layers of industrial trauma like the deer do with but a single…Flick!
To the deconstruction crew whistling birdsongs while wielding jackhammers, on their way to decommission the mess,
To the scavenger people who sift through it all, snatching broken factory threads to weave into patches colored raven black.
They are, I know, but not where,
But you would find them, if you were here,
With your always eyes wide open, for the next new flowering, for every new cultural leap, because each successive generation outdoes the one that came before it,
Or at least it’s supposed to.
But today the gray beards and grannies now grown from their time of shining are more youthful than are the actual youth–so pensive, cautious, and square.
Worried about our own assess (no matter if other asses are getting had so we can keep having ours),
Concerned with our own comfort no matter who, what, or how,
And still, the endless maintenance of the status quo.
Feeling the world’s burning, seeing the world’s bloodshed, for oil, for land, and water soon to be,
But going forth with our errands, organic or conventional,
Focused on our own self-preservation and our own health above all else, because anything else is impossible, we say to ourselves, and each other, so often,
We think we’re saving the world by saving ourselves
And its true it starts from within
But go it must
Outward!
Like the melody rising up from the tiny wren’s chest, like the molten rock bubbling within the mountain’s core, like the word inscribed then spoken.
Outward!
in effort to bring about what might be,
(“Imagine all the people…”)
Outward!
To shock and frighten, yes,
to inspire, more!
A life of authenticity and negation of the machine,
in favor of Whitman’s world so “curious” and “real,”
A life lived on the dirty earth,
in favor of its fecund smells arising from birth and death and decay,
A life of healthful congruity,
where that which one says does not contradict that which one does, where actions don’t undermine feelings, and where all work is meaningful,
(“You may say I’m a dreamer…”)
So, from the new scene your spirit is most certainly involved I beg your assist, point me toward those in whose hearts throbs the pulse to live, and resist.
Because from where I sit, between two ridges, in a mountain valley, alone, I see no way to the place your people were pointing to,
For I have no Six Arts Gallery, and Greenwich Village as it was, is now gone, and I’m beginning to worry your generation was the last flowering before the fall.
(For Allen Ginsberg)
I see you floating there, back lit in white, tripping out on America's mad habit of mainlining plastic and petroleum,
Almost forty years ago you said our failing ecological systems were a reflection of our polluted consciousness,
You warned our addiction to the American Way would lead to the country's downfall and the destruction of the planet itself.
How intent your expression was, gazing into the television camera with such knowing, uncertain whom you were speaking to, yet aware that your words would resonate with someone like me.
Even then you understood the power of the medium–camera as time machine–drawing me back to where you wiggle and sing, while propelling you forward, into my room, where I rake my head with garden tools for an answer of what to do.
Poet of lovely rebellion, flower bearer who mystified “the establishment” with a resonant “Om!”
You, who with a single poem, frightened those bleak architects busy laying gridlines over the world in heavy shades of dark and gray,
What would you say to the children of a century you never lived to see?
How would you address our defeatism, our ambivalence, our acceptance of the world burning up?
What would you make of our lack of imagination, our lack of experimentation, our lack of gumption to live and breathe and burn alchemical sparks?
Man of movements, jumper of generations, digger of dirty avenues where poetry and music mixed–as did semen with saliva–and the smoke spiraling above the gallery of heads,
Where today are the escape artists who paint a way out from the prison of conventions?
In what gallery, warehouse, village, neighborhood, or cabin are the caressers of the future’s transformation busy groping?
Where are the café’s that host them? The basements where they writhe? The parties where they gather to dance this mess around?
In what woodlands do they howl, or sing in tongues to birds, or make tiny circle alters on the banks of wild rivers in sweet hope that another will see?
To hear them, which direction should I listen:
(East, West, South, or North)
For their tone, for their dialect, for their language distinguished by its extraordinary subtleties,
For the sound of their laughter, toothy and careless, liberating themselves as if their lives depended on it,
For their wails, of abandon, for after all, we’re dying anyway,
For their late night whispers–those of humans and crickets alike–pledged beside frothing water gushing over rocks, with the threat of poison ivy ever present.
I have seen glimpses of them:
A sunfrog hopping through a broken window on a warm Cass Avenue night,
Piles of punk rockers in the nation’s Capital, with “tears in their ears from lying on their backs while looking at the stars,”
Kaleidoscopic visions of Vermin, and the heady smell of Myrrh as a lock of knotted hair was woven snakelike, around the finger, again and again.
Banging on bottles, banging on buckets, banging on trashcans, even banging on the tailgate–at lunchtime, on a suburban dead end road,
Where attraction morphed into adhesion, fostering kinship that crumpled isolation, so we could conspire for the sake of our collective selves.
How to find them now, Allen, if they exist at all, outside the white rooms where patrons drink prescription cocktails so nothing can be felt too much?
Like some plastic surgery nightmare the face of the institution got a maximum lift,
Modern psychiatry has a remedy for its malcontents,
Less jolting than the electro shocks that sizzled your friend’s synapses, prettier than a zippered cranial scar, yet nullified nonetheless,
Chemical candy glazing the over active mind, caramelizing the breakthroughs of feeling–with all their revelatory brilliance and horror–with artificial sweeteners that don’t hamper one’s ability to work, bargain hunt, or sniff out a sale.
Now, no attention span is too great, or felt sense too strong, nor recalcitrance too pathological to overcome the pacifying effects of Percocet, Prozac, Zoloft or Wellbutrin,
None of which mix well with marijuana, or should ever be swallowed with dandelion wine.
Are we now entering another dark age like the one you emerged from?
Like your generation’s mushroom cloud, we cower beneath the threat of “another attack,” with the ever-present panopticon haunting the figurative and physical shadows, “for our own protection,” of course.
Yes, it seems like “the beat’s on repeat,” but back then you had a culture to lean upon, the cohesiveness of “co-thinkers,” engaged in the common endeavor to get free by any artistic means necessary.
But dear Allen, is it possible now, as it was before, to use art, or music, or verse to any effect when the corporate castle dispatches its cultural vampires to feed upon every new upwelling of thought, each new progression of chords, any bit of exposed artistic flesh and blood?
Who than, after thoroughly digesting it, offers up the liquefied corpse for the mass public market mind? (nothing but empty calories)
And of our 21st Century attempts to stop war and total global environmental collapse, what flower of advice might compel us to turn back on and go unbridled from bedrooms to streets?
Allen,
The nightmare of Moloch has become a reality.
He peers at the masses without warrant, from space, via satellite, using machine men and women to destabilize the bridges citizens construct, between countries, over his dragon mote,
By his power he kennels his dissenters, far away and obscured from public eye–information blackout, like the black hoods he pulls over their heads,
His steel arm now reaches forth to sweep up the last of the great forests and, clutching them to its chest, hisses…
…Mine!
His metal teeth gnash the mountains–chewing rock, biting gold,
His slavering tongue laps the rivers and the oceans,
His gaping mouth swallows all the fishes that swim in there,
Biomechanical Giant. Genetically modified Thing.
Hatched in the basement of an unmarked lab–where the results of torture are trademarked,
And whose digestive juices are toxic, and whose belching is pollution, and whose excrement is poison to us all,
Unlike the bird fertilizing the soil, unlike the salmon whose fluids replenish the stream, unlike the bees constructing the hive
to honor Mother Queen,
Unlike nature at all, he erects monuments to honor the power of his totality, the strength of his rule symbolized in every single cinder block, in every single brick, in every blanket of concrete that rises from earth to heaven.
Teacher, we need a new mantra, the “Om” you chanted is too subtle to awaken the contemporary catatonic, its meaning redefined by an industry selling tank tops and yoga panties worth billions.
Even your “Fourth of July–Ahhh,” spacious as it was when you sung it, is now chanted by those who meditate upon which thing to plunder next, blissfully, from high-rise lotus palace.
You found your people in the fifties, crossing country and ocean for need of each other, for visions, for the poetry of it all,
And the music–its gravity pulling each of you in, then suspending you there over sloppy floors wet from toppled beers and warm ebullient sweat,
Seeing the holiness of kinship, the holiness of each other, the holiness of experience, the holiness of life lived as art, you found your way to your people…
…But could you now…
…point me toward the ones who envision “the possibility of a sacramental society,”
To the one’s shaking off the layers of industrial trauma like the deer do with but a single…Flick!
To the deconstruction crew whistling birdsongs while wielding jackhammers, on their way to decommission the mess,
To the scavenger people who sift through it all, snatching broken factory threads to weave into patches colored raven black.
They are, I know, but not where,
But you would find them, if you were here,
With your always eyes wide open, for the next new flowering, for every new cultural leap, because each successive generation outdoes the one that came before it,
Or at least it’s supposed to.
But today the gray beards and grannies now grown from their time of shining are more youthful than are the actual youth–so pensive, cautious, and square.
Worried about our own assess (no matter if other asses are getting had so we can keep having ours),
Concerned with our own comfort no matter who, what, or how,
And still, the endless maintenance of the status quo.
Feeling the world’s burning, seeing the world’s bloodshed, for oil, for land, and water soon to be,
But going forth with our errands, organic or conventional,
Focused on our own self-preservation and our own health above all else, because anything else is impossible, we say to ourselves, and each other, so often,
We think we’re saving the world by saving ourselves
And its true it starts from within
But go it must
Outward!
Like the melody rising up from the tiny wren’s chest, like the molten rock bubbling within the mountain’s core, like the word inscribed then spoken.
Outward!
in effort to bring about what might be,
(“Imagine all the people…”)
Outward!
To shock and frighten, yes,
to inspire, more!
A life of authenticity and negation of the machine,
in favor of Whitman’s world so “curious” and “real,”
A life lived on the dirty earth,
in favor of its fecund smells arising from birth and death and decay,
A life of healthful congruity,
where that which one says does not contradict that which one does, where actions don’t undermine feelings, and where all work is meaningful,
(“You may say I’m a dreamer…”)
So, from the new scene your spirit is most certainly involved I beg your assist, point me toward those in whose hearts throbs the pulse to live, and resist.
Because from where I sit, between two ridges, in a mountain valley, alone, I see no way to the place your people were pointing to,
For I have no Six Arts Gallery, and Greenwich Village as it was, is now gone, and I’m beginning to worry your generation was the last flowering before the fall.
posted by:
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Alaska
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