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Brian Oarr Feb 2012
They had begun to question consciousness,
turning solid matter into fuzziness in their brains,
rendering not atoms, nor photons, nor particles,
only cold energy, halucenogenic stardust joints.
For the exclusionary few to whom the material
had never meant **** to a tree or a **** to a rabbit,
it was the cash-cow of quantum reality,
ambiguous poetry for a Beat Generation,
Uncertainty in free verse chapbooks.
So they wrote of our interconnectedness ---
the Ginsbergs, the Levertovs, the Ferlinghettis ---
till the gravity of space-mind curved imagination,
a nation falling unheard without a whimper in the forest.
"You've got to pick up every stitch,
The rabbits running in the ditch,
Beatniks are out to make it rich,
Oh no, must be the season of the witch"
                           --- Donovan Leitch
Shanekwa Feb 2012
Where are the Kerouacs?
The Ginsbergs?
The Cassadys?

Drunk on
wine
and life

Riding the highways and railroads to dreams unseen, even by them.

Clashes of ideas, like bright lights in the dim daybreak of an all-nighters.
Fueled by cigarettes and philosophy.

Now everyone wants the same thing.
A boring spouse.
A boring job.
A boring house.

What happened to the generation of lost souls that once searched the open plains and the cramped alleyways?

For nothing more than a beautiful moment.
Emma Henderson Nov 2014
FIN
I knew you once before,
had passed you specky, lanky, characterless
in dusty corridors, retiring into C rooms

Now what are you, years older,
eyes uncomparable to clichés

What were we?
Invisible, 'part of the woodwork', the damp and must and old worlds

Why was it then you hadn't been of note to me,
of nothing to me

Perhaps you were not pin-marked,
bearing dead inks,
Perhaps your eyes could not sparkle behind thick lenses

I know now I fall in love with drug casualties, or wannabes,
who live their days as nights,
and set their lungs alight

Forgive me for all I say, all I believe,
all my vapid perceptions of boys like you,
being the Ginsbergs and Kerouacs of this world

Failing, always failing

And I'm empty still,
till I find,
boys like you made of easy exits,
and open doorways

I am not winning by having shallow feeling,
I am losing years from empty lust,
when brown eyed boys come profess love,
that is full,
and overbearing

Tell me,
will I ever be yours?

FIN
Dan Oct 2017
An empty page is a perfect reflection
Of my empty mind

And who took the life away from the words I write?
Who has cursed me to pace nervously around dining rooms with the hope that something meaningful will appear on a page
Some words that are worthy of being said that will be met by crowds with adoration and applause
Yet I am not worthy
I am not worthy of adoration or applause or words with meaning
I am stuck in this flat affair
Because while others seek for meaning with action my hours are stained with a deep black oil that keeps me standing still
When I think about writing my head feels so empty
And I wonder if I have wasted all my pretty words on meaningless sayings in the hopes someone would look at me and say “now there is a good and articulate revolutionary soul, a good man with good answers”
Now, for once, the whole truth is clear
I cannot write sacred words for there are no sacred words
I cannot write a sacred poem for sacred poems do not exist
And I think this is what growing up feels like
The day you realize that just because you read Allen Ginsbergs Howl,
and wanted to write a poem just like that, and you spend two years attempting to create a facsimile of “I saw the best minds of my generation”,
None of that can make you a poet
Just as refusing to have a drivers license does not make one an anarchist
And how much have I grown away from that once holy phrase “I saw the best minds of my generation”?
Since then I have heard Marius Jacobs declare “I saw the world and it was not beautiful”
Max Stirner cry out “All things are nothing to me”
And Johnny Hobo singing “you wish that the world was clean/but I’m in love with the way it’s *****”
None of these words are holy
None of these sayings are sacred
But I hold each one in my heart as if they are my property, or rather, a property of me
I decided to write poetry because of people like Carl Sandburg and Jack Kerouac
I loved the words they wrote to the point that my words were lost
I celebrated their words as if they were holy
But growing up means I understand that, at the end of the day, they are just words
I tried so hard to write the words that came from them
And it’s about **** time I start writing the words
That can only come from me
Michael John Jan 2024
i

-and i have always shared
some kind of infinity
with that flora-

affinity-from van gogh
to allen ginsbergs
sutra..

there is love and
inspiration
some cure..

some thing magical
and useful
not to mention

the colour-
yellow is god on
high..

ii

perhaps you will
return
as a sunflower?!

ah sunflower! weary of
time..
who countest the steps

of the sun..
blake william
eternal

infinite..
(not unlike the colour
yellow..)

iii

so where are we..
-fame and fortune?
when you were young

you gladly spurned
to be a beautiful sun flower
-loves resurrection..

about the size of it
odd is ambition
even the word..
kevin Aug 15
Derelict of duty
Reader of faithful patrons
Be held by throng!

Behind in the study
Relentless man
Hear more or less of gold?

Ginsbergs' Imodium

When you hear
The wars!
Of women! From somewhere a democracy!
A ******!
A mother

The hurry of having!
The recession in drama
The fake counter
Service with infinite question of how
Demeaning man?
While public?

Encampment of scorn science
And pretty

Housing The **** In America?

Rally thy troops
Proposition the pole!

Courtesy of the times of los Angeles

Developer of female walking has forceful interview photographed with victim of her cost in California
Forcing victim never to discuss the mortgage emergency that is ever prevalent in suppressing free speech powers her dialogued opponent fails to article history objectively.

Constitutional violations of objective humorist reporters

This concludes one examination of definitions

— The End —