I saw the best minds of my generation blown by canons
starving hysterical caged
Dragging themselves through reams of bound nonsense at dawn
looking for an angry fix
Heavy headed hopesters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry virgin in the academy
of night
Who met and lived and loved and wrote it all down
to give it all up and be gardeners driving their panelled vans
through crepe myrtle, moss, and azaleas
Who pressed endless ribbons of work to light the midnight oil
then found themselves on fire
Who disrupted spaced out faculty meetings on satellite campuses
taking their clothes off dancing with bongos
and visions
Who partied with nigras and fairies and freaks and lost
their southern benches to classically ignorant fools
Who finally simply died
Who shared bong hits with Eliot in reverdie fields
sucking elysian toes
Who ejaculated on Victorian novels by candlelight
in dark musty dorm rooms and fed their library cards
to the dogs of war
Who saw the random lines enjambed and walked
Who said Fuck it and moved to New York
and made four-fifty an hour in the world's largest bookstore instead
of fulfilling their Christian dreams
Who gave up on knowledge to praise education
through glasses of passion and jazz
Who vanished into nowhere Zen Mississippi
Who sat in foreign buildings flipping flipping flipping
through lists and volumes and litanies and tomes of intellectual lust
Who threatened litigation
Who charmed snakes that dance in filing cabinet baskets
silent slippery venomous
Who shouldn't learn Shelley or Burroughs
or Jack
Who semifrench kissed the disappointed the disenfranchised
the disempowered with lips that tickle and tease
Who insistently typed for seven hours to the seventh power
disgorging their intellects total recall
Who ran screaming through England and Ireland longing
for America
Who let themselves be fucked in the ear by sadistic ceremonies
ritual passages places where no one else
goes
Who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty lost
incantations that yellow the yellow wallpaper
and glue their mouths shut
Who demanded recounts and dreamed dreamed dreamed
of realistic world views where
they don't know
Who like disgruntled postal workers with messages going astray
modified amok into a verb
Who crashed through classrooms waiting for impossible students
golden headed paragraphs that live
on the fine line of fear
Who brought their own chalk
Who turned their honor society notebooks into protesting
headstones howling in anguish and unison
Who wrote books and poems and novels and essays and
plays and satires and lyrics and tragic autobiographical
elegies
II
Matthew! Retreating to beaches of Dover! Inexorable leech!
The Obscuratii! Matthew! Creeping through corridors! Granite Minds!
Ordering books!
Matthew! Duped! Damned! Dunces! PHDs in fraud!
Matthew! Pallid phallus! Sterile balls! Ingrown pubic
conscience! Pastoral! Asleep!
The book of myths! Our names do not appear! Old!
Embittered! Alone!
Self-inflated potentates! The hall walkers!
Bowlegged! Bestial! Banal!
Nursing themselves on Matthew!
Matthew! Filthy! Fountain of fallout!
Matthew! Rooting in troughs of iniquity!
Matthew! Irrelevant notes! Neverwhere dreams! Visions
of ivory towers!
Matthew! Hie thee back to hell!
Evil one eyed Matthew!
Balance the budget Matthew!
Matthew! Whose lectures are stale!
Matthew! Whose memos are signed in blood!
Matthew! Whose crystalline stares crack into jagged glass
shards! Matthew!
Whose accolades age and decay!
Whose overt extortion unearths hollow dins!
Whose overwrought prose exalts mediocrity!
Matthew! The heavy judger of men! Matthew!
Odd nauseum! Matthew! Born in an angry gyre!
Spinning for two thousand years! Counting!
And counting! Always counting!
Matthew!
III
Pynchon -- we cry in lot 49
Angelou -- we sing with the bird
Ferlinghetti -- we wait
Hugo -- nous sommes miserables
Dostoevsky -- we know less than the idiot
Baldwin -- we see in your room
Giovanni -- we trip on our egos
Vonnegut -- we are with you in slaughterhouse
Bronte -- we roam on your moor
Ellison -- we are invisible
Winterson -- we write sex on our cherries
Spark -- we are genes past our prime
Oats -- we return where we've been
Dante -- noi siamo ghiaciatto nel inferno ecco
Eco -- we name the rose
Updike -- we run like your rabbits
Lewis -- we are screwed out of Narnia
Ozick -- we are caught in the shawl
Flaubert -- we are simple at heart
Millay -- we burn with you at both ends
Baraka -- we keep up with you and the Joneses
Greene -- we are not quiet Americans
Hughes --we swim big in your sea
Chekov -- we replant the orchard
Ford -- we are all good soldiers
Reed -- we mutter your jumbo
Behn -- we are chained Orinooko
Marquez -- soledad es nuestra vida
Burroughs -- we write with you for mugwumps in the
interzoneKnight -- we feel fucked up
Paz -- we ride the rhythm of wave
Snyder -- we rap rips in your bath
Carroll -- we look through the glass
Pound -- we are boughs in the metro
Kingston -- we are women and warriors
Walker -- we are with you in the familiar's temple
Sappho -- we are with you on Lesbos
Erdrich -- we read in your red convertible
Agee -- we come to your family funeral
DiPrima -- we sing unborn songs of O
Corso -- we marry with you
Lawrence -- we love sons and daughters
Proust -- we remember your things
Barthes -- we are authors and dead
Kafka -- we must metamorphose
Jack -- we are with you on the road