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Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2006 : Dennis Arlo Voorhees
PEACE FOR ALLEN GINSBERG
Don't worry Allen. I won't follow your path to extinction. I won't yawp my way
on to America's slippery rooftop or dream your ghost through the back door.
I won't moan into the microphone about wars that never end.
I'll dream of a green automobile with a working engine, and mystical insurance cards
that cosmically vibrate an officer's hand, or a highway west of California
that leads to Canada, a woman I can't remember and a home that never arrives.
I'm a working man, Allen. I got debts and an America with no permanent address.
Getting through a shift without burning my hands, is spiritual success, and a glass of whiskey
obscuring a Harvest moon last month will insure my bones for another year.
Why do you brush your beard against my neck? Let me outlive my mind and meet Weldon
in the bottom of San Francisco Bay. I'm bringing personalized tea cups and a scrabble board.
Did you ever wash dishes for ten hours only to walk in the rain to an empty apartment?
Jerry ate your lion, Allen. He was old and rusty. Every time he roared a golden tooth fell out.
Jerry's a cartoon mouse that looks like Mussolini. He likes watching commercials
turning my toenails into mercenaries and reenacting the Revolutionary War.
Allen, seriously. Words are on the brink of extinction. Recipes for poems combust
on lonesome desert roads. When I scream Darling! Scarecrow! Die! everyone knows
I don't mean it. It's sinister. I've given nothing and now I'm everything.
Babies stroll alone in the rain screaming for an eternal breast. Spiders bury their fangs
and march toward the mountains. Presidents no longer procrastinate the apocalypse.
Every vowel has left the alphabet so all we hear is gibberish as a careless dealer flips the final cards.
Who killed the typewriter? What price salvation? How to describe a gust of wind
strong enough to blow the kings from the table? Dead bodies damn the Euphrates.
Methane hisses beneath Antarctica. Every horizon stinks of gasoline. Ginsberg, Can you hear me?
There's no triumphant two-step to gallop between gaps of rain. Help me steal detergent
from the Supermarket. Scoop the dog shit from the sandbox. Let the bombers forget their fingers.
Make the mind return to the old red barn. Let the rusty cowbell call the cattle home.
Is it really that crazy to go insane? Dead kittens pose for urban calendars on every street.
Marijuana is medicine for headaches and LSD only works in the loins of the Utah desert.
I saw the best minds of my generation build townhouses and vote Republican.
Losing can't be explained away in greyhound bus stations anymore. Tickets to anywhere
cost at least one divorce, eyes like sleeping murderers and an entire bank account.
Summer vacations are food stamp forms and pitching tents on the Oregon coast
watching the sun shrink into the Pacific, while the world pushes you in,
the wind and undertow paid off by the imperial hand of gravity. Mother Nature stereotypes
every budding Buddha. In the mind of the trees, the eyes of the blue jay
we are ignorant white men, waving chainsaws lynching the poor with barbed wire.
I blame the caveman who invented the idea of an idea the man that made the heart
more than just muscle, immortalizing elk on every cave wall. Allen, tell me
Who lied to the logger, making him believe that forests last for ever? Who told the soldier
dying is an honorable way to live? Who told the hippy to sell out, refinance
sip merlot around an electric fireplace, that money is the only way to close an open mouth?
O meaningless plea to absent spiritual adviser! O All-knowing cow loving Sage, step out
of your statue and guide me! Don' let the dramatic O echo over minefields and oil-soaked bodies.
Don't let the warrior's teeth chew up naked, beautiful heart-heavy prayers!
Allen, if I brought the moon to your attic, would you help me find the ethereal book?
If I was nude reading Rimbaud on your doorstep would you at least slip a note
through the screen door, then peruse me from your penthouse bedroom?
god's in Tangiers in 1955. He's not coming back. Imagine the bottomless martini,
each olive a tiny globe in his callused hands. He masturbates the needle in his arm,
hallucinating an island he considered making before humans gave him heroin.
Allen, the world has fucked itself with the atom bomb and it seems to enjoy
the sharp vibrations. Periods and commas lobby to jail the question mark.
My telephone rings wherever I go. Birds ring and no one answers. Please, Allen do something.
Let the mothers punish their generals. Let the colonels remember a lover.
Give the privates a copy of Howl. Whip the horses from their catalogs. Chase the cowboys
from their paper towns. Prepare the pasture for a sunny picnic. Ring the rusty cowbell
call the soldiers home.
This poem was a finalist in the 2006 War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Copyright is reserved to the author.
About Dennis Arlo Voorhees
Unafraid of the generic darkness or sugary sunlight that laces his twenty-first century breath, Arlo Voorhees is dragging the moon back to modern poetry, stuffing star-filled metaphors down the throats of old poets. His poems and stories have appeared in Humdinger, Ephemeris, Make More Love, Hot Metal Press and a few other places. His self-published chapbook, Milk Replacer, can be found at Powells and in the milk rooms of dairy farms across America. He is the host of the Broken Word Poetry Reading, which occurs every Tuesday night in northeast Portland, Oregon.
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