Every now and then, everyone has to howl.
(With apologies to Allen Ginsberg. To buy my updated book, click here.)
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by climate, starving hysterical modeled,
dragging themselves through the university streets at dawn looking for a bit of funding,
noble-caused monsters yearning for the ancient connection to the Galileo-thrashing Church of Righteousness,
who junkets and grants glistening-eyed and Lefty sat up searching in the preternatural dawn of humming machines for a way to close the temple once and for all,
who saw undergraduates stare toward them in ugly worship and imagined a lifetime of same just a little uglier and more fervent still,
who passed through the ramparts of reason but sparingly and never shed the dark cloak once while there,
who were seldom expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing the fruit of obscene codes but not the codes,
who cowered in holy terror of what nature had done and would do, accumulating their money in tin hats and broadcasting their torture through the wall,
who got promoted in their Lenin beards returning through the Maldives with a pack of journos following ready to pick up a crumb of wisdom,
who toasted their like selves until glasses broke or shoulders tired, a good year that,
with dreams, with shrugs, with shaking nightmares, hidden data missing data get your own freaking data,
intellectual blind alleys muttering lingo and leaping towards poles of Arctic Antarctica from the cover of tropics, illuminating the crabby surreal world of apathy between,
false consciousness resultant from checks that always come and always clear, shuffling sensible shoes on linoleum hallway floors and yet still sexy somehow, like every Church leader ever, like that,
who chained themselves to intellectual perversions for the fast ride from associate to full professor concerned not for the young ones frozen in lies,
who plotted dire dreamings that sounded as real as Hell and were more so,
who talked continuously seventy hours from CRU to PSU to the White House and never wondered how this dream came true,
how it was during their time that the sky had come to fall at last as they’d dreamed for so long,
who thought themselves privileged and courageous to report seeing the very first brick of the bright blue vault tumbling straight down
Ginsberg was never one of my faves, but …
Bravo! Harold … a brilliant parody
P.S. I have bought and read your book, and quite enjoyed it … have recommended to friends
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis.
Howl has always been a favorite…way to riff off of it…kudos…