Fit the First: Echoes from a Howl
Here's the story: This was written a few months ago, almost immediately after I read through Allen Ginsberg's Howl (phenomenal epic poem, check it out here www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179381). In his piece, perhaps his magnum opus, Ginsberg did a commentary on his generation and his era. It was genius. Howl really had this profound feeling that sprang into my head and rooted itself in there, refusing to stop pounding about and playing Bob Dylan until I acknowledged it.
This is a piece that reflects how it made me feel and some inkling thoughts on our generation in relation to the one Ginsberg wrote of.
Here is my acknowledgement, if you're one of those... ugh... 'fine' folks who has an issue with certain obscenities, leave now and do not return:
Oh to feel the unrequited love that I do
and not knowing how any other kind feels.
To yearn and dream of giving one’s heart away on silver
and having to keep such thoughts privately concealed.
They aren’t funny.
“The comedian doesn’t dance for us!
The comedian doesn’t dance for us!
He isn’t funny anymore.
He used to be.
He used to sing and dance to the rhythm of his own madness
never truly sure what his next joke would be or how he’d deliver
to his crowd!
The comedian doesn’t dance for us!
But still he expects our sympathies.
He begs and pleads for an open heart and caring mind, but no,
not until he makes us laugh and chortle until we choke.
It won’t be a pleasant day on stage ‘till he hears our cries.
The comedian doesn’t dance for us!
He grips the mic and hold it close to his own heart.
Lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.
He thinks he’s an artist.
Oh his tortured soul, it must be freed!
Freed from the booing crowd and the ironically unironic vegetables
we hurl at him and his dapper suit.
Who wears such finery to a fool’s show?
It isn’t until we laugh that we’ll listen.
It isn’t until we laugh that we’ll care.
How many times has he told the story of the girl that ignored him?
How much time will he consume with his own bitter chuckling?
All of it,
apparently.”
But still I perform, I write, I expand.
I seek new horizons and find their dead-ends,
their brick-walls, those nights when the money spends
itself away.
Where’d it go?
I used it on marijuana, honestly.
But I smoke in a pipe for some sense of civility.
I’m no atheistic do-nothing
I’m an atheistic well of creativity.
It spawns in the night when I’m most alone,
the creaking from outside the window powerfully reminding
of my home’s emptiness.
My visions and dreams keep me company,
sojourn me from madness. I feel for them.
Ginsberg prattles on in the back of my head,
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”
He saw things I’ll never see, described them in ways I never can.
I’m not Allen Ginsberg.
Nor am I Bob Dylan.
Nor am I Lenny Bruce.
Nor am I George Carlin.
I am me, simply, sublimely me.
And it seems I’m the only one comfortable with it.
I refuse to try and describe a generation here,
for my generation has nothing yet to describe.
I hope and wish and dream of us, our future,
of being the people who accomplish that clandestine peace
I’ve been told of for sixteen years and some change.
But still, my words are hollow as the shouts yet ring:
“The comedian doesn’t dance for us!”
I am not alone, here.
The thinkers and dreamers and I’m-gonna-doers of my generation,
they are real, they stand and sing and hide in corners with their joints and pipes.
They wait for the days when they will have options, when they can speak.
But now it’s all a web, a social networking experiment in which we’re all rats.
The thoughts and dribbling of unnecessary piles of flesh and bone that
should never have learned to speak cloud the atmosphere and infosphere
of all those around them.
“Going to the mall!” Ten minutes past.
Going to submit yourself to another day of consumerist pandering.
“wondering were the tme goes”
It goes to the same place capitalization, punctuation, and spelling have all fled.
“The comedian doesn’t dance for us!”
Fuck you.
The argument notwithstanding, for no argument is or does or whatever,
I believe there are those of you out there.
Those who interpret and think and believe and dream and hope and do,
those better than the simpletons I’m forced to engage with,
those better than me.
You are the future and only chance. You are the way and light.
And when all comes down and you’ve accepted your torch greedily from those
who I’ve claimed to be do-nothings and perchancers, the torch of time itself,
what will you do with it?
Will you use it to ignite the flames of creativity and art, to seek the musical harmony of all things?
Or will you use it as a weapon against people different from you?
Or… will you use it to make the comedian dance?
