America: for Allen Ginsberg

another loving rip-off. would love some feedback.

America!

America I’ve got to cut through and talk to you at last,

I’m crouched in a white bathroom cubicle writing, with no cameras, quietly safe.

America your teachers are useless

with their warbling vendettas, bitter constraints,

and litanies of lies berating my brain.

A fierce ignorance rises in my face.

There, the bell to rise,

America, please don’t make me go back. Not so soon.

America your regulations aren’t for me, I know what I’m doing.

 

America I feel sentimental about the lilies. Lilacs are falling blanched with envy.

with the romance of your roads, open & singing,

it’s ridiculous. We’re ridiculous.

Allen Ginsberg is still in fact the most enlightened man in America.

America there’s really nothing wrong if you look at it right.

 

America your corpses are rising against you,

in a tidal foam of weak white fingers, vengeful maids

& the lace of prostitutes sopping over clawed in cobwebs.

Wandering endless streets in chilling rain,

dancing to frighten your demons away.

 

America it’s amazingly easy being young & vital, a constant threat

I use my appearance & actions to my intentions.

and I feel like fodder, but what of it? I am legal.

I am heartbreakingly hopeful and self-conscious.

I am housed in your plushed universities.

I am alive, in your amazing array of lights.

 

In the America of pleasure gardens and ballad mongers still alive today,

A broken-tongued brown banging piano rattles & croons from Harlem Heaven,

My smooth white hand stretches to the fullness of jazz chords,

that I practice in my living -room, and every church hall I can find.

Radios detuned and rattling along the highway,

In the intimacy of a breath long dried in the microphone,

Frank Sinatra is scowlingly alive.

 

America, sling your tattered ‘60s halo over that thick platinum skull for awhile.

America the ‘50s are dead, in dead gray halls,

they kick & spin, flaring their gums to a white-leather dawn

 spread smooth like chrome

over the foreheads of skyscrapers on the skyline.

(Where is the sky? The moon has been hiding from me at my window. The stars still glitter maliciously.)

America I know what you still do to James Dean in your diner backlots at sunrise,

all sweet-eyed & howling with leather.

 

You deserve every metaphor in the world, you’re

an apple-pie princess

basking in your own lovely expression plated on the lake,

while darkness rises in fumes around, a heavy-sooted fog.

It’s come to this, in our bliss… America, at this point

your national resources include

an artillery hemline sinking into the sea,

gorgeous orchards of wire,

thousands of millions of genitals in shamed secret gymnasiums,

and even more synthetic ways to say hello.

 

America, we’ve never lost sight, we've always known this.

But when did you lose your flair for illusion?

America, this manifesto song is burning our throats under your stadium lights.

I’m climbing through the night, I’ll never sleep.

I could dream of you forever.

I sway from stars fading in your cold resuscitated dawn.