Blues played this time to a tinsel hazed
rhythm of guys in the street puffing on cigarette butts,
highschool fifties kids wearing St Christopher medals
confessing to each other to the blare of car radios and chrome antennas ,
the music all the while witnesses to this night,
dark as a senior prom dress.
Hopeless General Motors
puffing "Eli Eli Yale",
guilty despair!
“Progress is Our Most Important Product.”
Eisenhower shamefully laughing at something – maybe our poets?
Soft futility, tin tabulations of defeat
leaking through America’s emotional dams,
and the whole jackoff civilization grins
and the good ol boys drink more bourbon and toot coke.
We once took ourselves so seriously
like innocent solemn animals
gnawing off their infected legs.
We were educated to dodge the poison traps of hunters
bellowing rock–and–roll horns and factory whistles
as scientifically as the cold war.
Yet meanwhile
unbeknownst to our Brothers' Beat Generation,
America continued flexing its pornographic football muscles
snickering at the hip intellectual pinkos
busy tittering stream of consciousness poetry,
urbanely and counterculturally
nested under The Greatest Generation's bed.
NYC 1969