Those were the days, I used to say may they never come again, well
that was easy they don't come again
A lot of the people I grew up with are gone O, I can see them
not like a ghost or apparition
but inside my eyes
I see Janine lurching to her garden through the window
hardly able to walk
And I see her with immense pride as her students
in the prison workshop perform
I see Allen coming down the street, he winks lets
his patented askew smile, a tiny wave and turns
into a doorway or I close and open my eyes
and I see Neal in a 57 Chev, he's keeping
the beat with his hand on top of the wheel
I see him streaking through the sky I hear him talking
but not really I'm only imagining and every day
lines of Gregory Corso breeze through
the crackling of his voice inside the walls
Bremser Ray I can feel his presence ride his rhythm
chuckle along with his Hobokenesian cackle
Al Jazzbeau Collins said, "They said Bird was gone
but Bird was never more here."
The Beats that remain, remain! The autumns must be filled
and the markings are left for The Next
May the human race survive the racist Nazis
May the Beat go on with props for the Non-Ending
May there always be unexpected fun
& work to be done with collateral pleasure
May there be compassion for human flesh
Imaginations exalted explored expansive verse hailed
and passion revealed indulged
in the birthing of musical words
May youth travel all over ‘Merica and the world
May wondrous women lead us to peaceful prosperity
splendidly inundated in kicks
The mountains shivering under our foot steps
Books opening in the sky the words tumbling off their pages raining yarns & epics of the gone done poets
of the attics streets highways meadows
& mountains, taverns, bedrooms and fanes
Let everything be written
Let heartless craft be abandoned marooned
Let the masses that is the everyday woman, man and child
have no reason to fear penises and vaginas
Praised be the everlasting road and the gospel of infidels
Let heritage and ethnicity be no hindrance to anything
We weren't the ones promulgated look out for number one above all I mean all else the lack of love in the act of sex living
through celebrities bohemian beat hippie
And everything after, costumes mostly weekend, with choice of Elmer Fudd on crack or the Queen of Bad Judgment
& Deception
And Mammon is elected and cares not what is said
actually happens
It is reliant solely on the interpretation it'll be what the people want
to believe not what is
If there ever has been a time for Divine Intervention--
it's pretty close to now
If ever magic would work on a worldwide scale now's the time
for a little
ANDY CLAUSEN has travelled and read his poetry all over North America and the world. (New York, California, Alaska, Texas, Prague, Kathmandu, Amsterdam and elsewhere) He was co-editor of, POEMS FOR THE NATION, with Allen Ginsberg and Eliot Katz (Seven Stories Press). He was an editor at LONG SHOT Magazine. Andy has written about his adventures with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Ray Bremser, Janine Pommy Vega, Peter Orlovsky, and many others of the Beat Generation. He is the author of “40th Century Man” and “Home of the Blues”, among other books of poetry. His latest book, “The Latter Days of the Beat Generation: A First Hand Account” will be published in the fall.
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