Sometimes a mind can multiply
enlightened insights into past
by turning toward the innerlight
where balm becomes beatitude in calm.

Not long ago I did just that
in time to find excited signs
still swirled and twirled inside my mind,
while ripping out synaptic lines
that carried peace to coalesce
the harmony of duty blessed.

I hope our future truth survives,
divided by man looking back
on facts corrected in the present-past
allowing future days to thrive -
once guilt is stripped from genocide.

The truth will kill complacency
in open air of transparency.
If wars are sought by lies once wrought
it leads to battle royal rattle fought
and started by those fleshless men
who only qualify as men of stone.

Think back to nineteen sixty-six,
as Beatles then became the game
the King's great fame was lost in shame
and Elvis rose to King no more,
nor did he fly the heights once soared
to greet the reaching screams of love adored.

While soldier souls died side by side
on shores still unidentified
by brass who never found their ass
or told the troops their leader's lied
to cover-up as war a complex, compound suicide.

The poet/writer heroes of my generation
killed themselves but may have saved the nation.
We made them gilded gods we thought could not be stopped.
Though wise with words they used and self-abused their spark
until a gray-day bump of wind begins to fill with ash
that flows right into Hippie days of flower-power love
so very, very fast and far too vast and stark.

The progeny of genius past
brought darkness to the land at last.

But still I thank you Allen, Greg and Jack
for private invocation and the invitations back
to thank all artists for their wisdom won
and praise the melding rebirth then begun
by bee-bop poets who saw jazz must truly run
with purities progressions proud beneath the sun.

And then we blend and coalesce
a truthful future with our past deceit
then past and present can attest
that truth must fully find and harmonize inside
to join transparency and love where they reside.

Sometime ago I was a faded rogue
invaded by an excitation mind
that made me reach for things I lacked
as I kept slowly drifing back to find
that inner light so bright of mine,
somewhere in there still lost in time.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/11/2021 09:30PM by easyeverett.

Ginzsberg [?] from Philadelphia...used to sell shoelaces in Macy's, drove a Maserati 550...he to my prom, he wore res, I wore pink, they all blue.

I think I would have liked 1966. Do you think these three mattered more then than now?

aaron,

everyone matters more when they're alive than when they're dead ... because they can still initiate behaviour directly. tra la.

btw, Tom, I recently went to a reading at the Beat Museum titled: "Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts" which featured 11 contemporary San Francisco poets.

love,

Peter

Peter,

"everyone matters more when they're alive than when they're dead ... because they can still initiate behaviour directly. tra la."

Not sure I agree, at least not yet. Some of the people that matter most to me now are either dead or are fictional characters that were never alive.

I would agree that often times a person's legacy gets perverted after he/she dies to serve someone else's purposes. Maybe some truth dies with a person - not sure this makes them matter less.

My guess is that most people that were and are affected by these three never knew them directly.


Cheers,

aaron

aaron,

This week I talked with eight people who knew one, two or three of them...one lived with Gregory for a while...I have never heard Corso called Greg before...anyway the magic doesn't often rub off, or I'd be a better poet...which I am not...from having talked with Ferlinghetti...though I am a better poet from have had Creeley talk with me. So, it is kind of tricky. Does it count any that Allen once made a pass at me? I don't thing so. His poems and the first page of Kerouac's 'Subterraneans' and Corso's 'Gasoline' selection made me a better writer.

In the end, I'm of the opinion that lived experience makes the most difference, though.

Since I managed to survive 1966, barely, I feel no nostalgia for that year. I distrust nostalgia in any case...too much false emotion.

amo,

Peter

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/12/2021 02:21AM by petersz.

A good reflective poem.

These are different times but I don't think there is a lack of strong and similar voices today. Only fewer people earnestly searching for, or willing to listen to them.

I couln't help thinking of "Bobos in Paradise". That book has some good insight into the cultural swings of the last half century.