On Allen Ginsberg's Poetry

It may be the case that my generation
believes

in tumultuous celebration of Ginsberg’s poetry;

Cuing unflinchingly

a curtain-call to action,

an eruptive demise of blind tradition,

and audible roars of self-activism.

Perhaps even the generations

sleeping in graves

under cherry trees and magnolia leaves,

believe the same;

As they rinse through revelations

and pathological formularies

of his anti-militarism, counterculture, and

anti-bifurcation of sexual dichotomies –

Granting him

an unconventional status -

not unlike Hollywood beauties -

That has impregnated cults,

sprouted schools of thought,

and catalyzed mechanics

of the naked body.

I do not,

however,
feel my generation

nor the ones

under this universe.

I was reading the poem

New York to San Fran

featured in the February edition of Poetry magazine

during my train ride to Philadelphia

past Monday evening,

and what I felt

was neither arousal nor incitement.

 

On the contrary,

I was swiveling in confusion,

feeling amply homosexual, and caught

in states of hypnosis and hysteria –

A suspended mind, undulating

between tunnels of absolute vacuum

and an explosive crash of all the five senses.

I felt afloat, as if pinned to an air molecule,

between a marble floor and a marmalade sky,

with clouds breaking into sweat and thunder,

windows crashing into symphonic screams,

wooden tables bleeding at their ankles,

winds gushing in kicks and chortles.

I felt paralyzed

by the power of imagery.

I felt humbled by the sounds of Om.

I experienced simultaneously,

emptiness and totality,

suffused adequately with noxious verbiage -

Moans of hydrangeas,

orgasms of pansies,

bursts of poppies and purple periwinkles.

I felt ignited by allusions

to Strauss and Brahms and Beethoven,

and deaths at Wars across gouging oceans.

I felt hypnotized  –

Frozen and speechless, the way I was

by Magritte’s masterpiece from 1938,

Time Transfixed.

Upon reaching 30th Street Station,

I folded my magazine,

rode up the rows of gray escalators,

tapped on a pillar and sang a song.

Feeling volatile -

Like a pinafore of butterflies

like a crinoline of reveries

like an orchestra of sounds in gyrating orbits.

 

Ginsberg did to me

What Summer does to the water lilies–

Stupefy, mesmerize, and hallucinate.

Not roused to action, not incited to violate,

but pushed to the tip of wonder and awe,

Lidocaine-d, anesthetized, and ultimately

set free.