Howl Revisited

(for Allen Ginsberg)

I saw the best minds as
the stray dogs
of my generation,
wagging their fluffy tails,
howling apocalyptic
announcements in buses
and on subways trains,
in supermarkets and
colleges campuses--
barking about something
extremely important
like Kafka and busty blondes,
revealing the utter banality
of our ever collapsing
Western civilization,
reminiscent of some Goya
paintings, smudged with lipstick,
rouge, powders and mascara--
they were barking about
seasonal changes, orgasms,
and wars, presidential
elections, tampons and
brassieres,
caressing the pages with
full breasts, six pack bellies
and rising temperatures,
invoking revolutions,
erections and the first
amendment,
they were smoking Zen pipes
and snorting powdered
guacamole, mixing French
parlance with tea sipping
haiku moments,
they were starting arsons
and putting out forest fires,
they were saving the Amazon
and subverted the morale
of plugged up toilets
of our inner social fabric,
humping away at the foundations
of the sociopolitical structure,
because you knew, and we all
knew, as surely as the Pope
shits in the woods,
that the breakthrough
begins by embracing the animal,
by stripping away
the absurd conventions of
the literary establishment,
and doing away with the moral
bankruptcy of the power elite--
so the poets barked naked
and howled into the crowds
in the bitter cold of winter
and the oppressive heat of
summer--
they walked out nude,
armed with toilet plungers,
manuscripts, wrenches,
and weapons of mass destruction,
engaging in acts of poetic
terrorism at airport poetry
readings, bypassing airport
security, exploding poetic
bombs in airplane restrooms,
getting drunk and picking
fights with well-dressed
celebrities and CEOs,
puking their guts out
and shouting obscenities,
exposing the beauty and
ugliness of our collective
identity in words and in song,
and in the desperate
howls for some lost lovers'
affections.


  January 9, 2010
--Alexander Shaumyan