06 September, 2011

Summer Kings


Turned on the television – no news. Not now.
No where to put it it, all the pain and misery
from the past 6 hours
while I was dreaming.

(Sleeping is a form of meditation
and I know when I wake
whether I ought to go back
and finish.

Sometimes I can't, though.
Damned Adulthood.)

Turn on the television. No Coffee. Not yet.
Will buy it on Main Street. Caught the last part
of a movie about Allen Ginsberg
and I remembered where I was
when I heard he died.

                                  It was Spring.

I was the ghost of a former self,
wandering the streets of Cincinnati:
divorced, college drop out, drunk,
and broke – which is to say
broken – broken like
the lines of a poem
writ on narrow onion paper.
Slept on couches
curled up in doorways
aged my mother
disappointed the ghost of my father.
He died in the Fall.

(Druids used to call them Summer Kings –
when a man in his prime
died, was sacrificed in the Fall
so the crops would be fertile
the following year.)

Sitwells, the coffee shop I used to hide in
when I could afford coffee
was going to have a memorial reading.
Legions of Ginsberg lovers
reading lines inspired by the man
William F. Buckley called “naive
when it comes to politics.”

I signed up but did not read. I did not attend
because I couldn't find the words
in the doorway where I shared cheap wine
with an old man named Clancy
who would not go to the shelter
even when it was cold.

Turn on the television. Bad reality shows
and even worse news. At least Ginsberg
left poems behind. Fathers
leave sons and daughters behind.

Turn off the television
wishing for a bottle of wine
a comfortable tree,
and the final resting
of all the old ghosts
who haunt me
when I first wake
from dreaming.