IN THE SERVICE OF HEAVEN

the prayers of the fallen

GINSBERG 

 I wandered the library halls as a freshman,

Naked in my innocence,

Blind in my mediocre madness,

My ordinary insanity,

In search for a single slither of a nation's dream,

Beaten by walls of fraudulent morality,

Fighting a war called rhyme

While another was waged across the immaculate ocean

Of drowned visions and damned Gods of lost virtues.

I wandered off onto another path altogether,

Of hallucinations and dirty syringes behind closed doors,

Of theft and incessant, obsessive passion

For what we did and how the paper kept ripping

Beneath the fabrications I used to call fingers.

I closed my eyes and stumbled through the murky waters

Of diluted minds that smelled like kerosene,

Through empty rooms and alleyways where I waited

For whom? He wouldn't want you to know,

He resents the sound his name makes

When it fills the countless pages of my journal over and over again.

I think he wanted to call it hysteria, but I couldn't hear him

Over the sound my heartbeat was making in its psychotic obsession.

It was the delirious poetry of our new vision

That we nailed on walls and spelled in little red rivers on our flesh.

It was the maniacal fascination of everything new

And the frantic, drunk rejection of our fathers' ways,

As we inhaled the unknown and broke our nails

On cracked bottles empty of liquor and coffins we made

Of our sins, wrapped in pages of bitter poetry that smelled

Like betrayal and death, like murderous passions and nooses.

I think it smelled a little like him, too.

Now, as I sit, early on this hang-over morning,

Wondering how everything happened so quickly,

I hesitate to recall the tapping of his fingers

Against a typewriter. Had he ever used one?

Or had he used me instead?

The waitress comes, her hands fidgeting

As she takes away my empty cup of bitter coffee.

'The usual?' she asks. I nod,

Shake the ash of my cigar into the ash tray.

She comes back with a glass and wanders off,

Same way I used to before I met him,

Naked in my innocence.

Blind in my mediocre madness,

My ordinary insanity.

The taste of whiskey hisses against my throat,

Reminding the pale, broken thing of a writer,

Behind the cracked, old table, on the mahogany couch,

That all that makes me write tastes, smells, feels

Like the poetry he was baptized in.

I, too, was born to worship this desperate religion that was him and I.

But as the pencil scrapes the pages,

It is a different sort of prayer that twitches on the corners

And the cracked lines of my lips.

Another lover hits the universe.

The circle is broken.

But after death comes rebirth.

And like all lovers and sad people,

I am a poet.

[note] to all the lovers of this world who, like me, are dreamers on the edge of insanity