After the Reading at the Beat Generation Conference, May 25, 1994

Note from the Author: This poem appears in a recently published collection of poems titled “Foster Home”.Click here to buy that book. Thanks in advance for your consideration!!

Back at the hotel I sip whiskey from a plastic cup.
A black and white Kirk Douglas
glows in my darkened room:
A guttural rasp in khaki fatigues,
even in this beach love scene.

Cup to my lips, sutra to the city.
The pretty brunette resists---
she’s going to marry his son, she says.
Douglas tightens his jaw,
cups her chin to his,
presses their mouths together.
I believe he wanted to swallow all of her.

St. Mark’s of the Bowery,
writers who knew the dead
when Big Sur was a place to drink beer.
The truthful are sarcastic,
the nostalgic tell lies.

John Wayne in black and white.
He has to tell his son his fiancé is dead,
that her body, hard and cold as a bone,
surfaced on the beach at dawn.
Affixing his crew-cut straight ahead,
looks the boy to his knees.
“Get yourself together.”

Tomorrow jackhammers will wake me on 37^th street.
I will smile in Time Square,
Photograph goateed hipsters and mumbling street people.
Gregory Corso will sit with me on a park bench for thirty minutes
Before he realizes I’m not the guy who came here to pick him up.

The only people for me are the mad ones . . .

Just before I fall asleep a leather blonde TV psychic
shines porn-light on the screen,
languidly caressing her hips, her lips
caress each syllable
“prisoner of the unknown.”

The Unknown: cheap Benzedrine for the mortal,
a bus ride off the road with his mother
from Brooklyn to Orlando to San Francisco,
the road now looped back around itself again.