BEAT
by John Fenn

for Allen Ginsburg

Gleefully serenading the roaches,
grandfathered in for 2000 generations in 2nd Avenue lofts,
taunting the Tiffanys-is-a-Girl's-Best-Friend Broadway sirens,
they hammered out an art of poverty with jangling words,
shaping discarded junk from the ashcan and wasteland.

In their beer-stained corduroys and Levis,
they stared at America's gray flannel suits and spat,
like a New Hampshire farmer on a tourist's Lincoln
carelessly backed over tomato plants.

Silly with reefer, they goofed the words, like an elephant
playing with peanuts on asphalt at the Bronx Zoo.
From and through the drugs' early daze
in the Bowery's last gleaming,
they sang of the times that were a' changing.

From the coldwater flats,
littered stairwells, bathtub rings
from the lonely reaches of Route 66's ribbon of highway
from 'Frisco and Village gay bars and coffee houses,
off-Broadway theaters with code-mocking light boards,
they freed us to question

Imperialistic greed,
African American oppression,
homophobia,
and mammon money lust.

Leary-worship of chemical highs,
innumerable OD's in St. Stephen's emergency,
decimated many, so many brains cells.

But they gave us
Little Rock and Woodstock
the wonders of Zen,
the revelations of Watergate,

a flower in a rifle barrel.

© Copyright, 1997 by John Fenn
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