ginsbergia (9/30)

Last night, after a day of weariness and ping-pongy feelings (some other time, k?) I stopped in around midnight at SPLAB's Allen Ginsberg Poetry Marathon. It is a yearly thing they do, seeing how long they can keep people doing Ginsbergy stuff (reading responses, reading his work, watching films related to the beats movement, etc.) I guess this year they broke the record with something like 11 hours straight. I was only there for about an hour and a half of it and I started falling asleep (check the sweet picture of me looking half-dead) but it was a great time while I was awake and the new SPLAB (Spoken Word Lab) room in Columbia City is really warm and home-y feeling. For as much as I liked the Columbia City Cinema, this new room is way inviting. I started this piece there and have finished it just now. The last couple days I have been writing, but more of a journal-ish feel about the last couple of weeks' ups and downs (again, some other time) but this one is an actual poem, at least.

ginsbergia

the corpses go by so fast,
all exquisite, just in time
to start the film about poems
and men who write them
and women who love them
and also write, with splayed-fingered
gestures into microphones.
the room around us, draped
in a history of education and
host to ghost mice, amputee moths
and cold pizza, admiration,
adoration skate the hand-rail border
of literal, spiritual worship,
if it were possible to worship
half-sprawled off a couch.
the men with the poems
and the women with the poems
and the men with the women
with the men with the poems
and the lateness of the night
and brown warmth of the
room helped our own words,
scattered and mashed in a blind flail,
resonate as some sort of knotted rope
tossed from past traditions
into the near future
lined, wrinkled, blessed with ink.

I like Ginsberg, but don't hold him (or the beats in general) in the same regard as many people do. I wanted that to communicate without it seeming like I was making fun of anyone. Probably a blog/essay about the Weight of the Beats has already been written, but I've got enough thoughts about it I may toss that up here sometime.