I don't see nothing new but I feel a lot of change


Mary Ellen Mark, Central Park, New York City, 1967


from The Ex-Bush Files
-- by Klipschutz

Scott McClellan apologized to Richard Clarke
for dissing his book without reading it,

now that Scott has a book of his own.
So how does it feel to be without a home,

an unknown unknown*, and face the music
for what you didn’t do? Those were the days.

Let it bleed. You made a fool of everyone.
Cold turkey. Now this: the total eclipse of the son.

But not before they cast you into outer darkness too.
Bring lawyers, guns and money. Some books on tape, ha! Boo!
________________________________________________________
*© Dylan/Rumsfeld



From Ed Sanders' Poem Biography of Allen Ginsberg:

The Farm

Huge stacks of mail
and the endless ring of the phone

helped make the bard want to get to silence

& he asked filmmaker Barbara Rubin
to look for a place in the country.

A big factor in wanting to get a country place
was to help Peter Orlovsky off methedrine
His condition had gotten more serious than
toothbrushing the cobbles of Avenue C
in a meth-addled thirst for cleanliness.

Peter, of course, was a poet of stature. I often think of
his graceful lines in Don Allen's New American Poetry
"... on a hill a butterfly
makes a cup that I drink from, walking over a bridge
of flowers."

Allen and Barbara Rubin had been occasional lovers
He made it with women more often
than commonly known
& she apparently had a passion to marry the bard
a passion she shared with but a few of her friends

She looked around Sharon Springs and Cherry Valley
surrounded by state forest
90 acres, run-down, no electricity

Allen bought it
& he and Barbara moved to the farm mid-March '68

In addition to helping Peter,
who came to the farm with his oft-hospitalized brother Julius
Ginsberg also had in mind getting Kerouac up there
to dry out his liver
Though Barbara Rubin soon drifted away from her dreams
of marriage with the bard
the farm remained a factor, a haven for poets & seekers
for the rest of A.G.'s life
through the 1990s


The Mailer Rule
(November 19, 1960)

Do not stab your wife
at the party
where you
are set to announce
your candidacy for mayor.

At the same unfortunate party
Ginsberg and Norman Podhoretz
--a famous beatbaiter--
had a famous at-the-time squabble
with Ginsberg calling P. a fuckhead
and P. calling G. an idiot.