I was smoking with the boys upstairs
when I heard about the whole affair


Helmut Federle, Blume mit 4 Blüten (Flower of Sadness), 1982


It Can't Be True (1974)
-- Michael Brownstein

That we belong to one of the last generations
To see an uncontaminated sky
And walk through enough forest
Stretching for hundreds of square miles
Uncharted and completely surrounded by itself
Holding us because being there
Is a real suprise, vast and everyday
And not just the unspoiled tip
Of an island fenced off by the gov't.
For one brief, clumsy weekend
Fucking away from the glare of the city's
Shiny hallucination


Stag Club
-- Frank O'Hara

A prickly beer's like
snow on your asshole --
all the asphodels farting
through a poem by Robert Burns.
Joys of interminable beers!
teeth green as grass, the kiss
under the table upside down
mushrooming and sweet sun
over the bitches, their pears.


Headphones at Dawn
-- by Edward Sanders (from History of America in Verse)

Just as young people studied City Lights pocket poets
or mimeographed magazines
for news that was Really News

by the mid and late 1960s they studied stereo albums
as if they were religious texts
or as an anodyne to the crimson chaos
or even to help them build courage to
stand up for change

Raptured at dawn with headphones listening to Cecil Taylor
Jim Morrison & the Doors

Joni Mitchell
the wild wail of Janis

Dylan & other mind-mending mind-bending
mixes from the revolution in multi-track over-dubbed recording -- gifts from what Charles Olson called the Electromagnetic Aeon