Thread: Orpheus Emerged (Language)

I'm a writer of a smoky generation,
of drums cutting a crazy sound
at pale parties

Bastian together with
Eliot, and a few others,
wearing wise beards,
bend white faces to
acknowledge genius

I go out for quick beers
with Angie, talking, walking,
our thoughts filling up
the space between us,
cold on the lips of
an American night,
leaning shoulders
against the other,
a gang busting nuts
over beauty beyond
their dicks tips,
fingernails biting my neck

challenging Dostoyevsky
for fifteen as we knock tables,
holding hands as Eastern tunes
blow from water pipes,

Shining cents on the counter at 11

I, high, propel across the stand
to knock out my ashes
and read my verse,
remembering the cold
beginning. . .

Returning, slinking back to
love's door, looking at the jazz eyes
of the interesting dead crowd,
her crowd, there at the club,
at tables, with beers, getting secretly
high-tingled together with insistent
eyes examining the future for ten-cents,
eyeing the king in the blue cuffs,
shaking a short fist at the cross,
whose laughter rocked Chicago,
flicked quarters at audiences in Washington
tall and pale, spewing holy sermons
from brown bottles, and drums,
and ambitions wearing human vestments,
pretentiously answering, "Yeah?"

our generation floated on junky joints
remembering the stand, digging the greats,
watching cowboy-looking little girls
prophesying saintly over beers,
lungs of these great subterraneans
paining in the booming, roaring glee,
the new kinds of times coming in wild now,
undone greatly, flowing in from Paterson,
when we went to the bed to be for all eyes
to behold the solemn snaky wailing against the blond,
knowing long, giving long, wondering at the
pretending hips hiding behind black buttons,
pulling hair, trying not to yell, to face kindest
immortal infancy in a separate direction, quick,
repeated . . .
. . . the gathering of genius