THE LION AT REST
(For Allen Ginsberg)
Late afternoon random mental notes twilight ride into
New Jersey, open
to implausible diversions up the road, a
wedding, and I am here,
quizzical and attentive
to speed of light mental transport
past brick face cottages covered
bridge refineries
skeletal towers & glittering shopping centers
church spires & viaducts
dissolving into transparent
blue dusklight.
Red lights blink out hazards
as we negotiate
this friendly country road
realizing how distant is New York City
with its incessant yak & crosswalks curbside chatter.
We take in chintzy suburban landscapes
interspersed by green pastoral bliss;
TV
antennae & celestial transmitters;
phone wires strung across miles
designed for suburbanites
who listen to radios of sinister frequencies
and don’t even know the electrons
of pure thought!
Drowse murmur of local news 1010 WINS
sports earthquake terrorism
inhuman
war extravagant car crash toothpaste apes society murder
gregarious football blue collar scientific adultery,
Bulletin!
That the bearded custodian of the universe
should notice:
Allen Ginsberg is dead,
gone now, returned to the void,
karma resolved,
sorrow undone, heart restored
lack love no more,
the tender plea of the poem honored at last.
In “Mescaline” he once asked
“What happens when death gong hits rotting Ginsberg
on the head”?
knowing that he would soon be blessed by visions &
revelations;
think of WC Williams,
years past the voluptuous cognition experienced
by the flesh.
This, an incidental miracle:
that he loosened the breath of the continent
mid-century
with improvisational cerebrotonic bop after
he abandoned the six-pointed star
of hallucination
in relentless pursuit of retinal seizures
& assorted eyeball kicks
hoping in the end to illuminate
a small part of the Dharma.
How many years then
to wander ancient cities
populated with unrecognized sphinxes;
seeking out the glories and mutations
of the flesh?
How long for
the lover of love whose sexual incandescence
ignited a world
that believed only in prostitution?
Seeing his own consciousness
assuming a bold multiplicity of forms
a mirror of his own incarnation; a human shadow
across reality.
Words alone, mantras & poems
invoked his mission to abolish
war asylums corporations prisons slums banks
while still trying to improvise
on his own angelic lusts, given to
battling middle-class voodoo & psychoanalytic
split-level magic
state police CIA A-bombs & armor-plated nationalism
armies & academies
muscular Christianity & all stone-faced gods
of inflexible will.
The victory secured
with the help of the kindly reagent marijuana
his carnal beard, archival mind &
the instantaneous grin & whatever Jazz
followed the motion
of his naked soul.
The music of his invention
still apparent even at the end: deathbed
agony;
sweetly transmogrified in a moment
breath released, brain gently
short-circuited,
spirit liberated, the universe
that only thought it existed
vanished in the expired
& holy phrase
“AH”
(Thank you, Allen)
The Beatnik Cowboy 
Great imagery
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