Beatnik Blues


The night moaning like a whore faking 
love, red neon pouring whiskey on junk- 
ies watching their blood ejaculate up into 
a syringe, eyelids fluttering on Whitman’s 
finger, dance boys dance, blow your har- 
monica until sunshine orange drenches 
the shadows, prisons, and asylums over 
flow, spewing detritus, talking rats with 
yellow jaundiced eyes and bebop cats 
 
William S. Burroughs cut off his finger 
in 1939 out of love for Jack Anderson 
and sent it to Arnold Gingrich at Esquire,  
later he said it was an initiation for the 
Crow Indian tribe, he hoped his words 
would be published, Gingrich sent Bur- 
roughs a note back reading, “I greet you  
at the beginnings of a wonderful career,  
when do I get the corpse?” William had 
love for heroin, morphine, and marijuana 
 
His work was of mystical, occult, and mag- 
ical themes, William’s totem animal was a 
green reindeer, his life was fleeing from one 
troubled place to another, he killed his second 
wife, Joan in 1951 while drunk and went to  
prison in Mexico City for 13 days, they had 
him for culpable homicide, he fled to Morocco 
where he was accused of importing opiates, he 
fled to a rundown hotel in the Latin Quarter of 
Paris, to meet Ginsberg, Corso, and Orlovsky 
 
Burroughs cooked the dragon with a burnt spoon, 
a step ahead of the law, snapping fingers, to the  
bongo beat, chasing daydreams down the street.




Cherokee Rose

 
Prolonging the heartbreak, baby 
baby, your love leaves me on a  
ten story ledge watching the side 
walk artists below creating master- 
 
Pieces vanishing in the rain, they 
smile like hundred-dollar bills are 
pouring down, they know that every 
thing is temporary even blossoms 
 
Floating on the xeric wind, apricots 
and nectarines make fiery love and 
replace the sun in the cinnamon sky, 
watching a video of Tommy Castro 
 
And the Painkillers, play his song,  
Ride, pretty ladies dancing, while he 
Kerouac struts past City Lights Books, 
keeping me alive like a Cherokee Rose.