(and ginsburg is still dead)

To Sarah, the sister of a poor whore, who buys pastrami by the pound, injects her juices into Tom who is not mentioned later, having on the sixteenth, last month, been found dead in a dumpster east of town. Sarah has moved often from several lovers' lofts into the skids but I love her like a romantic poet whose own ruins rise nostalgic at night then I go to the bathroom to think of her. Pastrami is a cold reminder of her heritage -- something somewhat Italian I am eating -- like her hard dark eyes and dark skin. Rome, she was in the habit of reminding me, weren't built in no day like hers up at four or six a.m. to prowl streets and scrounge at bus-stops for the nickels and dimes of her lust from suits preparing like good white knights to battle the dragons of Earning in the wastes of downtown. What she whispers into my ears grows illegible in daylight.

Sarah is the lost mother of the next generation
and Alan's the teen father who left her this way.

To Sarah, who as a mother walked in on her own naked son who she thought had been whacking in her underwear secretly but he wasn't just then He had been writing furiously love notes to his first love, an inappropriate black gal for the suburbs one who sucked dick, wore tight pants in central city flamboyant colors and flashy lipstick that got stuck on his cock that glittered all night when the boy dreamt of her tits falling out like Niagara or Stanley falls And these note cards grown to 3x5 all over the bathroom looked like square sperm in the womb of porcelain shaped cold time Then Sarah remembered bobby-sock sex and says, Sorry, Dear, thought it was your father getting it on late in life. His back's gone out, you know, since my breasts started to sag and he harbors no guilt for the years he has sucked them dry out of shape.

And WHO is this darling of yours? I'm your Mother!  I'm talking to YOU!

Reasonable men have said sweet things to your mama before you were born and maybe she even did 'em for pleasure or drove home with 'em to see their thick hard etchings.

And Ginsburg's still dead. Poor boy, who will YOU read?

II. Pyronics in the j-jungle groceries store on the day of the Jackson Mississippi mundane murders

I am a harlot in hoboken whose broken dreams ooze into the bidet. I am the juke-titted boy of thirteen suffering his first satanist cult sodomy. I am the way and the life of the corner conversion by a black preacher slave to his bible and the tote sack of all this bullshit on my back while I cam-corder the day-to-day miscellany of our far more mundane howlings

      Libby writes that it started her flow
      I read it in a poem about that moment,
you know,
      Ginsburg's still dead but the madness ain't.
      War deprivation, periodic lava flows, killer gas.

A lady is stealing dog biscuits for her aging lover Sticking them one-by-one up her wrinkled old cunt Eyes avert. It is as if she is blind and not one can see she shoplifts (disgust among the fresh meats customers returning loaves and fishes to cryogenic purgatory). Fire in the eyes of the old bitch.

      I am an hour from orgasm.
      My flight will be over soon.
      I will land into stripsearched-at-customs
      then quickly leave the country again.
      The agent on the TVcam
      jackoffs love this stuff.

      They are reading now.
      Looking for themselves
      Their souls small between
      Lines of print/unmoving.

      If we could make the words
      MOVE wouldn't that be something

III. Pagan interlude

Subliminal messages over the megaphone There is a Dan handler in aisle ThreeB: The gay grocer has a hard-on stacking cucumbers is a cliché for the 'nineties at the end of millenium and Goddamn him Ginsburg's still dead How we could use his immoral word in this titpasties pastiche of a world that passes postmodern in midstreet, taxis swerving left and right to avoid it, in this postmedieval life

I love the cool fresh breath of Spring's kiss in the midst of winter's foul blasts (That was Sarah said that -- remember her? she was the woman I might have married or had married couldn't remember which who haunts my daydreams or the mother who never was lost mother of a generation.
      Ginsburg-- described in one obit
      as "that small gay jewish poet"--
      would not be the kind.

And, folks, the special today is poets and puns, at sixth sense a pound Cheaper than pastrami-- somewhat Italian, dark eyes, almond skin.

The who-picks-this-shit-linoleum manager is on the loudspeaker in his gray tweed jacket and deck-shoe best speaking of his desk job life unraveling as he speaks He is reading HOWL amid gasps and shrieks of little suburbanite ladies pissing their Depends as he reads He is thinking this his last act before AK bursts while he rampages through the Saturday morning Lot where I heft bags into their Volvo Chips and Dips for Superbowl Sunday
      All of us playing that gig
      lined up against the others
      pushing toward goalposts
      pigskins of our sons and our daughters
      inflated past recognition

The universe of poetry is a goddamn wormhole without Ginsburg who's still very much dead Though middleclass kids and suburban punks, those who can still read, read him.

IV. Wichita

because a poem had to be written there is Whichita which somehow became a wateringtown for cattlemen (as cowboys are poets too), a town full of bars and honkytonk women (about whom cowpokes sang) boxcars of Sarahs surrendered without making a sound Poker eyes dead ahead as they are poked then herded into domestic showerstalls Cattleprods up their butts Cameramen reporting the carnage and their husbands at home over TV dinner watching the news shaking their heads HOW CAN THEY PUT SUCH CRAP ON THE AIR WHILE PEOPLE ARE EATING and their sons defiant "this is central standard and the world doesn't go by our clocks and why is it washing machines eat one of two socks and isn't that MOM third from the left no you missed it" and "Dad couldn't we get madcow or something from eating our burgers as raw as this stuff"

So he thinks I'll remarry

So he puts an ad in the Sunday Paper

Someplace far away maybe Dubuque

He thinks
they won't know
what he had done
to his Sarah

But now they know

and Ginsburg's still dead.

V. This is About the V Her Crotch Makes

And I ask through my memory of that delta of pleasures of which we shouldn't speak whether it is more properly a Y to ask yourself because the line goes along her thigh to her knees or maybe an X because at the knees there is a bend And I remember how ask and X were rhyme words for her in the dialect of poverty that rejects the language of her masters anyone with a few dollars for her time

And it occurs to me that she told me once how people expect as they die to have their whole lives flash before them but the problem with that is the church is aristotelian, believing since the fourteenth or was it the sixteenth century in the unity of time space and action where the thought of sex called lust is a crime equal to the time it takes to do the thing is the thought so that the real problem is that at life's end death doesn't flash it but life is visited in real time, if it took ten minutes to walk to the store, at death it takes ten minutes to relive the experience.

And I said, that complicates free will.

Yes, she said, massages that V or Y space, then continues; in life you have choice but if you are already dead and reliving your life then you have joy or guilt at what you're doing. Like, if you give the bird to another driver and you regret it the minute you do it because it turns out you've given the gesture of romance to a cop, well then the regret says you are already dead -- there's nothing to do for it but accept -- and some people live as if they are dead so that when they die and relive then before God when he asks (she says this as AX) what you have learned in that lifetime all you can do is say "huh?" because you thought you were dead when you were alive.

And I said you have powerful muscles that grip me and will not let me go let me go so I can go home and read up on this stuff because no one really expects a whore to know so much

Aristotle, she says, the plausible impossible over the possible implausible I think that's right

Whores too can have education it seems; queers can write poetry; we can all lament their passing (through suburban grocery stores where they purchase snacks for trips into the netherworlds of backwoods utopian america then at the cashier suddenly HOWLING at the discovery that there on the two-dollar bill it says "in God we trust" but with road weary eyes reading "THRUST" for trust as Monica once said it's all about fucking… I had this fucking experience or what the fuck are you doing you can't write that down in there no one will ever accept a word they use too often

So I have gone back to school hoping to get a better job so that I can buy that car Julie saw on the TV red as a whore's dress in some B movie and I am reading HOWL as a classroom assignment by a middle-age widow whose husband died in the war, someone I actually knew from my childhood. And she asks me what I thought about the "up the ass" line in the poem and I said
NO
thank you, but I've Sarah and Monica at home and I'm only here to get a new car.

She seems to say that reading is safe sex that goes slowly with thought through the tight sphincters of our souls to return at night for us to think about or when we relive life at the moment of death. What a great reliving in death Ginsburg is having.

And this is the end of the assignment to write about the suburbs, my life, the effects of reading Ginsburg in my suburban sprawl campus of a community college where the english teacher wants to know whether "up the ass" is appropriate for an adult education course when we meet only once a week and part company when it is already dark outside when no one knows into what lives we vanish.

I hope I can get an A for mentioning her interest in ass. Over coffee maybe.

There are questions about where the lines finally break. But, the tough parts of poems and tough parts of essays and tough part of life too is the closure