I like the heroic America of World War II;...
The America champion of good technology...
The America that freed us from the damned little mustache...
The America of Hollywood, of cinema,
Of black soul music, of Doo Wop,
Soft rock of Credence Clearwater Simon, Bob Dylan
Folklore... Woodie Guthrie, Peter Seeger,
Peter, Paul, Mary, mixed with country and blues,
Poets like Walt Withman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost. BEAT POETS...
The America of Frank Lloyd W. Edison, OTHERS...
Not an America with dyed hair and greed
madness for money and power...men colored
in yellow who only think of domination,
and submission of others, without thinking of brotherhood among peoples...
MAGA Make America Gentle Again
was the whiskey and the jazz playing
On too many black nights with too
Many lonely women and not a poem
Between them
How many times can you run
From the shadow of the voices that
Surround you
Beating like drums in the darkness
Tasting more of your flesh each time
Not leaving enough for a man to breathe
No way for a man to live
How could the hep-cat jive survive
When my voice can only spit silence
Wasn't a dream left to filter thru
The night worn inside and out and
Bled dry a bottle singing the page blank and life in the hands of
the haves laughing at the broken shadows of the have-nots
There was a club on 34th and Second Ave where the jazzman
swung
All night long beat poets recited Tuesdays' nights and Jack was
always drunk in the third booth
Scrawling poems on paper bags and notebooks
Taking life hard on the chin and after a while not fighting back
anymore
Ain't the road thzt donev Jack in
Beat Poets
We're cool and we're hip.
We're writing everything
you wish you wrote before.
We live in attics smoke weed
and drink cheap wine. We bleed
Howl and Ginsberg's other tears.
A San Francisco Haiku Quartet
Oh San Francisco
Beat poets Ferlinghetti
North Beach was our city
Hushed conversations
Rich coffees and biscotti
Smothered in rich fog
Our French cigarettes
Then under table footsies
Moonlit hills our home
Cable cars singing
Golden Gate from our window
Heaven and stars..ours
{In Memory of Ralph}
May 4, 2020
2:30pm PST
English Haikus
Pictures at an Exhibition
I recently saw the ghosts of beat poet visionaries
staring lonely, from pictures at an exhibition
Ginsburg, Corso, Snyder, Kerouac, and Cassady
the murderer’s row of the desolation angels line-up
smoking cigarettes on dingy New York fire escapes
eyes squinting into the brutal mid-day sun of Tangiers
chanting Buddhist mantras in Golden Gate Park
posed with arms around each other in Mexico City
with the fires of holy imagination burning in their faces
My heroes, the ones that lit my blaze of spirit
and urged me to write with their heat and passion
burdened souls, searching out the mysteries
of rhythm and god hidden inside hip, jazz phrasings
My heart swelled with gratitude
and for a moment, they were friends
ghosts grown much larger than life
urging me to walk in their footsteps…
Limerick crochetés: Once Mid-East refugee hi-jacked plane
Once Mid-East refugee hijacked plane
At Heathrow Airport without much pain
Set course for Florida
Down Gulf Stream danced salsa
O’er Bermuda Triangle lost brain
Raised head in parallel universe
Where everybody spoke only in verse
Shakespeare just a mere page
At beck and call of Sage
Who rode on a flying-trapeze hearse
Walt Whitman why whipped hard ten times tight
For turning fine-tuned verse e’er so slight
Beat poets all sweat caned
Their howls and growls un-maned
Ginsberg last seen dropping out of sight
Harriet Monroe drowned in P-Soup
To lay P-Foundation nin.com poop
Rhyme and dine for a dime
At Multi-Verse win prime
Refugees now cross Atlantic in sloop
At P-Soup Port they re-fuel with port
Learn how to parse clichés sans rapport
Great poems like Hardy’s
Drivel from their panties
“America” refugees sing out!
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2018
He was a new poet with the dew of youth
on his cheeks and childishness in his words.
He spoke of his God, of love, and of truth,
with a pony-tailed naïveté which implored.
Bicycles pedal through his posies chords.
He smiled, when he spoke of A. Ginsberg, man ...
nicotine stained the fingers on his hand.
Thinking of the beat poets, Rexroth he'd read,
tales in smoke-rings round his brow like a garland.
Dean was resurrected in the cock of his head.
This new rooster was just twenty-four,
one earring, bow lips and shy of pretense;
he wrote in a leather-bound book of war.
Yet, he was all about peace, and innocence;
for the world, the world, held troubles immense.
A rebel of peace, so like Siddhartha
to war he'd not go, not follow father.
A poet primed a new man with a calling
trying once again to call each man brother;
scrying with blood to stop mankind's falling.
*Double Dizain
Been some time
I’ve written in rhyme
Found it easy,
Like committing a crime.
Instead of a gun
Grab paper and pen
Write line A then B,
Repeat again.
No wonder Beat poets
Favored prose instead
Enjoying cheap wine,
Lettering in bed.
Interesting views
Burst out
Of their head,
Hating to rhyme
Preferred to be dead.
I stayed then away
By means of this style
Avoiding the rhyme,
For quite awhile.
Many friends miss
This way I write
Could you please tell me,
Who’s wrong, who’s right?
In black painted seashells candles burn,
eyes stare blank - no one is home;
they barely live and never learn,
incense-smoked souls in the twilight zone.
Nightfall casts a silver net,
Nagasaki is back projected;
a chanted dirge from a silhouette,
nasal whines, shrill and affected.
Perfume drunk from china bowls,
the atmosphere is cold, ceramic;
red lasers burn like smoking coals,
incompetently mock Satanic .
Verses dredged from heaving lungs,
voices cracked and centre stage;
speaking words in foreign tongues,
dry ice swirls, it's all the rage.
Bongo drums thud out a beat,
faces white as Arctic frost;
frozen minds, no spark or heat,
dynamics cast aside and lost.
Born too late I voice this treason,
yearning for a time apart,
when soul and purpose, rhyme and reason
were all to the poets art.
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