Meaning Jack and Allen (I wrote this one for Matt)
It is great to reconnect with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg every now and again. The visions they espoused created images in my head.
Allen altered poetry. He opened my head up and gave me eyes to see. He brought poetry to life from the rotting carcass it had been.
For me Allen’s forte was that there were no rules.
Allen wrote poetry in the same stream of consciousness that Jack wrote prose. It was a revolution.
That revolution brought a whole new way of writing, thinking and feeling. It created the modern world. Others had done it before – Henry Miller for one, but nobody connected in to that ‘reality’ the way Allen and Jack did. They were searching for the meaning in life, the ultimate kicks, to tune in to the craziness of life, to live.
They weren’t satisfied with the plastic, the superficial, the mundane; they wanted something that had depth; that meant something.
Society is empty.
Real living was to let everything out – all that emotion, feeling, energy and joy.
They wanted to live and life had to burn. If it wasn’t real it wasn’t worth a fuck.
We’re beat but we ain’t beat yet.
Meaning Jack and Allen
Searching for meaning,
Truth and beauty
In the back streets
Away from the plastic
Neon falsity of Mammon.
Searching for a raw
Unprocessed chord,
A burst of inspiration
Blast of energy
Among the processed
Refinement of rehearsed notes.
Searching for energy.
Searching for words of passion,
Fury and eloquence,
Words that are meant,
That are revealing,
Inspiring and awakening.
Searching for candour
Amid the controlled,
Those robbed
By the political correctness thieves
Who steal souls in the name of respect.
Searching for compassion
Among the dead
Moribund corpses
Who walk the well-lit streets
Without a mind,
Regurgitating indoctrinations
And believing it.
Searching for someone to offend
Argue with
And learn from.
Who has the balls to speak;
To scream the images
That adorn the inside of their skull.
Searching for reality
In the midst of a culture
That has sold its spirit
To both religion and business,
That is bankrupt,
Devoid of ideas;
That consumes the planet
In the madness of its death throes;
In a mindless self-fuck;
That thinks plastic is perfect –
It’s what the suckers want –
It makes bucks.
Searching for the spirit
Of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassidy
On one long crazy rapture
One night of endless madness
With no limits
No end
Spitting words, dreams, visions and thoughts
In sounds
Beyond words
Beyond meaning.
On an endless drive
Of desperation
Roaring across plains,
Up mountains,
Down canyons
In search of crazy.
In search of ultimate kicks
Goofin’ with eternity,
Lost in honking sounds,
Mad fuck
And high on anything –
Just so long as it will never stop,
Never be understood,
Never be explained.
But it is there –
It exists
In the zen of an instant,
A rock, a sax solo, a raving stanza,
A drooling poem
Spontaneously bursting into existence
Climaxing from the tongue
In an orgy of sudden understanding,
Realisation
Real
Unfettered, furious,
So orgasmic and crude
That it throbs through your groin
To explode in your brain
With uncontainable joy.
Searching for an explanation
For the madness
Wreaked on humanity,
On the planet,
The poor trussed planet
The enslavement of humanity
The taming,
The reduction
Containment and boredom,
The pressures
That causes people
To explode
In cruelty and barbarism.
Searching for the love
That melts the soul
In ecstatic waves
That swamp, crash and churn,
So that we are absorbed,
Enlightened
And reborn totally alive
And free.
Searching through words,
That squirm and metamorphose,
Through my mind
My dreams –
Searching for expression,
Substance and delirium.
Searching through images
Extracted from the mundane,
With shape, texture and colour
Never before glimpsed!
Creating poems to reflect
The turmoil,
Truths that stalk the coils
Within the skull.
Opher 21.1.2016
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A paeon of praise indeed! First thought, best thought – as Ginsberg said. Intense and exciting. My favourite of his is Wichita Vortex Sutra, best anti-war poem ever!
Cheers Dave. It was ‘Howl’ that woke me up to poetry and I love his ‘America’. Sometimes it’s great to just open your head and let it flow out in a stream of madness. I liked it and it seemed to flow and say what I wanted to say. It’s cathartic.
nice one
Hooray for Ginsberg!
He was a wonder.
Opher – btw a reminder: how about the signed copy (or the original scroll) that you promised ?
Was that the original scroll for On the Road?
Nope. That was your poetry book. Is it out yet ?
My seventh one will be out next week! I am doing a final edit at this minute. It is my sixth book of poems.
Blimey ! Opher- you should be able to imagine that I’ve got a separate shelf for THE ROAD with at least 30 different editins !
But not the original scroll that Jack typed. Just the transcript.
I’d love a signed one of “Opher’s Art and outpourings”. Can you manage that ?
It’s yours Matt!
Send us your address again. I have it somewhere but it will take some finding.
Will do.