Beat Poetry and Other Forms

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Articles: 1, 2, 3

I Was the Emporer of Pupekea
2007-09-18 21:25:00
I was the emperor of PupekeaTwice, in its gentle bosom,The green lands west, Hawai'i,Driving into the sunSet aboveSailed down and sauntered to a marble ocean blue,Blue and blue sky,Hawai'i so blue as she is.I was emperor of the blue realm.Of Pupekea I saw with imperial eyes,Spying the end of the West and the day,The emperor robed in bright and orange,A gift of the happy sun untied in the western sky,Afternoon boon,On my throne,Knowing wellThe East was shrouded in its dark darkness,Had swallowed the Buddha,I learned with crying imperial eyes.It was a bright hot morning,My bamboo bong and telephoneTold me of his demise.I practiced the arts as emperor of Pupekea.Windy with spirits and divine indifference,My magic was poor,But I am not a high priest,Just high enough to write imperial poetryAnd smile in PupekeaWhile I wave goodbye,For I was emperor in a grand time.

Four Corners of the Earth
2007-09-18 00:33:00
I.She is twentyAs the wire handle digsInto her sandpaper hands,Walking stingy barefoot miles,To acquire muddy waterFor six dirt-smile children.He is twentyAnd target after curfew,Head covered besideBullet-ridden body of a friend.When the searchlight passesHe will sprint to the wall,Cowering in warm manure until dawn.II.She is twentyAnd with great effort,Swats flies from her puffed eyelids,Cradling a bloated infant,Grasping a tin plateIn ecstatic anticipation of sticky porridge.He is twenty,Grasping the dusty jeep,Machine gun strapped to back,Desert sands blind the weathered faceHeaded for a village of stick and straw,Ripe with cattle and women.III.She is twentyAnd sports agile wrist in chorusWith unforgiving metallic lathe,Peddled and fed rubber,A Harvest of tennis shoesUntil she loses her other hand.He is twenty,With bails of riceDraped over his hard brown back.When he staggers and crampsThe reminder is always a whip.He shouldn't have criticized the state.IV.She is twentySprawled ...
More About: Earth , Corners , Four Corners

Apartheid
2007-09-17 22:03:00
The constructive engagement of rubber bulletsAs exacting as the sand against bare feet,The days in sun-stagnant sweat townsWhere women glide buckets of muddy waterAtop proud shoulders,The future perched and purchased,Sticky mud converted into value calculusInside the plush white air-conditioned roomsOf Wall Street-Footsie fantasy profit marginsAnd white-boy stock market Ferrari cars,The purring of entropic suicide,Macho abstraction,Imported into the nightmare hades of Apartheid,Enclosing the children playing in industrial rust,Alongside men stuffed in buses to hunt value expansionFor the modest entombment in Krugerrand death mines,Times were better long ago,When the seed and the grassesSwayed in songTo the dry-baked summer ground,When the lazy irrelevancy of being was enjoyed,The dances, sunsets and shamanistic songs,Inside the buzzing of insect-night skies,Under the clouds,Blooming in the afternoon wind,The airy dharmas sounding out hellish IBM futuresWhere electronic prison camp g...

Doomed For the Change
2007-09-17 21:01:00
Armpits smell in insurance elevators.I sit amidst crumbs and compose.Fear is the milkshake of the night,Emulating Santa Barbara geneticists and mathematical economists,Beautiful plant smoke.I am an image on the screenOf that coca-cola stained video gameThat pushes me toward extinctionWithout adolescent quartersOr ephemeral women.I saw a film on Nicaragua.The people are awakening,Rubbing the profit sleep from their eyes,While I slumber in the mowed grassOf California desertsDoomed for the change,A draining suburban happinessThat will not end.
More About: Change , Chang , Chan

Suffering Polishes Joy
2007-09-16 21:37:00
Apparently there is much to learn,Like the whittling of a stubborn but fine wood.Suffering polishes joy.Somewhere there is a foundation,Not that one must find it.Go onward jerking thoughtsInto knowledge.Know everyone.Feel there smiles.Share in perceptions,Teachings,Of our species and others.One should breath deep,Recalling the abilities,The pointless moods of childhood,The raw taste of life.We must be as bold as a candle flame,Students of the moment,Laughs of the one.
More About: Erin , Polish

Going Backwards
2007-09-15 22:00:00
The day it mellowed outAbout the houses cobweb atticAnd the artsy market floor,The bore wasTerrifying.The day it telephoned outAnd you with himThat electronic Avon-lady day,I would have to sayWounds with blame.But hey, it's not timeCrying over spilled milk,A silk that rapes times curves,The slur was only clockworkHopefully not soul-likeThe fright of light.Night! Tickle the objects.I protest this surface.I know of infinite alleyways,All possibilitiesFor the dead loversAnd living leaversHeave me here.But there was fine,Watermelon Midwestern rindsAnd Oklahoma dreamsOf Dorthyesque birch treesAnd seeds of honeyStinging bees.Please,Find me a clock,With many springs,That winds every way.
More About: Going , Backwards , Goin

Off Upon the Naval
2007-09-15 21:56:00
Off upon the naval,Graceful upon the apron,Roll off the rootsOf the apple treeKissing,Off the lad's wet she.Flow off the navalPower flowers on, off,Stop toward the girl's.Pop off the weighted seed,Naval through the boughSex on the navalOff and down,Up and on,Cross path the mammal,Off the globe's trough,Soft walk careful,Smooth,Turn on the offs of thought,Silent now, candle softLight off the cloudsMoth on the flameMind on the NoOff the laden wheel --On the nothingsPerfect scream.

Autonomous Not
2007-09-15 08:09:00
And turning into the credit card mecca,The final place,Shiny transitory illusionFirmly enshrinedBeyond psychoid.And seeing the patternsOf particle waves,Musical choirs,Harmonizing in the glade,Of 3D projection.And dropping Christ-consciousnessInside the sticky New York nightsThat echo Roman tyranny,Pagan archetypes,Of the mathematical west.And finalizing the beginning, my life,Your life,The timeless bubble birthsThat burst and fadeLike helix's rising into Babylon,Then crumbling into starless pleroma.And doing all of this without any traceOf a doer.

Daytime T.V.
2007-09-15 05:52:00
Relish the irregular supper-man,Superman, stupor-man.Involve yourself in mid-20th centuryCigar and Bogart lightingWatch the blackAnd whiteOn the afternoon airwaves.Oscillate aroundDusty studio sets of L.A.-dom.Finger the rivetsOf the brasThat knew only Joe,Senator McCarthy,Father knows bestologistOf the twilight zone.Offer highway patrols,Columbia drug analogiesWhich point to a zeitgeistOf Reagan moviesAnd racist fishbowlCommunity bores.Hide from this day.
More About: Daytime

A Cliche'
2007-09-15 03:40:00
A quart of alcohol inhibits oxygen,Window pane of the brain,The sane,Sages of teapot nostalgia.I live in a fish-bowl,Rich parents,White,That equation hums to me with such congenital easeWhile the rest must taste smogAnd sportCalloused Hands.I am a rotting college kid Marxist.Fuck, a clown,A court jester of the universityPlayground.Modern poetry is shit.Rich whites obscure realityGlorify red wheelbarrows,As if they meant something,Something as important as their bloated stomachsOn corporate ledgersAnd the sleek war technologiesThat poets eat from.Only optimistic fantasy keeps me going,Not going to the insurance firm,A place I might go.Yet change might be the orderOf the day;For I feel the restless moleculesAnd their laughings,Night spirits that personify:THE INTENSE GUILTOf being AmericanAnd stillWanting more.

The Girl and the Guy
2007-09-14 21:45:00
True to the lights,Opaque and final in the dullPlacid chairs of rooms,The girl and the guy sit waiting.After the last paycheckWhen all the rents have left,This couple will fly into milky nights,Embracing beyond their errors.We all sit by the computerPressed to the nausea of money,Clinging to the bosom of capitalOf property, fear and performance.The chattering couple will continue,Man and woman herded into the company,Two little things oscillating in spaceLearning about this strange civilization --Only to leave again and report backTo the one.
More About: Girl , The G , The Girl

Afternoon
2007-09-14 08:18:00
We are afternoon,Set in line on this trainAnd we spy Whitman's decay,The coast where it startedWhere Jefferson wrote,As he once rode winged stallionsAnd touched the dharma,The feathered imprint of freedom,Flustering by Maryland, VirginiaHer forests,Now do I peer intoThe sick treesOf junk-rusted winterCold as the mind darkens.The empire is falling.Whitman was late morning,As he flew over her forestsAnd saw the power of the land rise,Rise for the white manAnd the bloody war over the slavesHe cameLate morningBefore the noon Zenith of Hiroshima,Of empire,Japan's surrender.America has done thingsAs power set circulatingWhich Rome could only dream of.I am late afternoon.The sun is low,Bowing down to the sunset of the future.The glowing opening shall come,The circle from Christ's murder complete.All Empires from Rome's womb shall fall,And I am afternoonAs Whitman was morning.I shall sing of this land's decay.I shall see lumbered forests illumined,Hear Elf-song in the garbage dumpsAnd ...
More About: Afternoon

Manhattan to New Canaan
2007-09-13 21:31:00
Motion again, Manhattan to New Canaan !By the fasting Buddha's so swiftly,This train moves northbound.Goodbye to Rome on the HudsonWe float on electronic rivers,Like uprooted treesSpinning toward a divine lightening.Time ushers us on,A commodity of tragedy.Man is so closeAs to only dream the spaces between.Underground I writeIn the cobwebs of Grand Central Station.Pointed northwards toward the cooling forests,September and harvest,Do these rails tend so painfully stretched,So buried in this city of cities of cities.Manhattan is all the cities of earth,Set aside each otherFloating on the motherfucker of invention.We crawl slowly above the sputtering rails."Faster," I say.I wish to see the stars open the pathways,Tunneling to worlds of gods and guardians,Not these dreary sculptured bricks of low-income housingThe 99th street stables for the black war workers,Who built the machines that pounded Dresden,Only to be discarded and caged once moreIn the demonic kennels of this Empire.Econom...
More About: Atta

The City Is the Closing Chapter, Though the Book Will Never End
2007-09-13 04:39:00
The city is the closing chapter,Though the book will never end.The city is man's new bodyHer workers,Man is cell.City is the fluid of actionThe lid of self-denial.She is most graceful in the nightWhen the mother sun has left the room,And only electrons teach the HighwaysThe cars,And hide the sky's starsTo the cool illusions of our work.Jagged tombs for our wars,Cities never learn.Only ruins acknowledge time.
More About: Book , Chapter

When Satori Appears As a Woman
2007-09-13 03:15:00
When Sato ri appears as a woman,The dark hue of grass will always sting the skinAgainst the plethora of lamp-light Augusts,As dreams pour their colored mulch,Like broken cloaks revealing rusted springs,You must dodge the traffic hate and stand.Time is state propaganda,For only the sun has twisted our parting,Has moved with cold knowledge of the warmth.We long for simmering mammal love,While trees grow hornyFor sailors and nurses thighs.Satori and sex are species-less and species-like.Orgasm is blue-ribboned DNA mothering,Cookied reward for crashing the billion-year party,Our satori sex can be mundane or clear-eyed --When satori appears as a women.
More About: Woman , A Woman

Slim Pickens
2007-09-12 21:21:00
For a pint golden of whiskeyOr maybe religious sickness of cigarettes,Old man Pickens held servicesAnd they came:Mildewed leather bikers,Crazed babbling trash,White, Black or brown,Ripe-young or rotting old --Slim would kneel.At Fatman's trailer, playpen Oxnard,Slim, stumbling like an old ragged dog,Bumped into smelly deathGun-crazed and bored racist,Pants now soaked with whiskey,Thanks to sloppy slim.Our bored minister of hate,Nigger-hatting nuclear NaziHad a smile of an idea.Revenge!Slim won't spill again.That smile made lonely Slim a friend by evenings end."Forget the whiskey you spilled Slim.""Let's go a shootin' up by Rose Valley."(I won't forget the rope).He tied with rope-burns that scared pissless old animal,Hands bound, sensing death, shaking, pleading and doomedFull of dirty oil rags and tools was that old Chevy trunk,There Slim lay in the dark,Feeling the bumpy road to home,Destined for a hole below the backyard grass.A cylindrical fine-made model "A" lay below shinn...

Citizen Under Power
2007-09-11 21:04:00
I live in the shinning acidic bellyOf empire.Cancerous, I am a Marxist,Yet still of the body,And for the body:America.My dwellings spring from muddled thoughts,Monstrous steel wombs,Woven in the centuries of karma,Whose rough silk smothered,Peyote Buddhas --Indian slaves for the Spanish-Catholic mines,Christ consciousness for metal.Movements of the multi-tongued empireLapping up the peasant entropyThat oscillates in the dialectic sweat and blood,Dreaming of:SANDINISTA.Yes, we are cells of the northern eagle beast,Stench of the ego windsThat have filled the bourgeois collegesWith suffering -- dukkhaDoom of the Asuras,Descending from the power of the airInto synaptic skull templesAmerican brain -- TrustUs!Exxon.And the poets still talk about wheelbarrowsAnd eat Chiquita bananas,United Fruit Company,Guatemala,Indian Auschwitz.Images develop continuity,Beyond the Newtonian lie.Motion doesn't exist.George Bush doesn't exist.We do not exist,In form,Only events --Thoughts of ancient ones...
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Lost In Your Eyes
2007-09-11 09:26:00
I could get lost in your eyes for eternity my angel.Your beauty overwhelms me.Your depths are endless,As is the time I wish to spend with you.
More About: Lost , Eyes

Who Doesn't Love Me
2007-09-11 09:22:00
The lovers in Iraq have cried,And the lovers of Bush's oil war have died in sighs,Looking west to their beloved homes,The bosom of life and light,Mangled burnt carbon of uranium babies,Who confront my sufferingAnd indeed, I am small --Only crying for a womanWho doesn't love me at all.
More About: Love

The Key
2007-09-11 09:18:00
I have reached the Zenith without you my love, Summer solstice. I can feel the sun washing away our times, I feel the waning toward another cold fall, For the both of us.It was April, my dear, when we last spoke. Our love now destroyed by this dark earth, By forces I must face alone. Your love for me has faded to a dream, And for you my love is not real anymore.They killed us with our love, my dearA black shroud for a fee,Yet all of that wouldn't matter If love were not the essence And you were not the key.

An Age Beyond Love
2007-09-11 09:16:00
An age beyond love,When she becomes a memory.A drop of dewfalling into a cold eternal pond.
More About: Love

The Wastelands
2007-09-11 09:15:00
I am in the Wasteland s without your love dear, In a future unknown Awaiting a time when I can come to you, Awaiting the tilt of the earth, As we set together Down over the ocean.

What Forces Approve Our Love (My Dear)
2007-09-11 09:00:00
What forces approve our love, my dear?What Caused our meetingforging us from the beyondHundreds of levels deep,hurling our vibrations to collide?What forces approve our love, my dear?Those that oppose us are legion.But what forces soar above?I see them now, my dearest,Indifferent, in shinning armorGuarding the dimensions of this earthAs they are indifferent nowTo love’s death,To its outright murder.What forces approve our love, my dear?Do they watch as we walk away, backs turned,Fading into the stone cold rain of time,The hard rain that washes away our livesOur dreams,tracing us apart forever.
More About: Love , Forces , Prove

The Deluge and the Seed
2007-09-11 05:34:00
Haunting movements in the soilsThe goals of gulls and manDays, still as furnitureSoaked in sentiment's habitHabitual futility behind dreamsThese leaves, among othersCircle meTrunk of a tree.I see the gouging paradoxEyes wet in the celebrationMusky storm-soaked thicketsA muddy flow from the forestsThe nipple and the moon -- beforeCement chilled the puzzled toesThat pressed into the sharpened stone.I weep in knotted stomach munchAs gargoyles push popcorn postcardsFor the beauty pageants of polyester lawyers.I the wheelbarrow roll awkwardRusting in the sea-wet stench of midnightAnd the beer-soaked breeze of companyFasting -- amidst the herds' yellowed grass.Can we obtain rather than describe?Will we change, not chide, then hide?I ache from the stairs of slippery bouldersAnd lap up the river's poisonFlailing my salmon-crystal tailupstream, blind to the shoreThe deluge and the seed.
More About: The D , Deluge , Seed

Corporate Dungeon
2007-09-10 21:19:00
As the smelly 1950's floor smothered my pace,I could see the sun-belt illusion of L.A.Arizona would have been more aproposIn the belly of the corporate dungeon.The 8 AM elevator scene is finalIt needs no analogy of materialismOr any Jungian wise-man symbol,For the corporate elevator is just that,A platonic thought,An irrational hypotenuse.If revolution was an option for poetic cowards,I would block these freeways,The blood of the huge glass castlesThat thrust into the California sky,Earning symbols for the coupon clippers,Pointed results on the degree of exploitation,Like the brainwashing of TelevisionThat waits for no commercial.There should be a communist in every skyscraper,To witness the thousands trod to work,Buying cigarettes in the lobby.We need that opposite.It would refreshen,Like the loosening of a tieAround, Around,My mushroom neck.
More About: Corporate , Rate

A Typewriter
2007-09-09 22:08:00
An Ancient typewriter of infinite power metal,This old desert sage roams the confines of social symbol,Manipulatory axioms of being,Captain crunch,sugar chemical love machine,The commodity of mother suburblamp-post consciousness,The father of now-ness time,Spewing forth words in the shitface of illusion.

That is Will
2007-09-09 10:09:00
Now in the silent rugThe penny rests as science,A saucer of power.I lift the charged diskAnd hurl it eons.That is will.

Yet Another Ben Laden Message
2007-09-09 10:00:00
Buddhism and boyfriends,Bodacious Ben Laden ,Laying out his cockring fantasiesOf Allah in the shopping mall.
More About: Message , Mess

Ram You In the Plains
2007-09-09 09:58:00
Could we fuck in Kansas without knowing why we we love me?Could my cock piston to your mouth's hot refrain,Or is love just a goat grazing in my panties purple rain?Need me, my angel..and let me ram you in the plains.
More About: Plains

Blue and Sun and Marijuana
2007-09-09 09:56:00
Blue and sun and marijuana,Drifting me to the timeless realms of Hawaii.Does the shepherd of existence impale me with flames,Running wild and coursing through his whorish veins?
More About: Blue , Marijuana , Mari