Greetings. Welcome to the resurgent DKos Poetry Slam/Open Mic.
Find yourself a table, or sit on the floor, and hey, step up to the mic and roar! It's almost New Year, 2008, & we have a lot of howling to do. The 50th anniversary of Howl and the Landmark court case for Free Speech is closing, still contemplating jazz.
We have a very good bench in the Prezzie race, & the other side is stacked with loozahs, (as you say in NahEngland...brrr...got enough ice & snow? Tell us about it.)
Bring us a poem, a song, a monologue. Whatever you like. Step up & say it. Original or the work of your Heroes and SHeroes.
(If you post the works of others, please provide a link to the scource, and Blockquote the content, with Author recognition, for the sake of fair use and copywright acknowledgment.)
Whew! You can see how society would be up in arms about that at the time. There's some stuff in there we don't fancy today. But it was a very different time. What offends us today was not the issue then.
We'll have to plunder Howl further in the comments. There are 2 more long stanzas, & they are just as heavy as the first.
Let's give the ineffable Ferlinghetti, Godfather of us all extant, some love:
Wild Dreams of a New Beginning
There's a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
Beyond the ledges of concrete
restaurants fall into dreams
with candlelight couples
Lost Alexandria still burns
in a billion lightbulbs
Lives cross lives
idling at stoplights
Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs
'Souls eat souls in the general emptiness'
A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window
A yogi speaks at Ojai
'It's all taking place in one mind'
On the lawn among the trees
lovers are listening
for the master to tell them they are one
with the universe
Eyes smell flowers and become them
There's a deathless hush
on the freeway tonight
as a Pacific tidal wave a mile high
sweeps in
Los Angeles breathes its last gasp
and sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit
Nine minutes later Willa Cather's Nebraska
sinks with it
The sea comes over in Utah
Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles
Coyotes are confounded & swim nowhere
An orchestra onstage in Omaha
keeps on playing Handel's Water Music
Horns fill with water
and bass players float away on their instruments
clutching them like lovers horizontal
Chicago's Loop becomes a rollercoaster
Skyscrapers filled like water glasses
Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine
Great Books watered down in Evanston
Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam
Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly become salt
Manhatten Island swept clean in sixteen seconds
buried masts of Amsterdam arise
as the great wave sweeps on Eastward
to wash away over-aged Camembert Europe
manhattan steaming in sea-vines
the washed land awakes again to wilderness
the only sound a vast thrumming of crickets
a cry of seabirds high over
in empty eternity
as the Hudson retakes its thickets
and Indians reclaim their canoes
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Millennium Mix