When I was a beatnik

When I was a beatnik

When I was a beatnik

(and it was something like 50 years too late)

I used to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day

And read Allen Ginsberg under a darkening

Dream

My thoughts about America

Were still American

(and they still are)

But the smell of those carcinogens

And the smoke and the taste of that bitter

Tobacco

Was senseless

And poised

I bled one time

My hand caught up

With a broken dish

My temper made the dish break

12 stitches and chatting merrily

With the man who’s putting needles

In the wound

 and puked

Every day for eight years

(thanks Goddess Be to Lithium)

I say that sarcastically

But with the radiant truth

In my soul

That knows my cats

Needed a beatnik to feed them

I did not so much go on the road

And womanize

As sit on my porch

Under the sun and the braches

Of the purple potato plant

That grew by the door

And I fed it carcinogens

By the bucketful

And read and muttered to myself

While the voices in my mind chattered

Mystically fervent

I tried to be a Beatnik

I felt I indentified

With Kerouac’s

Disaffection

And sense of rejection

And so like he drank himself to death

I smoked till I got asthma