©2008 mykl sivak

Crazy Stadium World (Pablo Neruda and Alan Ginsberg)

Pablo Neruda looked like
Che Guevara.
Long wild hair,
perpetually damp
from rain forest mist,
dressed always in
army fatigues
still stained blotted
with blood from
the jungle dead revolutionaries,

whose wounds he’d sutured
with sewing kit thread,
as a volunteer medic
during a great war.

He was beautiful in body,
intellect, and spirit.
His machine gun bullets
had blown holes
in bourgeois imperialist skulls

so the perfect children
of Indian farmers could grow
to plow South American earth
and call it their own.

U.S. America waited for Pablo Neruda.
in the hot night of American summer;

And when the landing-gear tires
touched tarmac in grey puffs,
in the Summer New York night,
the nation exhaled in unison.

That late sixties night,
The Stadium shuddered;
hirsute youth of America
stormed stadium gates,
flowed like stadium human rivers.

The concrete ached and the mayor
paced smoking in his skyscraper office,
fearful sweating in thoughts
of stadium disaster,

vision of collapse,
pile of concrete and children,
pile of rebar, of hair,
pile of American entrails and
tie-dyed cotton.

Among the airports,
beneath streams of inbound/outbound flights,
the sound of stomping feet
pulsed to Paramus and Passaic.

Meadowlands nightbirds
gorged on swamp toads and locusts
that sang and croaked in time
with the perfect time pulsing.

Riker’s Island inmates
looked out cell windows
to the blinking lights
of LaGuardia runways,

or across the East River
to Bronx shores,
growing almost mad
from the stomping of
one-twenty-thousand-odd free feet;

and they wept for their poetry,
which is the poetry of crime.

The svelte, unshaved poet,
of people and poems
crossed the stage,
looked to his feet,
smiled to himself as he crossed;

and the roar from the crowd
was a deafening roar,
and nightbirds fell from the sky
and were swallowed by snakes.

The poet raised an arm
to shoulder’s height;
kept it there until
the signified silence
slowly came.

he looked around nodding,
warm satisfied smile upon
delicious lips,
pressed delicious lips
to the microphone, thrust his fist
to the crowd,

laugh shouted:
“Leaves of Grass !”
The roar rose again.

Some people had air horns
and these were sounded.
Some people had brought
girlfriends, and had fed them
LSD, and these were hoisted
upon shoulders to lift shirts,
expose white breasts
full bare to the summer night.

Allen Ginsberg
fried French fries, fillets-O-fish,
apple pie onion rings.

He watched draining baskets,
watched the film-caked monitor.
Listened to voice
of Cronkite announcing
the birth of some
new perfect era,

and one or two tears
dropped down
to rolling bubbles
of golden chicken fat.

Ginsberg stood pensive silent
till he placed his card
in time clock slot,
passed through the trash corral doorway.

Late thirties, gay lonesome,
he crossed New York’s
sidewalk nightscape,
rode the fluorescent subway
to Brooklyn nighttime
neighborhood.

Home, mother passed out
in an armchair, American flag
grey and grey waving,
American anthem from
tinny speaker ringing,

he took the lit cigarette
from her tar-stained fingers,
clicked off the TV,
and stepped hunched tired
up the ancient Brooklyn stairwell,

to sit behind the antique
Underwood
to type his first poem ever.

He knew then that he
would be a poet,
and he threw his grease-stained
uniform in the wastepaper basket,

then crawled to bed naked
poem drunk, poem spent
in the summer attic heat.

He fell asleep thinking
of Pablo Neruda,
tan thighs of Neruda,
pulpy lips of poet Neruda—
poems of Pablo Neruda,

without time to wipe away
the result of his thoughts.