H e a r t S o n s & H e a r t D a u g h t e r s of A l l e n G i n s b e r g

N a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 4 : A r c h i v e s E d i t i o n

ANDY CLAUSEN

Insurgency

Ineffable undigested lament hovering

in dark lawless hallways

Cellular anger gestating in mildewed garrots

adhering to rheumy smoked skin

tremors of varicose stairways

O you've been elusive grandeur

peace of mind generation

Yes sparkling diamonds dancing on the lake

gold shining on the Sierras

emeralds like festive ornaments

hanging in the branches

And in the distance the unmistakable cries

of wounded children

of thirsty & hungry dispossessed

of those left to die

I summon and call all reserves

I must try

One word like one step at a time

staccato spontaneity

interrupted a dozen times a minute

Jolt conscious consciousness

say away the monstrous

bring the light

Samsonite optics

purgatory lip burn

Breathing like a nudged accordion

squeezing wheezing from the center

of the solar system

The streets have no home

the cries of the wounded

All the laughter & bounty

that will never be

eaten by maggots alongside

the bombed roads

Were there no me

all my working

all my so called verse

never existed

all my loves

tribulations, sins

all my desires

dead in the water

Far better than this failure

of the world

This is not about me

It's about us

I know you wrote & belted the anthems

marched & protested

led a different life than was planned

With ringing strings & radiant keys you strived to celebrate

harmony in every good atom of your willing body

scribing verse like never before

defying the customs & tired forms of the limpid parlor

ignoring muse strangling edicts

from tenured blue blood

Illuminating instead the street prison workplace

backyard river side & human gates

exonerating desire

You were born in a bombshelter

born in the exaltations of the G.I. BIll

You sprang into life listening to broadcasts

reading headlines

New Frontier Great Society War Against Poverty

Stay the Course I Have a Dream

You fought wars on foreign soil

sometimes reluctantly, willingly sometimes

Fought against war

Fought warfare with everything you had

and imagined you had

You came home doubting the identity and purpose of God

The way we walked the talk

was going to change

Each would abet this salvation

of earth by earth for earth on earth

You would turn on the world

emancipating the railroaded inmates

of calloused overweened Truth

You would both do your own thing

and collectivise against a war

and do what seldom had been done

You stopped a war without using weapons of war

You formed Manichaen communes to grow resilient bodies

& ideas

welcoming the renegade progeny

of the Madman of Kent

Arms open to Spartacus & Ghandi

Malcolm & Martin

to demand an accounting

to understand our resources at the source

to foster devotion to the Common People

to love the down trodden

to literally love one another

Freedom was going to be more

than just another word

more than a word

Your seven senses rhapsodied majestic pines

pungent aphrodisiac redwood, cottonwood & magnolia

You embraced hemlock and climbed rhododendron himals

copped a stance for snapshots, boots on receding glaciers

dutifully reporting the raucous elevated sounds

at 18000 feet

You beheld the quarried faces

the landslide jowls

the gouged & scourged breasts

desultory forlorn acres of two story piled logged Alaska

bound for Japan

the rotten cabbage-egg spumes of the pulp mills

of Springfield & Missoula

the concertina wires silently screaming

Coxsackie, Otisville, Woodbourne

You were blown out when the oxygen devouring flames

of the refineries spelled out SATAN MOLOCH

TERROR DISEASE APOCALYPSE

in the choking salmon charcoal night miasma

clinging to the windshield

on the doldrum drive to lower east

Paradise Lost & the land of Nod

You got off the couch

& learned hands-on carpentry & plumbing

dancing on red iron high in the sky

the Gotham-Baghdad by the Bay-Oklahoma City Sky

You punked the rods in the thick air valley

Santa Clara-San Fernando-Phoenix-Hudson-Williamette

Shouldered the hod, humped the wheelbarrow

Kept the rig barreling in the white line fever

cross country wail bar night

You waited on tables with weary dogs

and conjured smiles, a tip dependent thespian

You set tables, bussed & cleaned tables

polished & fabricated tables

your own and those of the rich

if you were lucky

If you were lucky had kids

went into the family business

Wanting to ease the trials of the road

for the kids, the road you no longer travel

deteriorating detonating under their innocent

wheels

Remember when you made your own music

worked out your own songs & prayers

your own steps & mudras

your own instruments

Anything was a drum

Any twang okay

Every street had a story a tune

Every country road gave birth to jigs & blues

Pilgrim & artist

pulsating genuine lived in living rooms

utilizing bedrooms at all hours

raunchy rambling garages and old time stoops

of lowdown hoods with cross blown

mouth harps, crimson eyes at half mast

messaline meadows and brown bag corners

ideoblastic parks of cities & cherished wilderness

midnight cemeteries

ancient barns gypsy fiddle lofts hustling coffee houses

saxophone woodsheds swimming in clear light

atop godlike mountains down by the everyday water side

Everyone was a celebrity

all was genius

I know the jobs you had were not easy

more than once humiliating dreamless

underpaid unpaid health destroying boring

as all get out

You learned mammon has reality

on its side at its side

Nothing has a sharper blade

Nothing has colder penetration

Nothing has the concentrated will to ruin

like legal tender

Even history & scripture & medicine must consult the mighty

dollar (Or is it Euro?) before they write themselves

You decided to aim your poetic flare at merchandise

advertising promoting sometimes the best

sometimes what you knew was bunk

toting grief & guilt a million miles

purchased at Walmart

You battled forest fires, battled erosion

battled environmental stupidity

and grew old growing asparagus & beans

& catnip with home grown fertilizer

muttering, "Everyone loses...and it doesn't matter."

You opened hip rare vision & user friendly bookstores

the brightest came to browse and carouse

Wagner & Dylan in the air

You had eclectric transrational record shops

and sold posters of Anarchy & rent short artists

and went to work for Barnes & Nobles

Bertelsman Seagrams & Rupert Murdoch

You haven't yet taken off your clothes

and walked thru midtown a saddhu

You haven't yet gone for the rope

the razor the pistol the pill bottle

or 10th story window

You Here

hand fashioning jewelry, scented candles & mirrors

doing massage color gem & aroma therapy

Late at night in the 7-11, Quick Stop, U-Totem,

down on Cumberland Farm

At dawn cleaning houses & toilets too

delivering papers

hanging drapes in blocks of condos you could

never afford or want to live in

You voyaged to foreign lands went native

started sending exotic culture home

You could no longer afford America

You toiled for disrespectful pitiable wage

before and after parole

They wanted ou to work scared

& act like you loved it

You were told to consider yourself fortunate

Everything you collected was consumed in the fire

Everything you knew washed away in the flood

Like the sword of Bhairav

amputating ignorance

Like Jesus put a sword between parent & child

A sword dissolving with the torn pages

of composting calendars

and grandchildren pointing at pages

yet to be

And the old anthems seemed only old

Even though you did puberty in the projects

You became the beaucoup gardener of wanton

celestial flowers, ghetto flowers, neon bouquets

immersing into the Waters of Life

precious everyday Water

You were born again

yet suffered the afflictions

of begrudged repetitive motion

sitting on the unjustifiable boils of Job

yet rode his horses when they jumped

Nobodaddy's fence-- abandoning a deity

who'd gamble away your loved ones

You guided the inhibited to the primordial pools

sailing the pre-Adamic seas laden

with contraband jazz & duty free Jai Shambeau

Days melding into endless novenas

of house car medical payments

Your Lord's first name was Land

You dug the sod with back & plow & pen

aiming, clicking the carnal camera

with excess joy inevitably

leaking sanguine droplets

of gleeful sweat

You could still dream

You could still grin

You had a mother guru

a father guru

a child guru--a consort guru

You made love with your guru

You took the mountain side for your guru

You sought refuge on Tamalpais the Flat Irons

Denali Overlook Tremper Fuji Kilanmajaro

El Capitan Sagarmartha Nose Mountain

You sought primitive therapy in atavistic pubs

the outlaw rock and roll of your sexual awakenings

& came that close to biting the dust

in a bath tub of ice cubes

with neglect came denial, false romance & viral grief

You are still here

You can get off the floor

on one knee, get the other foot on the ground

Rise Up O Uprising O Insurgency

Forget your solipsistic woes

Let your voice be heard!

Without Bombs! Let it be heard!

Are you here only to witness

every aspiration

every shred of decency under siege & corrosion?

The sustainability of mothers of earth of the stars & beyond

all the eye can & can not see, desecrated?

What it is to have choice, persecuted & condemned?

Every scintilla the poor have to protect themselves

against the whims, follies, and privilege

of the rich being snuffed?

Every religion worshipping the One God

invoked to justify killing human beings?

Every industry governed by Mammon Urizen Moloch Dog Eat Dog?

America who gave the world the transcendence

of the blues

rock and roll, be-bop hip hop the wobblies

the Summer of Love, Harlem renaissance & the Beats

America the beautiful reviled by the world

cast as insatiable bully & glutton

has become what she hated

A land of Orwellian distortion

of lethal deceit

of treacherous anti-sense

Freedom is not free ( 3 times)

Heroism is comparing bombing missions

to video games & the 4th of July

Whole families explode and burn

accidently on purpose

The duty bound the poverty coerced

compare drive-bys in Iraq

to drive-bys in Brooklyn

Patriotism is denying those who disagree

free speech

Justice is compiling dossiers

on what folk read think contribute to

Justice is retribution & revenge

Allah, Jesus Christ, Jehovah the names invoked

before committing mass murder

The Rapture exonerates lying

to vast populations

Professing fear of God absolves all bads

Love is anything very expensive

Love is chocolates, a stunning gown, a limo & liposuction

a new face, a rare breed of mammal

Love is a package dancing on a gilded stage

it's applause, O show me the love

it's a whoop for the home team

four letters on a page

a slo mo zoom in a manicured meadow

Democracy is not Whitman's, not Thoreau's

John Stuart Mill's

not Martin Luther King's

nor Eugene Debs democracy

not Thomas Paine

not Buffy St. Marie

not Paul Robeson, Rosa Luxemburg

Democracy is a twisted depraved metaphor

for doing business

America is a code word for get

the best of any transaction

You were privy to the Way is not the Way

You might have read Corso's The American Way

You know what I know

You've been out sourced

You're paycheck to paycheck

to other kind of check

And everything is rising but wages

Temperatures are rising

Tempers are rising

Rent and Real Estate rising

Threats are rising

Torture is rising

The water is rising

The sewage & effluvia

of carnivorous slag is rising

It is permeating the fabric

Injuries against nature float

like greasy seaweed

The pig-out of conquerors

has upmerged from shallow internment

like chemical zombies

But wages are not rising

What else can rise?

What can come out of the charnel sod?

You have religious practice

your rituals your prayers your solitude

facing the sun the moon east & west

in all six directions

fingers on beads emptying & filling your mind

from little round pillow to cushioned pew

and your legs behind your neck

and counted everyone of the 108,000

walked the last mile on your knees!

You have access to more information than dreamnt

possible a generation ago

You can parse the gaits of rare animals & insects

machines, gold, winds & rain

that will never touch your face

at your fingertips

Everyday you affirm faith the path to unwind

will not lead you nowhere

not marooned in your cenotaph residency

in hyperparanoid domains of ravenous

matter consuming ghosts

You have your departed friends & lovers

& their indispensable counsel for ephemeral comfort

& funereal resolve

You deplore the destruction of meaning in words

of meaning of the old forests

old buildings & ways

sitting in a thousand rooms of agreement

& encouragement sans answer

without key no window

outside the war continues

You laud easy laughter

intoning your motto your rune

"It's all good."

like a mortal lock paradigm

"It's all good."

outside they are teaching you are the enemy

What else will rise?

What else can emerge

from this charnel ground?

You who hold the driving belts

to the machines of the world

in your maybe battered, maybe contorted,

maybe barely able, maybe atrophied,

maybe reborn one thing's for certain hands

Call out! O Common Sense Insurgency Organize!

Let your voice be heard! Organize!

Stop the war, let the chimes of freedom flash again

Be born again! Voice it!

O Land of Beulah how can you be measured

by numbers?

O Imagination how can your value plummet so?

Politically as one man I ask you how has

smallbusiness fared under the Republicans

Nixon Reagan The Bushes

and liberal republicans like Clinton?

Ask Office Depot, Barnes & Nobles

Ask the radio waves, ask Clear Channel

How has education fared?

Ask the millions who only know a false history

or no history at all

We had one president who told us to conserve nature's yield

and withdrew finance to vicious tyrants

One president who did not bomb

& we saw what & where it got him

As long as the plastic presented consumer good life

in action & the supermarkets were well stocked

& the oil flowed into fuel

you did what you had to do

you didn't have to think about it

whatever it was

Insurgency quit working for the war don't supply the war

don't fight in, don't let your children fight in

this profiteering inexcusable bogus war

exorcise the war from your heart

this war that is all wars

this is the war fought on every plane & dimension

in every aspect & fiber

this is the war against human love

Human Love

Honest work for honest pay, cry out wail howl organize!

Out of the ashes & flotsam, out of its coffin

It is Joe Hillstrom, Emma Goldman, W.B. Dubois

Vachel Lindsay, Emmit Grogan & Abbie Hoffman

Let your voice be heard

in every day in every way

O insurgents, O peace mongers

don't mourn, organize!

O artists magnanimously the planet turns

from the desperate day

Your hand has fashioned represented & glorified

unrelenting beauty we were born to

are entitled to

But we suffer addicted collusion intent on using this

awesome fecundity to make capital

Capital that begets more capital

Money not even what money buys just money

Money inflicting pain

A society that fears its neighbors

whose gold is do unto others before they do unto you

A society that fears race & language

sex & no sex & poverty's karma

A nation that jetsams its heritage

when push comes to shove

which is its heritage & its sex

A society that conceives to make reparations

to the descendants of the ethnically cleansed

& robbed original inhabitants of These States

with long shot pipe dreams

of the poor & working losing

their retirements at the gaming tables

A society that conceives to make no reparations

at all to the descendants of slave labor

survivors of and in defacto apartheid

You saw streams of fish & revivifying drink

rendered carcinogenic & wept iodine

You saw rain seducing mysteries clear cut

& waves of stumped Mars like terrain

Orange Walnut Apricot groves bulldozed

into disposable housing

Beaches petrofried

Acres of abandoned rust

Mountain ranges of plastic plastic plastic

Mountain tombs of radioactive waste buried alive

Winds of depleted uranium & birth defects

dirging

Hills of crank & pills & lost teeth

dirging

You saw it from the portholes

of your rides

You felt it on a train to Secunderbad

to Budapest to Eugene Oregon

A bus to Cleveland Ohio

on the turnpike, O Elizabeth!

boarding a plane in Walla Walla

O Homeland Security pork!

On the 7 train

Insurgency

Uproar boiling in its bloody cauldron

O insurgents for birthright, laugh loud & proud

dance like your life depends on it-- it does

drink go ahead Jesus & Haffiz are with you

smoke it's your right, your religion

watch your ashes, notice your anger

outspoken exuberant generous forgive educate protest

wail shout out

Let it be heard

You can stop the war

You the woman & you the man

can stop the war

Who else can stop it?

Renounce virtual reality's design on 24/7

not enough virtue

not enough reality

not enough time

Tear yourself from the screen

go out the door

Insurgency without bombs & poison

renounce the media of big boy control culture

hypnotizing cheapening us

O uprising dawn new Unions, Revolutions

& outlaw outside markets

bring it to the numbered streets

& sylvan roads, the sacred airways

O non-violent heart of Jesus & Buddha

reach & touch

overwhelm these malignant cowardly

heartless vibes

Whether it be Velvet Orange Rainbow Pink Black Blue

Red or Green

by any means possible

This deadly fog must lift

Arise Tom Paine, John Peter Altgeld, John Reed

Jane Adams Helen Adam John Coltrane Etheridge

Knight Jack Kerouac Allen Ginsberg Black Buffalo

Woman Crazy Horse Langston Hughes rise

Uprising Debs and Jack London Caesar Chavez Abelardo

Delgado Frida & Diego Billie Holliday Bessie Smith

Big Bill Haywood Joe Hill Phil Ochs Malcolm X

Joaquin Murrieta Chief Joseph rise

Woody Guthrie Leadbelly Cisco Houston Harriet Tubman

Charlie Chaplin Billy Burroughs Jr. Enid Dame

David Lerner, Judy Bari, Pedro Pietri arise

Maestro Gregory Corso come with on the point straight shot

eloquent prophetics

"Know that there are millions of Americans

seeking America...know that even with all

those eye-expanding chemicals--only more of

what is not there do they see"

Isabel Eberhardt show us the New Frontier

& if need be disguise & attitude

Sitting Bull show us the route

the method the rudiments

How will we fight the most pervasive

destructive Empire the Earth has known?

I reach out to all the saints & sinners

you who are named

& you billions with no names in books

with no glory but what was

in front of you

I call to all laborers, the misrecognized

the great heroes the mothers of us all

the hammer the hoe the rags & sponges

the lactating breasts & fore arms

the steel wool knuckles & eyes aged

beyond this life––Cold mouth

declaiming the immortal lines in mortal faces

the mop & broom, the conveyor belt

the choker and skid, the will killing pick

the ovens the ladders and swinging scaffolds

the tie wire and grill and telephone and trowel

I call to guide wire and caulked boots

the steel toes, the dollie, the ho dad, the lumpers

the victims of misogyny, the foster families

broken furniture families

the jack hammer, the jack of all, the fruit picker

pearl diver the hacks the seamstress the drill press

the death bed comforter, the lesson planners

and underpaid menders of atrocities

To all who did the dirty work

To all who made us clean

To all who were sold short overused

& deceived yet found time to live

I call on you now

Arise Help Us, guide us

We will make a future together

fit for you to live again

You shall rise!

You are not dead

O Insurgents

O Pioneers

Let it be heard!

Stop this everywhere everything

contamination

Stop this war, Organize, rebirth

Come together

& you'll find a way

to stop this war

[Originally published in NHS 2006, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs06/Clausen.htm.]