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

RANDY ROARK

Written at My Last Penny Lane Reading, July 11, 2005

I tried to understand what I was reading,

rushing through the swirling text as it expanded

and rose into the sky as a dazzling aureole of light,

a shooting star circumambulating the roses, incense,

and teas served to an army of phantoms, swimming

in the margins of sleep with one vein of rose woven into the gold

the way the sun expands, pouring over the horizon from a spit of land

from which both the sunrise and sunset can be seen

the way a blossom splits from its stem in the hard intellectual light

of a restless mind where I hold what few answers I have near.

And the audience has left what they should be doing

to listen to a song as impossible to understand

as the strange rainbows in puddles, or the shaded paths

of stones and thistles through mountain snow,

or Chinese paper with absolutely nothing written on it,

or the humiliating brightness of a journal by Thoreau,

or the way Goya’s images slowly sink into the sunset

we had hoped for, the not-quite-here and not-yet-dead.