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

JOHN ROCHE

Here’s for All

Here’s for all those poets who never publish. Rolls of rotting paper in drawers and closets

and under sinks. Bathtubs full of manuscripts. Notebooks available only to St. Peter.

Here’s for those who do, but never leave their mountain hovels—just send their poems

out to friends’ little magazines, regular as epistles from the Unabomber. Here’s for all

those poets who never attend cocktail parties ‘cause they can’t remember names very

well and the arts patronesses in their low-cut gowns make them nervous. Here’s for the

Vietnam Vet poet skulking in the back of the hall. Here’s for the tenured Beat poet

playing jazz real loud in his office, or the one who shouts Go Away! when students knock

or the one who sends poison-pen emails to administrators at midnight or the brilliant one

barred from teaching by the dead hand of Moriarty or the one tapping away into the night

on his manual typewriter, hoping to get it all down, intent made clear, before lymphoma

silences him. And here’s for the young poet who freaks out on acid and is soothed by a

famous shamanic poetess, and years later gets a transsexual operation to become Tiresius.

And here’s for the gifted millionaire who gives it all away to starving musicians to free

his angel, and the one who blows a fortune on heroin and the one who plays William Tell

unsuccessfully and the one who climbs the devil tree and can’t get down. And here’s for

the poet who gives up poetry to follow the false gods of Deconstruction. And here’s for

the poet who wanders the many rooms of his father’s mansion, but can’t find an exit. And

here’s for the poet who gets tossed out of the art gallery reception for having sex in the

john. And here’s for the poet who really thinks liberation means he can go anywhere

without clothes, radiant in the checkout aisle. And here’s for the poet who hangs herself

on Halloween when sleep won’t come any other way. And here’s for the poets who watch

the aurora borealis ‘cause someone had a craving for a cigarette and so left the party and

so noticed There’s a whole other universe up there! and got them all to drive drunkenly

out to the cornfields to watch. And here’s for the poet who tore up my bathroom in a rage

and my wife had to cuff him and throw him out into the night, where there was much

wailing and gnashing of teeth. And here’s for the poet who got his life back at 50, with

his mother dead his father dead and his relatives all dead dead, but they left him with a

handsome monthly stipend. And here’s for the poets who blow their brains out, or worse,

let their gray matter slowly seep into ten thousand composition papers, along with the red

of their pens. And here’s for all the poets who wait their turn interminably until the

featured poet finishes expounding and they might get a few moments at the mic, they

might, if the line’s not too long and if everybody obeys the time rule and if they can be

heard over the cappuccino machine and the sound of the cash register. And here’s for the

poets who wish they were musicians so they could get laid. And here’s for the poets who

wish they were artists so they could get paid. And here’s for the poets who wish they

weren’t academics. And here’s for the poets who wish they’d studied Greek so they could

read Sappho in the original. And here’s for the poets who wish they were priests so they

could cast out demons. And here’s for the poets who wish their chants could really STOP

THE WAR instantly. And here’s for all the poets. And here comes everybody.

[This work first appeared in John Roche’s Topicalities (FootHills Publishing, 2008). Reprinted with permission of the author. Originally published in NHS 2012, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs12/.]