Son Of G, 1993 (after Allen Ginsberg’s Howl)

Filed under: New Writing   

Annalise Bomenblit

I saw the best minds of our generation silent before a
fluorescent light that screamed like the rainbow sky of the
drowned man’s last memory

who tried to fight it with pilgrimages at night to food and other
scarce suburban treasures speaking of things they bought and
things to buy and things to covet with only enough money for
another cup of coffee

who broke out of shells slowly, blinking in the light, murmuring
a reinvention of society that never sank into the minds of
the millions and millions and millions that never heard

who sat in classrooms scratching at the surface of the texts
until the minute hand moved and a hole in the stomach was
felt like a loss of wisdom which the two p.m. job confirmed

who one day stopped at McDonalds and ordered a bag of wisdom to
go and it kept them full at least for a few hours but left a
starchy taste that smacked of car exhaust and dirty
magazines and crowded video stores on a Saturday night

who jetted around in cars inherited or half-paid for but
thundered about nonetheless floating just a few feet from
the ground by faith

who played cds over and over particularly the ones that
sounded like their lives and all of a sudden it was their
story being told and that was comforting enough to go back
to sleep

who cried at movies and imagined them to be made by men sitting
around and intentionally plotting to make the women cry
openly and the men do it in secret and not feeling the least
bit guilty for monopolising emotion

who made food their religion and religion their bedtime snack
after the fairytales got old and rusty and not politically
correct

who sat in on profound midnight conversations and took out an
empty notebook later on at home to record it all and drew a
most horrible blank

who sat up afraid of nostalgia and the future all at once and
felt paralysis set in

who spent nights clicking artistic black-and-white photos titled
“The Human and The Squash” and came away feeling that is was
the greatest truth they’d encountered in twenty years

who admired Love and other words capitalised by Dickinson in
museums for free

who found the hippie hallucinations only after nights of insomnia
and decided it had been a very productive week

who watched hemlines fly up and down and out and around and grew
so tired they woke up and didn’t change or even brush their
teeth

who had the same dreams as every generation before them with
water and flight and drowning and nakedness and facelessness
and all the characters telling the truth

who spent mornings representing each dream symbol in every
established school of thought and came up with seventy-four
different meanings

who reached for the sun and felt it burn them hot and crisp so
that they glowed a strange shade of orange and found it
empowering to fly to the most crowded stretch of east coast
beach and yell “I am not a target market for sunscreen”

who set out burning and glowing into the night slapping heels on
the pavement and pumping their arms and running running
running until they reached the invisible psychological
boundaries of their own brains or collapsed among the
foliage of the concrete jungles lying quiet in their rags
as the world spun on.

Posted on June 1st, 1996.

• J.G. Ballard: Cocaine Nights
• Crowded House : Afterglow
• The 88: “Over and Over”
• Shakra: “Fall”
• Anna Funder – Stasiland