After Howl

[create_destiny]

Assignment:

Read Allen Ginsberg's poem, "Howl."

Write a rant, (your own version of "Howl"). Be as rhetorical as you like, get up on your soapbox and scream. Use repetition and striking imagery.

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After Howl

Our days of terror are over now
you and I,
our apocalypse has ended,
the signs of war have faded
from our faces
now shining with holy oil
mingling with tears of gladness,
tumbling from tender sore eyes

Our days of torture ended
And we went rejoicing into that water,
you and I,
our hair hung in our faces,
washed with hyssop and made clean
we were kissed by simplicity
again and again
we tasted grace on our lips

These were the days of our mystical resurrection
when we knelt in holy places
smelling of beeswax, earth and incense
the chinking of the censor like bells breaking
the bonds of our psychic death
our minds restored from madness

we walked softly in those days
gathering sweetness,
thumbing woolen prayer ropes
tied in intricate knots by black-robed women
bathed in beauty and light

again and again
we heard holy words
chanted by musky, bearded angels,
sacred words and ancient melodies flooding
our hearts
the way made smooth
by suffering
again and again

the traces of war and apocalypse
once etched deeply into
our souls, are gone now
our minds ravished
by the heavenly mystery
only images
of our mystical Resurrection
remain

Comments

[nodressrehersal.livejournal.com]

Your not-rant is quite beautiful.

I don't think I can play this one; I have neither the energy nor the creativity to even know where to begin......

All I'd want to rant about is the hormone-induced acne-on/acne-off, fuzzy-thinking, addle-brained, nightly-sweat-soaking, emotionally exhausting, what-the-fuck-I-just-had-my-period-two-weeks-ago phase of life called perimenopause, and who wants to read that shit?

[gracegiver]

Whenever you post one of these challenges, I sit at my keyboards and try, and try and try. And Zip. The fingers fumble. The only way I can write free form is when I'm able to separate myself from myself. If you know what I mean.

I like what you did here. The theme of resurrection interlacing in each paragraph gives lots of interest.

Keep posting what you're doing. I'm devouring it.

[whosplittheatom.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, this is the poem you mentioned on my post?

I love this, its like the polar inverse to 'Howl' in so many ways...

Well, you already know I can rant all too well...

But my rage is a game.
I play.
Sometimes. The. Universe. Fragments. INSIDEME.
12345.
And Ginsburg can play hide and go fuck himself with his starry dynamo, because you know why?
He, self-deluded piece of worthless beatnik shit, sat idly by with all his generation's best and idlest minds and mental-masturbated for decades to fevered self-induced visions of the cock-and-pussy-coated Void
THEY ALL WORSHIPPED
WHAT NONE WOULD ADMIT
and they invoked this demon on the heads and into the hearts of their unborn children,
and we have seen its face and its flaccid cock and festering balls and putrescent cunt and breats dripping black hydrocarbon petrochemical blood-for-oil mothers' milk,
as it walks naked through this world.
"Burning for that ancient heavenly connection"
they found their Faceless Namelessness, their fashionable Zen Oblivion, their drug-addled sex-rattled bliss, at the price of their children and grandchildren being born to suckle shit and live in wet cardboard and grow turnips in gravel.
And as that sorry lot burn through ozone in soccer-mom minivan SUV spaceships powered by dredged dinosaur blood and pour choking concrete like a plaster cast over a wounded world, billboards and signs and symbols screaming from every direction telling us what we need to buy to validate who or what they say we need or should or ought to be, we sit back and take shit for being "jaded" and "apathetic", when really, what the hell else are we supposed to do or say once we've looked into the war-face and gaping maw and insane black-hole eyes of the Beast whose lumbering leg these blind-boomer-beatnik-whateverthefuckyouwannacallthosemotherfuckers are still trying to hump like a little rabid dog in a suit and tie?
So when you see Ginsburg or Kerouac or Watts or Leary or any of those other wastes, you know what you do? You say "fuck that shit" and you spit in disgust, because they wanted the brainrape orgy of infinity and surely they'll get it.
Let me explain a little bit about the Machinery of the Night - it's ALL connected to everything else by lots and lots and lots of teeny tiny little strings, and you pull the ones that are connected to other people places and things and other people places and things pull the ones that are connected to you.
So there's your starry dynamo and all your empty pseudo-romanticized longing in a nutshell, and fuck you a thousand times over for forcing me to see before I was ready.