Walter Holland
What Say You?
Where is Burroughs with his hashish stare, watching the hustlers
in Times Square as he blows smoke-rings
and discusses the mad trippy verse of Rimbaud, or that
pot-headed Baudelaire; talking on the radio
of frequencies from aliens that ruminate through the vast
effluvia of the ethereal stars?
Corso ranting like a street-bum jester, smirking at marriage
and praising the Bomb—naming the chakras and
yelling prophesies, bedding whomever he pleases, obsessed
over spreading his onanistic seed
while desperate Allen fixates on getting laid, or sucking
Cassady’s cock in flagrante delicto,
as Carolyn comes into the room—what say you of the fucked-up abuses
of Uncle Sam, of blatant government
bullshit, this meltdown on a trash heap of lies, the Establishment’s
kowtow to a new fascist order—Moloch with his
greedy tax-cutting grin? What say you to this whiny fraternity of White men
and their gun-happy, race-baiting army
of the 1%? Would you chant and dance like some Krishna freak, reciting
your pacifist prayers, calling for a new
peoples’ insurrection, another Blake-crazed, weed-fueled, beatified, holy-shit-shocker of a say-you-want-a-revolution revolution?
Walter Holland, PhD, is the author of three books of poetry: A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 (Magic City Press, 1992), Transatlantic (Painted Leaf Press, 2001), and Circuit(Chelsea Station Editions, 2010) as well as a novel, The March (Masquerade Books, 1996 and Chelsea Station Editions 2011). His work has appeared in The Antioch Review, HazMat, Redivider, Rhino, and other journals and anthologies. He writes book reviews for LambdaLiterary.org and Pleiades. Follow him at: walterhollandwriter.com.
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