At home in Poinciana Florida rummaging through second drawer of old forgotten poems and word-scribbles arranging a pamphlet to be laid on the grave of poet-priest, Allen Ginsberg
I want to be his wild kidmonk providing god something to read to him on cold winter nights in heaven
(–who was the god you spoke of? did you really believe? was it all a metaphor? clinging to childhood teachings? ((I know you’re too intelligent to leave something so blatantly unacknowledged)) what if you’re right? would god accept a nonbeliever? would god even bother to read you my non-theistic poems?–)
Angel eyed poet Ginsberg your bald skull is home to ants and maggots and worms and soil and exposing brain void or maybe safe within a caskets temporary fortitude (–was that void consciousness? or did it dissolve into eternity?—I ponder at 6:29 am MCO airport recognizing faces I’ve never seen solemnly walking luggage to gate, all implacably hurtling towards the present moment, questioning what has happened and what will happen and what is happening)
and later me soaring (in airplane) above creased & lapping turbulent ocean spotted by scattered cloud’s shade, looking out the window realizing the futility & meaninglessness of human commerce and phallic buildings and cars always coming and going forgetting that they can’t drive from death and that money will erode with their skulls and engines, like your bones Allen, no longer poetically white now marrowless and decaying soil sludge
I landed and visited your grave at the B’Nai Israel Cemetery in Newark, New Jersey
I passed not-you Ginsbergs and Solomons and Eisenburgs and eventually stumbled by the Ginsberg-Linsky family headstone,
Irwin Allen Ginsberg inscribed on your personal headstone
I knelt by your grave placed my sheets of stray paper below your headstone beneath the weight of a rock proving I was your disciple asked you to instill me with the angel eyes of poetics and swore it wasn’t in pursuit of fame or publication and I asked you about death’s black void and if you even remembered your beard and misshapen eye and poems and friends or if you are now egoless singularity wafting through the trees making them tremble-shake or the sunlight pouring into my pores or disseminated to everything in every far-reaching corner of everything which to me is just an idea (–have you seen everything Allen? do you know what everything is now? the actual contents of infinity?–)
many birds flew near but one bird sat on a telephone poll string singing high pitched ballads for your deceased Israeli neighbors
(–did you hear that song? did you hear my pleas begging you to apprise me of your rightness?–)
I am your fucking disciple, your following is spread throughout internet forums and academics
my professor wrote on my poems ‘i didn’t know you were related to Ginsberg’ and I slightly wept
Would we be friends?
I sat cross-legged by your grave and closed my eyelids and felt the tender lively grass on ground against my hairy lively legs and opened my eyes to the leaves of grass bowing to the wind
(–or were they bowing to the prophet? could the blades of grass fathom where they stood?–)
I am buried here and sit by my grave beneath no-tree.

 

*this poem is a response to Ginsberg’s own poem “At Apollinaire’s Grave”*

 

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teddy duncan jr/ born and raised in poinciana florida / allen Ginsberg disciple/ teddy.albert23@yahoo.com