Visit a monkey in the tree of his life
He doesn't eat the fruit before it is ripe
When the sugar turns to alcohol
He shares his crop with one and all

The alcoholic tangerines are free
The alcoholic tangerines for you
The alcoholic tangerines for me

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

American Kids


The flappers and the jitterbugs
The beatniks and hippies never die.
The rockers and grungers speak nothing of the wars
Interrupting our good time
Meaningless things, wars
In which nothing happens really
But you can feel it when a war ends
And the music can continue

After World War One
The survivors of that war became the first generation
Of Americans to do it in the back of an automobile.
Perhaps it was the sex lessons they'd learned in Europe
That led to the American sexual revolution of the twenties.
(Thousands of them returned from the war with VD
after being encouraged by their moral government
to not use condoms, because,
what could be worse than contraception?)

Time passes
And face paint hair band rock and roll
Becomes the turgid flannel and corduroy of grunge

But say something about marijuana
How it sneaked itself into white American culture
Disguised as Jazz
White kids listening to Gene Croupa
The drummer of a Negro band
The first white person ever charged
With possession of pot in 1938

Devil music they called it.
Ecstatic energetic multi-cultural vibrations
Intoning fierce emotive dancing and rhythm
Shocking to puritans
Frightening to moralists who were sure
That swing signified the beginning
Of the decay of American culture:

“The family system will disappear,” they said
“Society, sapped at its very base
Will have to find new foundations,
And Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free
Will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower
Through a sunlit world1

Those moralists were right all along
The jitterbug craziness the ecstasy and dementia
The refer madness (the poem pauses while I
crash through the window and fall out onto the street)

In the nineties kids were cool
We were stoned beautifully and there can be
No status among the equally beautiful
All very confusing for young women of common sense
For if there is no status among young men
How is a girl supposed to know who to mate with?
Perhaps she should just sample us all and then choose
Her- mother- said- to- choose- the- very- best- one-
And-you- are- not- it

A kid today has a different bent
He's a straight edged non-drinking non-smoking ass kicker
Whose greatest vice and outpouring of spirit is his violence
And his willingness to repeatedly fall off of a skateboard
Breaking his ankles and cracking his head on a plywood ramp
He tells stories about getting kicked in the face at the metal concert
And relishes the pain of tattooing and piercing and cutting and scarring

Pain is what galvanizes his memory to the moment of life
He loves pain, and so the decadent hedonism of my generation
Has become the masochism and asceticism of his

And what can we say about the movement between the decades
The different faces, the masks of the American spirit?
Perhaps one cannot participate in the emerging incarnation
Without completely disconnecting with the past
As though an awareness of the past disqualifies us
From participating in what is new.
1The moralist is quoted from Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow

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