Technicality

Growing on vines,
we are
raised on dimes
umbilical cords into
nooses,
knots,
plugs into 
outlets.
Carrying these burdens
in our baskets,
we are
taught to believe
in lies
yet wonder why
we’re always hurting
and I 
don’t think my brain understands 
it
and I
don’t think my soul
accepts it.
But I live it
and you live it,
we live it
together /
a p a r t:
running into walls
like blind mice
afraid 
the next will just
prey on us,
afraid
that we’ll be smashed
under a stranger’s foot,
afraid 
that we’ll walk into
traps
specifically designed for us.
Lost in mazes, we cry silent 
searching for an exit
that doesn’t involve
our
blood.

An interview, ALLEN GINSBERG: 

“It’s simultaneous. The poetry generally is like a rhythmic articulation of feeling. The feeling is like an impulse that rises within—just like sexual impulses, say; it’s almost as definite as that. It’s a feeling that begins somewhere in the pit of the stomach and rises up forward in the breast and then comes out through the mouth and ears, and comes forth a croon or a groan or a sigh. Which, if you put words to it by looking around and seeing and trying to describe what’s making you sigh—and sigh in words—you simply articulate what you’re feeling. As simple as that. Or actually what happens is, at best what happens, is there’s a definite body rhythm that has no definite words, or may have one or two words attached to it, one or two key words attached to it. And then, in writing it down, it’s simply by a process of association that I find what the rest of the statement is—what can be collected around that word, what that word is connected to. Partly by simple association, the first thing that comes to my mind like “Moloch is” or ‘Moloch who,’ and then whatever comes out. But that also goes along with a definite rhythmic impulse, like DA de de DA de de DA de de DA DA. ‘Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows.’ And before I wrote ‘Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows,’ I had the word, ‘Moloch, Moloch, Moloch,’ and I also had the feeling DA de de DA de de DA de de DADA. So it was just a question of looking up and seeing a lot of windows, and saying, oh, windows, of course, but what kind of windows? But not even that—’Moloch whose eyes.’ ‘Moloch whose eyes’—which is beautiful in itself—but what about it, Moloch whose eyes are what? So Moloch whose eyes—then probably the next thing I thought was ‘thousands.’ OK, and then thousands what? ‘Thousands blind.’ And I had to finish it somehow. So I hadda say ‘windows.’ It looked good afterward.

Usually during the composition, step by step, word by word and adjective by adjective, if it’s at all spontaneous, I don’t know whether it even makes sense sometimes. Sometimes I do know it makes complete sense, and I start crying. Because I realize I’m hitting some area which is absolutely true. And in that sense applicable universally, or understandable universally. In that sense able to survive through time—in that sense to be read by somebody and wept to, maybe, centuries later. In that sense prophecy, because it touches a common key … What prophecy actually is is not that you actually know that the bomb will fall in 1942. It’s that you know and feel something that somebody knows and feels in a hundred years. And maybe articulate it in a hint—a concrete way that they can pick up on in a hundred years.”

Grapes would be a sexy fruit if I didn’t like, choke on them all the time.