(In Memoriam)
by Kathryn Pierro
[3 deep breaths] Ah Allen, I first met you the weekend that I took refuge. I brought you lunch when you arrived from the airport-- a vegetarian hummous plate from Zingermann’s deli with olives and green pepper arranged on it like a smiley face. There was something else on it you couldn’t eat, but you were gracious and hungry and ate it anyway. I was afraid of your fame and didn’t talk to you. Allen, we talked later at my first Wisdom retreat. In a moment of beautiful clarity I told you that you were a Perfect asshole. You, the Dharma Lion, reached out your claw, scratched at my arm and my samadhi, saying “the trick is not to grasp at the enlightenment, or else you lose it.” Allen, one mealtime you sat at my table, asked me where I came from and what I did. I said I was a poet, too, but I had a writing block. “That’s because you take yourself too seriously,” you said. “Write one page every night, and at the end of the year you’ll have a 365 page book. That’s more than anyone wants to read.” Allen, I loved listening to you sing Little Boy Lost, and our voices echoing in the dining hall as we sang “all the hills echo’ed” over and over again. Allen, I always wanted to talk to you about Shelley, who was my first guru and poetic lover; Anne Waldman told me you loved Shelley, too, and I heard that Hymn to Intellectual Beauty was among the last things you read to Jewel Heart, but I was napping and missed it. Allen, one day at another retreat, I knocked on your door while you were preparing to play for us, and asked some idiotic question I can’t even remember about creative genius, and you said emphatically, “I’m not a creative genius.” “What are you, then?” I asked “I’m someone trying to transpose the key this song is in... no, I’m figuring what note this note matches... that’s it, I’m figuring something out.” Allen, it’s time I figured something out, too. At the next retreat I asked you for political support. “I need to hear the cause before I support it,” you said. I said we needed democratize the performances in Jewel Heart. “You need an open mike,” you suggested. I thought that was a great idea, so, we had an open mike that 5 people attended, 3 of them, like me, frustrated poets and 2 others who couldn’t leave the room in time to be polite. Allen, at the last winter retreat, I could see you were dying, and I was certain I would not see you again. One night I followed you around the dining hall wanting to thank you for having lived so openly, a poet in an age of prose, and mostly for all the fun. I wanted to tell you I felt privileged to have lived in your time. But you always seemed preoccupied, so I left without telling you. Allen, now your body is dead as dust but only a corpse imagines you are gone. I see your breath filling a void, echoing over Plutonian hills, and dripping through every crack in Saturn’s rings. Allen, your breath is still breathing out of me the white radiance Shelley lit in you or the tiger Blake burned in your brain. Who imagines we are separate is deaf. Allen, I know courage is the nakedness you wore so well. I am full of silence, pride, and fear. I’ve learned to wander the India of the mind, but soon I’ll be stripped to bone before the villagers. Who can’t imagine this is blind. Allen, I never went to the puja we held the night you were dying. I got poisonously drunk and fucked a near-stranger. Maybe that was my way of celebrating you. Allen, I will fuck one beautiful boy and girl every year in your memory. Who isn’t touched by this has no feeling. Allen, I am afraid I will never be the poet you were, and now it’s my turn to keep my vows and speak. The Buddha’s compassion was his speech, speaking truth that frees and heals. Allen, in this you were a child of the Buddhas. Don’t get lost playing in the hills, come home to us. Allen, I will yell at America for you while you are gone. Maybe they will finally get the joke and stop being so tasteless. Sometime, light will resolve and some new sense will be born, and the lotus will open and breathe out a laughing baby. Allen, the sound is changing already. I can smell the pollen. Listen, now is what I am talking about. Now, I’ll stop running from my own truth: People, you are what made Allen Ginsberg terrible and great. The greatest mind happens nowhere else but in us. Stop being afraid of yourself. Live large, act kindly, breathe out life in long drunken kisses, suck life in-- tit taste, cock touch, acid sight, death smell, birth sound, empty air words. Nothing to it, really, just space kissing itself into a drunken gasp of pure pain and pleasure that echoes over and over again Ah...ha.