Rave Apocalyptic
Posted: January 8th, 2010, 4:36 pm
Going through some old notebooks I came across this blatant rip-off of Howl I wrote back in 1993, when I was twenty-nine. I read it last night and decided I actually liked it. I never posted it online except once back in '97 or '98, maybe early '99, at alt.poetry.com in the old newsgroups that are no more. It's very long, around 125 lines, so you have to be ambitious to read it. It makes references to things and people in my life both personal and general at the time.
Rave Apocalyptic
Any one of us have seen the best minds of our own generation destroyed by madness and broken on the rocks placed by the failures and bad reputations of our older siblings
Mysto-steamy prophets of benign doom who stare hollow-eyed at the malignancy that has encrusted their dreams with hopelessness and unbound dread
Who were sent by the courts into the reeking coffee stained maw of the twelve-step god because no other church would do
Who preached to empty hallways that all was by design and all was according to plan
Who bellowed out loud, “No! I’ll never forgive you for that,” to his neighbor, his Father, his Savior and his tormentor
Who raged into the heavens of the night, “I don’t care. I believe.”
Who found salvation in a bottle or on the head of a pin or the cap of a wild mushroom or the button of a cactus
Who found light in the darkness of the soul while fathoming hell or soaring angelic
Who lost the world on any of a thousand night but always made a new one at the same time
Who embarked on vision quests into the docile, domesticated mockery of nature outside the city
Who chose to live in a place called the cross for that reason alone
Who heard radio waves in their head and called it the hissing of angels trapped in magnetic fields
Who came here from another world through storm and starvation and life, death and insanity
Who worked extra hard only to find more storm and strife and resistance to personal progress
Who pushed the envelope until it burst and saw the light as they held it in their own hands and bent it into pretty shapes as the logs and serpent monsters floated solemnly by on the darkened river
Who heard the others as they spoke of building a fire not with sticks but with people, and who received only blank stares and winning smiles in answer to his many questions
Who walked a road that led from ignorance to enlightenment to saintliness to sadness to dissolution to rebirth to purposelessness
Who saw musical extravaganzas in their heads on Saturday nights out in the shop and went on to create real ones in the television studio that was a church
Who sought a mystical connection in the arcane magic of the past and with it envisioned an amalgam of the old with the new, and who fled in fear from the evil they saw there into the warm, swaddling comfort of the thoughtless bosom of the Lord
Who didn’t really care one way or the other as long as they had dope and something to smoke it in and beer and a car to drive
Who heard in the endless throbbing of the great cosmic engine the music of the spheres and bells and harps and choirs of angels, and in the music found solace and forgiveness and on the cusp of the end of the world saw that there is yet hope for a new dawn
Who danced outside under the stars and a blue moon while the band played on inside
Who called the tune as it came to him and in so doing unfolded the fabric of the ongoing creation
Who sought a message and prayed for a revelation and in receiving it were driven to madness and emotional ruin because the answer was not what they had expected
Who fucked like a goddess with the flaming light of lust consumed in her eyes but would never talk about such things in the morning
Who conversed with the genie released from the bottle and received a message from the stars
Who wondered where the Resistance was and in finding it felt like they had sold their soul
Who were born again and again only to finally give themselves over to something they only thought they saw
Who wondered how to tell the right from the wrong, the good from the evil when the devil wears the guise of God
Who lifted the veil and peered under the edge of the tent into the Holiest of Holies hoping to see there at least a face, and who saw in that place only grey formlessness, a swirling orb of mist that would not resolve and thus reveal itself to him
Who grew up happy and normal and sat drinking on Saturday nights reliving old memories of glorious high school days and adolescence as the highest point achieved in this life
Who was both Homecoming Queen and captain of the football team and never did anything better again
Who became a soldier of the state and killed a man one day on a highway in the desert
Who failed to grasp the gold ring and lost his mind in the attempt
Who came out of the closet at eighteen because they couldn’t stand pubic hair between the teeth or the smell of cunt
Who reveled instead in the semen of the anointed ones, the angelic boys in their summer best
Who couldn’t contain the gnosis and so tried to talk about it and succeeded only in pulling and stretching it from their hearts like taffy until it was only a sticky mess on their hands and fingers
Who watched the dancer as she exposed herself to the crowd, and who paid her for the privilege
Who ran away to find his people and found only loneliness and pain and a sickness of the soul
Who poured out their hearts and their thoughts to a longed-for land of listeners who were never more than a complete work of fiction
Who dreamed of a life after the fire in which desolation and lament came together to produce an illumination of the matter at hand
Who placed themselves between the two sides in the war thinking they might be a balance or a bridge, and who broke under the strain but did not fall screaming into the void below but clung in earnest to the sides of the gorge and contemplated how to link up once again
Who delved into the net for an answer to his own personal dilemma
Who swore a solemn oath of utter fealty to his employer and then broke it
Who looked inward and felt the hum of the One and heard in it a message from the Creator
Who raged out in angst to an indifferent world and raved into the dawn oblivious to the noise of warfare around them
Who found peace one night in a spinning place
Who developed endless formulae and un-testable hypotheses about anything and everything and really nothing at all
Who made up the world as they went along
Who sucked at the oracle’s nipple and found strange magic in the genie’s bottle, and who was granted as a wish the ability to stop time
Who chose instead to walk through the dance and so felt jeered at by the oblivious dancers
Who died a thousand deaths on a thousand different nights but always found themselves renewed in the morning wondering where they were
Who never found the answers because they never asked the right questions but were all along saved anyway because they believed
Who railed at their older brothers and sisters because to incite a riot then stand back and watch as the idealists of an entire generation are slaughtered is the most unforgiveable sin of all
Who saw the world as only evil and ugly and so longed for the End Times Hal Lindsay-style in the assumption they would be the beneficiaries of some better order afterward
Who mistook the myth as fact and so lost the beauty and eternal wisdom contained in the Word of the Logos
Who followed the progress of SETI daily hoping for a message of salvation from the stars, and who realized too late that the search would never work, that the message would never come, was already here, that Jim was right when he said, “We’re searching for something that’s already found us.”
Who wondered almost continually how they could go on living knowing what they knew, and who longed just to talk about it with someone else who knew but never did because the war assumes a different form for each soldier
Who felt his life was over in his thirtieth year and so had no choice but to start a new one
Who wandered the back streets of town hoping to avoid his boss
Who feigned illness and trips to the doctor only to be able to make esoteric scribblings and perform sacred divinations through modern alchemy
Who were cast out into the real world as a gift from a generous boss wishing only the best
Who had an X carved on their foreheads by a shameless journalist claiming to be their voice
Who were reviled by the major media as a generation without merit or morals or ideals or anything
Who secretly laughed and smiled as they lived up to expectation by being slack and joined the deadbeat club
Who singlehandedly in a day saved a small parcel of rainforest from the greedy teeth of the McDonalds chainsaw
Who beheld the national spectacle of that January ’93 and skeptically hoped for the ushering in of a new era
Who found the keys to the kingdom in reading and because of that were never heard from again
Who put their faith in their work and so knowingly tortured their families with regret but felt this was what had been requested of them
Who ransacked the homes of the rich while mocking the poverty of the poor thinking they might find favor in the next world for the things they had done in this one
Who believed in the law of life yet never understood what it meant
Who were killed by the trolley while drunk seeking only a private place to pee or peace or maybe really wanted to die
Who put his arm through a window and rode the ambulance whoop-whooping into the night and called his girlfriend from the hospital, one more failure of spirit or resilience, one of many faltering steps on the path
Who fought with their friends and their girlfriends and their parents and other loved ones and thought no one at all knew who they were
Who chose to keep so much hidden, so much left unspoken
Who rocked from the cradle to the grave and never did figure any of it out
Who died behind the wheel of a car at age eighteen sitting perfectly still, done with rocking, because what was done had been done
Who always did everything right but always felt like he was doing everything wrong
Who witnessed the death of the great MAD monster and waited impatiently for something to take its place
Who descended into the whirlpool of change and emerged on the other side washed in the warm blood of the lamb and soaked in the coppery sweat of fear
Who imagined a three-way split to the thing and three sides to every story in hopes of casting off the burdensome yoke of the Greek-bred dualism that labels man evil and somehow failed or fallen
Who confronted what it is to be human in a solitary diatribe with God one night as the world was coming to an end, and who called out, “No! That can’t be,” because if it was it could mean only that God had become psychotic
Who saw their lives reflected in a thousand stories told down through the ages and wondered why no one had seen fit to tell them of this existence
Who are even now waiting, waiting, waiting for something, not waiting for anything, but nonetheless waiting, and living and creating through the vast unknown and unknowable synergism of the global vibe a new thought and a new addition to the long song, a song of hope, vigilance and inexplicable energy that carries with it mistrust, for the battle has been joined and it really is a war out there though it is only perceived in here where the mind resides, as the black-garbed slackers sip lattes and talk about putting together a band
Rave Apocalyptic
Any one of us have seen the best minds of our own generation destroyed by madness and broken on the rocks placed by the failures and bad reputations of our older siblings
Mysto-steamy prophets of benign doom who stare hollow-eyed at the malignancy that has encrusted their dreams with hopelessness and unbound dread
Who were sent by the courts into the reeking coffee stained maw of the twelve-step god because no other church would do
Who preached to empty hallways that all was by design and all was according to plan
Who bellowed out loud, “No! I’ll never forgive you for that,” to his neighbor, his Father, his Savior and his tormentor
Who raged into the heavens of the night, “I don’t care. I believe.”
Who found salvation in a bottle or on the head of a pin or the cap of a wild mushroom or the button of a cactus
Who found light in the darkness of the soul while fathoming hell or soaring angelic
Who lost the world on any of a thousand night but always made a new one at the same time
Who embarked on vision quests into the docile, domesticated mockery of nature outside the city
Who chose to live in a place called the cross for that reason alone
Who heard radio waves in their head and called it the hissing of angels trapped in magnetic fields
Who came here from another world through storm and starvation and life, death and insanity
Who worked extra hard only to find more storm and strife and resistance to personal progress
Who pushed the envelope until it burst and saw the light as they held it in their own hands and bent it into pretty shapes as the logs and serpent monsters floated solemnly by on the darkened river
Who heard the others as they spoke of building a fire not with sticks but with people, and who received only blank stares and winning smiles in answer to his many questions
Who walked a road that led from ignorance to enlightenment to saintliness to sadness to dissolution to rebirth to purposelessness
Who saw musical extravaganzas in their heads on Saturday nights out in the shop and went on to create real ones in the television studio that was a church
Who sought a mystical connection in the arcane magic of the past and with it envisioned an amalgam of the old with the new, and who fled in fear from the evil they saw there into the warm, swaddling comfort of the thoughtless bosom of the Lord
Who didn’t really care one way or the other as long as they had dope and something to smoke it in and beer and a car to drive
Who heard in the endless throbbing of the great cosmic engine the music of the spheres and bells and harps and choirs of angels, and in the music found solace and forgiveness and on the cusp of the end of the world saw that there is yet hope for a new dawn
Who danced outside under the stars and a blue moon while the band played on inside
Who called the tune as it came to him and in so doing unfolded the fabric of the ongoing creation
Who sought a message and prayed for a revelation and in receiving it were driven to madness and emotional ruin because the answer was not what they had expected
Who fucked like a goddess with the flaming light of lust consumed in her eyes but would never talk about such things in the morning
Who conversed with the genie released from the bottle and received a message from the stars
Who wondered where the Resistance was and in finding it felt like they had sold their soul
Who were born again and again only to finally give themselves over to something they only thought they saw
Who wondered how to tell the right from the wrong, the good from the evil when the devil wears the guise of God
Who lifted the veil and peered under the edge of the tent into the Holiest of Holies hoping to see there at least a face, and who saw in that place only grey formlessness, a swirling orb of mist that would not resolve and thus reveal itself to him
Who grew up happy and normal and sat drinking on Saturday nights reliving old memories of glorious high school days and adolescence as the highest point achieved in this life
Who was both Homecoming Queen and captain of the football team and never did anything better again
Who became a soldier of the state and killed a man one day on a highway in the desert
Who failed to grasp the gold ring and lost his mind in the attempt
Who came out of the closet at eighteen because they couldn’t stand pubic hair between the teeth or the smell of cunt
Who reveled instead in the semen of the anointed ones, the angelic boys in their summer best
Who couldn’t contain the gnosis and so tried to talk about it and succeeded only in pulling and stretching it from their hearts like taffy until it was only a sticky mess on their hands and fingers
Who watched the dancer as she exposed herself to the crowd, and who paid her for the privilege
Who ran away to find his people and found only loneliness and pain and a sickness of the soul
Who poured out their hearts and their thoughts to a longed-for land of listeners who were never more than a complete work of fiction
Who dreamed of a life after the fire in which desolation and lament came together to produce an illumination of the matter at hand
Who placed themselves between the two sides in the war thinking they might be a balance or a bridge, and who broke under the strain but did not fall screaming into the void below but clung in earnest to the sides of the gorge and contemplated how to link up once again
Who delved into the net for an answer to his own personal dilemma
Who swore a solemn oath of utter fealty to his employer and then broke it
Who looked inward and felt the hum of the One and heard in it a message from the Creator
Who raged out in angst to an indifferent world and raved into the dawn oblivious to the noise of warfare around them
Who found peace one night in a spinning place
Who developed endless formulae and un-testable hypotheses about anything and everything and really nothing at all
Who made up the world as they went along
Who sucked at the oracle’s nipple and found strange magic in the genie’s bottle, and who was granted as a wish the ability to stop time
Who chose instead to walk through the dance and so felt jeered at by the oblivious dancers
Who died a thousand deaths on a thousand different nights but always found themselves renewed in the morning wondering where they were
Who never found the answers because they never asked the right questions but were all along saved anyway because they believed
Who railed at their older brothers and sisters because to incite a riot then stand back and watch as the idealists of an entire generation are slaughtered is the most unforgiveable sin of all
Who saw the world as only evil and ugly and so longed for the End Times Hal Lindsay-style in the assumption they would be the beneficiaries of some better order afterward
Who mistook the myth as fact and so lost the beauty and eternal wisdom contained in the Word of the Logos
Who followed the progress of SETI daily hoping for a message of salvation from the stars, and who realized too late that the search would never work, that the message would never come, was already here, that Jim was right when he said, “We’re searching for something that’s already found us.”
Who wondered almost continually how they could go on living knowing what they knew, and who longed just to talk about it with someone else who knew but never did because the war assumes a different form for each soldier
Who felt his life was over in his thirtieth year and so had no choice but to start a new one
Who wandered the back streets of town hoping to avoid his boss
Who feigned illness and trips to the doctor only to be able to make esoteric scribblings and perform sacred divinations through modern alchemy
Who were cast out into the real world as a gift from a generous boss wishing only the best
Who had an X carved on their foreheads by a shameless journalist claiming to be their voice
Who were reviled by the major media as a generation without merit or morals or ideals or anything
Who secretly laughed and smiled as they lived up to expectation by being slack and joined the deadbeat club
Who singlehandedly in a day saved a small parcel of rainforest from the greedy teeth of the McDonalds chainsaw
Who beheld the national spectacle of that January ’93 and skeptically hoped for the ushering in of a new era
Who found the keys to the kingdom in reading and because of that were never heard from again
Who put their faith in their work and so knowingly tortured their families with regret but felt this was what had been requested of them
Who ransacked the homes of the rich while mocking the poverty of the poor thinking they might find favor in the next world for the things they had done in this one
Who believed in the law of life yet never understood what it meant
Who were killed by the trolley while drunk seeking only a private place to pee or peace or maybe really wanted to die
Who put his arm through a window and rode the ambulance whoop-whooping into the night and called his girlfriend from the hospital, one more failure of spirit or resilience, one of many faltering steps on the path
Who fought with their friends and their girlfriends and their parents and other loved ones and thought no one at all knew who they were
Who chose to keep so much hidden, so much left unspoken
Who rocked from the cradle to the grave and never did figure any of it out
Who died behind the wheel of a car at age eighteen sitting perfectly still, done with rocking, because what was done had been done
Who always did everything right but always felt like he was doing everything wrong
Who witnessed the death of the great MAD monster and waited impatiently for something to take its place
Who descended into the whirlpool of change and emerged on the other side washed in the warm blood of the lamb and soaked in the coppery sweat of fear
Who imagined a three-way split to the thing and three sides to every story in hopes of casting off the burdensome yoke of the Greek-bred dualism that labels man evil and somehow failed or fallen
Who confronted what it is to be human in a solitary diatribe with God one night as the world was coming to an end, and who called out, “No! That can’t be,” because if it was it could mean only that God had become psychotic
Who saw their lives reflected in a thousand stories told down through the ages and wondered why no one had seen fit to tell them of this existence
Who are even now waiting, waiting, waiting for something, not waiting for anything, but nonetheless waiting, and living and creating through the vast unknown and unknowable synergism of the global vibe a new thought and a new addition to the long song, a song of hope, vigilance and inexplicable energy that carries with it mistrust, for the battle has been joined and it really is a war out there though it is only perceived in here where the mind resides, as the black-garbed slackers sip lattes and talk about putting together a band
great poem, barry!! 
& bravo for your 29!!