Brooklyn North: For Allen Ginsberg

Another treasure from the "leather satchel" collection (see previous post "Me and Josey Wales: Poetry played out in real life" is dated 1998, a poem my father wrote called "Brooklyn North" (for Allen Ginsberg), whose early friendship with Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs gave birth to the Beat generation of poets and writers.

Allen Ginsberg having received his master's degree from Columbia University in New York would've known the city streets my father was hauling⏤I believe it was U.S. mail⏤through at the time. Ginsberg was an avid anti-Vietnam War activist, voice of 60s counterculture and free speech. He was overtly homesexual, some of which was written about in his most famous work, "Howl and Other Poems," first published by famed San Francisco bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Bookstore.

Allen Ginsberg singing petition at draft resistance rally
​National Archives at Boston, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (source), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Brooklyn North

Brooklyn Bridge
Naval Yard
Metropolitan Ave.
You are foreign but I love you.
Only way a Reb could ever 
love a Yank.
Ramblin' thru yer alleys
and mean streets.
Picking up yer backbeats.
So much wonder
waiting to be recovered.

Hit Flatbush and 3rd.
Orange hair Abundant.
How does anyone sleep
HERE?
I do - peacefully.
Ghost of Henry Miller
'bout 'hundred six, Streisand
Lou Reed. Neil Diamond, 
TONS.
Ragged steel-fallen souls.
No room for grassy knolls.
Assassination perhaps.
Grabbed train to Coney.
We are multi-colored
Mostly looney.
Where do we go?
Verrazano looms.
Kosiusko (sic) Tombs.

We must begin to breathe
AGAIN.
I love yer stinking streets
yer telephones once removed.
Yer blacks browns yellows
and whites and blues.
Yer traffic james and
3 step red lights.
What's not to like.
You are sweet
after all.
"Shut up - get in da car already - drive North!"

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