beat

Poetry
is words
words with a flow, yes, words with
beat
     rhyme
          sing-song tag-along meter and 'mastery'
yet words, nonetheless





Howl was unveiled to me with adulation and aplomb:
 "it's responsible for like 3 decades worth of culture"
high praise, to be sure
but words, they can only have so much power today

the teachers, the educators, the administration, the man
elementary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary
they beat the
pre-approved
     pre-defined
          pre-detested power-free peter-out words
into the psyche of the vulnerable innocent students
whose minds would know nothing of
words but the esoteric mind-morphine
haunting high-school texts and lost-life libraries

children grow hungry
no, not hungry
starving
     hysterical
          naked, beating their chests
not for this tedium, but for candlelit colloquium
for midnight streetlight firefight conflict
for Facebook freedom and Tumblr tolerance
to talk      and think      and wonder
what
can words be?

I read Howl.
I heard Howl.
I chewed, consumed, absorbed, digested
      lived, laughed, ate, slept, beat, bore, stole, stored
      talked, walked, bred and bled
      whispered, whimpered
      talked, thought, wondered
on Howl
these, these were words
words with power, with substance

I read a generation, I heard a history
I chewed the eras and consumed the presidents
absorbed the radicals, digested the revolutions
and I wondered at the might of it

if these were words, then words had wisdom
then Poetry, with all its pains and perils
has merit
has power
has a beat.

(Mr. Mullins, any chance we could read any Beat Generation poetry come that unit? :D)

http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/CreativeWriting/323/GinsbergHowl.htm