ALLEN GINSBERG'S "AMERICA" (AND OURS)

by Robert Knox

“America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.” 

—Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, 1956

 

I am frankly envious of the poet who, on Jan. 17, 1956,

wrote, in a poem entitled “America,”

“America, go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.”

 

Tennessee, I invite, in the same spirit of candor,

go shoot yourself with your absolutely unqualified no-foolin’, stand-your-ground

irredeemably nut-case gun rights laws,

per events on the ground taking place March 28, 2023.

I could simply echo every sentiment in that mid-century poet’s inspired piece

     of unbridled spontaneity

composed on the theme of his America, in which he that mid-century poet vowed,

amid other proclamations,

“I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind”…

but I do not expect to be in my right mind

so long as the YMCA in which I seek to run away from my fury and despair

offers news channels on its TV service available to rats like me

who run on treadmills of anger and despair

 

Networks, that is, on which the munitions-injury expert

is asked to describe the effect of AR ammunition on the bodies of children,

and what I increasingly wish somebody (even crazier than me) would do

to the persons of the elected Tennessee officials

who valiantly protected their freedom-loving constituents from any limitation,

however slight and publicly supported by official law enforcement,

on their natural right to destroy the bodies of children

with whatever armaments the Good Lord, acting through the protected mediation

    of the National Rats Association,

entitles them to possess

 

“America,” Ginsberg demanded in his disarming and eternally youthful way:

“when will you take your clothes off?”

“America” – how’s this for pre-visioning the paramilitary far right?—

“why are your libraries full of tears?”

 

America, we ask in our hair-tearing, torn-clothing way,

Why are your courthouses, state houses, ballot boxes and school boards

full of self-made demagogues who failed to read the books

in their now besieged schoolhouses when they had the chance?

who think that libraries are merely back alleyways for the gang fights

     of the culture wars?

America, we ask, why do the voters of Tennessee develop amnesia of the ballot box?

When will it end, America, your war on humanity?

When will you be worthy of your blues singers, jazzmen, street corner poets,

         dancers on the page as well as on the stage?

When will you invite Stephen Colbert to be the speaker at the next inauguration?

America, the cherry trees are blossoming

and I feel sentimental about the days of wine and roses and that legendary decade ban

     on assault rifles…

and even when the party of Richard Nixon was, by comparison, a beacon of moderation

Americans, we are obsessed by media, by the Chinese timebomb that goes TikTok, TikTok

 

America, the best minds of my generation are already underground

America, there is nobody left to vote for

America, our ancestors saved the world from fascism

But all the fascists have to do today is show their pure-white fannies on TV

and the writing on the wall goes tic-toc-clock, as the timebomb of private self-interest

     melts the glaciers

and brings the ocean to your living room

just before the signoff of the foxed and phony nooz

 

America, you are teaching all the world how to kill people,

     best result for the buck

Because that is all you remember how to do

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of the recently published collection of linked short stories, titled House Stories. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site.

TEXAS IN HELL

by Robert Knox

The eyes of the others,

les autres

 

Hate mongering

Closed doors of the mind in self-panic

Race-pandering Congressional creeps

stalk the Halls of Hades

When? in God’s name?

 

A universal set of trigger-fingers

in circular execution

A lake of burning fire

Armed to the teeth = utterly unprotected

Gehenna on the dusty plain

 

Looking into the eyes

of the lost

No consolation in the knowing

 

Self-slaying America

Compelled to repeat the same self-torture

endlessly: forever

Infinite self-slaughter

 

An underworld of hate,

unholy perdition

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of the recently published collection of linked short stories, titled House Stories. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site. 

SUNFLOWER PEOPLE

by Robert Knox 

You hide in the subway tunnels

of life’s unending nightmares

You walk, or ride, or hire cabs for thousand-dollar journeys

     to a border crossing

that is no longer open

You struggle down roads, carrying your baggage,

your children,

who belong not only to you,

but to your country,

      and to us all

 

You shelter in rubbled cities,

holes blown in once-solid blocks

of home and hearth,

sacred refuges that once housed human bodies and souls

by the hundreds,

people no more, nor less breakable than any of us,

 

left abandoned and vulnerable,

now that death has come to a land

     where sunflowers bloomed

 

You, who flee

and carry one another’s burdens

along pitted roads to the hope of a tomorrow

somewhere safer than today,

that haven

we have all promised ourselves.

That earthly haven

in which we may celebrate another spring,

another birthday of the earth

 

You carry our lives in your journey

as well as your own,

and those of your loved ones, your ancestors,

and the memory of ours as well,

There is room enough, I know, in your souls,

     to carry all these

 

as there is world enough for you

in ours

Come, walk in our shoes as well:

there is world enough for all. 

Robert Knox is a poet, novelist, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of House Stories, a recently published collection of linked short stories. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site. His essay on Putin's war on Ukraine is up on Medium.

AMERICA SINNING

by Robert Knox

via Demcast

Walt Whitman heard ‘America Singing’

I’m hearing things as well,

some of them sadly off-key.

In Texas those who run the place

like the last rodeo of the unforgiven

want to make voting hard to do

for those who have already run the obstacle course

     of history,

returning the privilege of suffrage to a comfortable,

white-sheeted nightmare 

from back somewhere before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

 

We once stayed (in our day; not Walt’s, not King’s)

in Florida, next to the motel where they poisoned the pool

to keep those they did not wish to see at the polls

out of their purely chlorinated water as well.

Everybody out of the pool! 

and nobody at the polls.

 

‘Some better day,’ as we so often say, we will look back

shaking our heads in horror

at what our fellow Americans got up to.

Sorry, sun-sick Florida, hypocritical Texas,

I am voting you out of the club.

Fly the battle flags of your disgrace all you want,

but you are no longer part of my America.

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, and Boston Globe correspondent. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, Eunoia Review, and Unlikely Stories. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. He is the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.

YEAR OF THE RANT

by Robert Knox

In a year in which only personal realities 
are consulted by humans, 
in which only over-sized creatures are heard 
and they merely grunt

In a year in which the hogs that grunt 
are only human, 
in which it can be seen that 
their blinkered eyes are rightly suspicious
and monitor the intrusive attentions 
of folks with cameras,
who are neither journalists nor tourists, 
but uniformed executioners bearing witness on themselves
 
In a year in which the words of the truly reproachable  
bear witness against themselves,  
in which the words of the prophets 
are everywhere and too numerous to recall
amidst the blinding lights of the next enormity,
too large for even the wiser among us to believe, 
or the most gullible
 
In which even the loudest of unsanctioned mouths 
fall silent,
for there is simply too much to say
 
and no lack of overpaid oath-breakers 
clamoring to bear witness against themselves.

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of a novel based on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, titled Suosso's Lane. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as Off The Coast, The Journal of American Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, TheNewVerse.News, Califragile, and Unlikely Stories. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty, published in 2017, was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. The chapbook Cocktails in the Wild followed in 2018. He was recently named the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.

I HAVE LOST A COUNTRY

by Robert Knox



 

"What signifies the beauty of nature when men are base?" —Henry David Thoreau


He was thinking about the Fugitive Slave Act,
speaking at an anti-slavery rally along with Sojourner Truth in 1854
after Anthony Burns, who had escaped from bondage,
was arrested in Boston, where he has been
"working quietly in a clothing shop" on Beacon Hill.
It's just one more thing. It happens everywhere.
It's a tipping point.
Someone tips off a slave-catcher, they're hunting up North now,
empowered by federal law.
Burns is hauled before a special judge, in a special court,
created by the law to facilitate claims against persons of color
—"persons"! that Constitutional euphemism—by any white person.

Boston rallies and 'mobs' of protestors war with police,
seeking to free Burns, who is dragged through the streets
by federal marshals with guns drawn, guarded by an artillery regiment
and three platoons of marines, while thousands of angry locals
watch helplessly, cowed by force of arms.
Burns is returned to Virginia, shackled,
and flogged.

At the rally held in Framingham, Mass. on July 4, 1854.
Thoreau confided that he had suffered "a vast and indefinite loss"—
but, he asked himself, what was it? "At last it occurred to me
that what I had lost was a country."

And so, reading in yesterday's newspaper, and again today,
that armed thugs, "federal officers" culled from border police and ICE,
were firing weapons, hurling flash bombs,
and kidnapping protestors from the streets of Portland, Oregon,
where they had no lawful business to be
and where no assistance from the federal government
had been sought by local authorities—
but simply performing in the absence of all legal warrant
as T***p's chosen "Brown Shirts,"

I find myself thrown once again into days of  rage,
unsettled in my mind, as I too often have been
since the dark days of November 2016:
feeling deprived of something valuable, if imperceptible,
dear to me and to many,

that I too have 'lost my country,'
and that finding it again is no sure thing.


Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of a novel based on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, titled Suosso's Lane. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as Off The Coast, The Journal of American Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, TheNewVerse.News, Califragile, and Unlikely Stories. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty, published in 2017, was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. The chapbook Cocktails in the Wild followed in 2018. He was recently named the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.

ENDEMIC

by Robert Knox

Illustration by João Fazenda for The New Yorker

Let's not believe in science
Let's just play it all by ear
Let's say it's all a swindle
There's nothing, folks, to fear
Let's blame it on the other guys,
who want to take our place
It's a hoax! And a disgrace!

Swindle time, scoundrel time
Don't let it all unwind
Dwindle time, fiddle time, reduce the prime
Con job on the knotty pine
A little bug in the system's all
Just wait, I'm sure we'll soon be fine

We're practicing our magic word
Like the Marvel man's 'Shazam!'
We'll say our word some lovely night
and deconstruct this sham
There is no call for fright
It will disappear when we say the word
We'll wonder why—it's so absurd!—
we ever could have been so dense

Don't ask me what the word is now
I'll keep you in sus-Pence


Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of a novel based on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, titled Suosso's Lane. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as Off The Coast, The Journal of American Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, TheNewVerse.News, Califragile, and Unlikely Stories. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty, published in 2017, was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. The chapbook Cocktails in the Wild followed in 2018. He was recently named the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.

SEASONS IMPEACHING

by Robert Knox

On the third day alone
I begin talking aloud to myself

Or, perhaps, I will eat myself to death
I wake at night
with the word necrosis
in my thoughts

What is it, oh what,
country of my soul
who will you eat yourself out of
given such rot?
Will you smell yourself
dying with putrefaction?

how can anyone be left alone
with their thoughts,
such thoughts,
when the rats nibble
at our toes

and bandits make
for our heart?

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of a novel based on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, titled Suosso's Lane. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as Off The Coast, The Journal of American Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, TheNewVerse.News, Califragile, and Unlikely Stories. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty, published in 2017, was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. The chapbook Cocktails in the Wild followed in 2018. He was recently named the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.

THEY CAME

by Robert Knox

First they came for the immigrant children
And we looked away
Because the Leader's toady told us, "Those are not
our children"
And we looked at our own children,
and were reassured

Then they came for the people who cover their heads
or pray too much
And again we looked away
Because we were not Iranians, or Iraqis, or Gazans,
or children of the West Bank detained indefinitely without charges
And, as the man said,
those are not our children

Then they came for the abused, and those who accused their abusers,
and for the accusers' advocates,
and for those who fought against their abusers,
breaking into their hidden armories to take away their guns
            But we looked away, and jested at the comedie humaine,
because we were not ourselves the victims of abuse
or the advocates for the abused,
and, after all, we are "not his type"

Then they came for the ones who would never
play ball with Der Leader
The ones who would always be trouble
because they were cheated out of their land
or, perchance, had been enslaved
or who had once owned a country that the slave-owners wished
            to possess for themselves
or who, we feared, were willing to work
            for too little money
or who loved the wrong people
or who were unwilling to remain in their positions
            and to perform the tasks
for which they had been created by the distant Creator—
those varied and disobedient creations
of that stable genius
            somewhere in the sky

And then because no one else remained standing
            in our diminished patria,
neither advocates,
nor scribblers with their pencil over the ear,
nor Enemies of the People with their hand-held devices,
nor party of the workers
nor defenders of the beaten, humiliated and disappeared

able to kick the ball from his feet,
nothing was left for us to do
but to lay our own bodies before His feet
            As the painted, spiked, and horny-headed demons of extinction
cheered, and drank, and laughed, and danced upon the bodies
of their victims
and ran up history's score

Boston area writer Robert Knox is a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual in which his poems are regularly published. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty has been nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award for poetry books published in 2017. Also a fiction writer, his novel Suosso's Lane, a story of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, was published in 2016. His novel Karpa Talesman recently won a competition for speculative fiction and will be published by Hidden River Arts.

AMERICAN GULAG

by Robert Knox


 



Weep not for the family of Márcio Goulart do Nascimiento
who crossed the river for fear of being murdered by the neighborhood drug house
     in Brazil, 

where police told him, 'if you complain
you will be killed.'
For now they are safely jailed in Texas, Marcio and his wife in one place,
his two children somewhere else in the American gulag,
convicted of infringing on the peace and security
of the great Land of Liberty
because, as he himself confessed, "I did not wish us to be killed."

Weep not for Juan Francisco Fuentes Castro, fleeing the violent streets
     of El Salvador,
who sought only, he plead ("may it please the Court")  to bring his children to safety,
for surely they are safe now behind bars.
Some day, perhaps, he will see them again.

Nor weep for poor José de Jesús Días of Mexico,
who fails to understand why the court cannot tell him
where his daughter is.
And so he alone will not accommodate the Court with the obligatory guilty plea
until someone can tell him where in this land of freedom
they have placed her, safe behind bars.

For it is a simple thing, is it not, to declare one's guilt
for wetting one's feet in the sacred waters of Destiny's Dividing Line
in order to preserve the lives of one's own family members?
The Madonna would understand. The Savior would understand.
The judge too sympathizes, but his hands are tied by the bonds of Liberty.
Weep not for José de Jesús Días, for he is patently 'illegal.'
His daughter too is illegal,
but now no doubt safe in a place made of bars and uniforms,
among the tribes of lost children.

Nor let us shed our tears for the sufferings of Elizabeth González Juárez,
who alone among so many, knows where her daughter is.
She crossed the River of Tears from Guanajuato, Mexico,
to protect from harm a three-year-old child, abused by her
drug-dealing father,
and sought the healing Balm of Gilead in the home
of her own mother who dwells among the kind and peace-loving souls
of Fort Worth, Texas.
Alas, the Land of Liberty could spare no refuge for one single infant more
upon a camel's back of three hundred million souls,
and so delivered the child straight into the hands
of her rightful, family-abusing, drug-dealing father.
It is the American Way.

Weep not, I say, for the 17 defendants dispatched by the Court in
an hour-plus session, finishing in time for lunch.
All are guilty.

But in the quiet watches of the night,
lend a thought for a thousand children, and yet a thousand more
(by unofficial count) young minds and hearts below the age of legal consent
ripped from the arms of their parents in a few weeks' time
on the strength of a Liberty-abusing Demonic Decree.
How many more victims, both old and young,
lie in separate hells
among the thousands denied refuge in the Home of the (no longer) Free?

Now is the time for your tears.


Author’s Note: Names and other facts taken from The Guardian.

Boston area writer Robert Knox is a contributing editor for the online poetry journal, Verse-Virtual, in which his poems are regularly published. They have also appeared in journals such as Every Day Poet, Off The Coast, Houseboat, and Yellow Chair Review. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty was published in May 2017. The chapbook Cocktails in the Wild followed this spring.