Poetry Suffering

Ode To Failure (excerpts) – Allen Ginsberg

A beat riff on the theology of the cross? Written in 1980: Many prophets have […]

David Zahl / 1.5.10

A beat riff on the theology of the cross? Written in 1980:

Many prophets have failed, their voices silent

ghost-shouts in basements nobody heard dusty laughter in family attics

nor glanced them on park benches weeping with relief under empty sky

Walt Whitman viva’d local losers — courage to Fat Ladies in the Freak Show!

nervous prisoners whose mustached lips dripped sweat on chow lines —

…

Prospero burned his Power books & plummeted his magic wand to the

bottom of dragon seas

Alexander the Great failed to find more worlds to conquer!

O Failure I chant your terrifying name, accept me your 54 year old Prophet

epicking Eternal Flop! I join your Pantheon of mortal bards, & hasten this

ode with high blood pressure

rushing to the top of my skull as if I wouldn’t last another minute, like the

Dying Gaul! to

You, Lord of blind Monet, deaf Beethoven, armless Venus de Milo, headless

Winged Victory!

…

My tirades destroyed not Intellectual Unions of KGB & CIA in turtlenecks

& underpants, their woolen suits & tweeds

I never dissolved Plutonium or dismantled the nuclear Bomb before my skull

lost hair

I have not yet stopped the Armies of entire Mankind in their march toward

World War III

I never got to Heaven, Nirvana, X Whatchamacallit, I never left Earth,

I never learned to die.

COMMENTS