Imitation by Josh Culpepper
May 9th, 2008 by Editor
I walked to the edge of creation in this wrinkled brown bag crumbled leaf town to watch
the mountain smother the simple Promethean horse-drawn forgetfulness of the sunlight’s fire.
Ginsberg sat beside me as a yellowed sour water-stained pamphlet with ink-splattered
thoughts that tempted and twisted my ink-splattered mind.
The rusted belts of red iron stretched for miles that would reach and entangle the
drenched hills of northern California and reverse into the flat Midwest
and the arching dome of the East with its bright Apple light.
Where vast coliseums of reinvented patriotism douse the skyline that
eludes the deep waters of the Hudson and the Euphrates.
Where the sun breaks in confetti streamers that pierce and feast on our eyelids, no frumpy
midlife crisis in that light, no cracked bells tolling victory by our endless brick calendars.
Where I ran along the rail lines dumbstruck and assuming that this flat busted chicken-fed sweat track connected me
to so many hard loose conjoined skeletons in other states, in other worlds.
Where Ginsberg waited with coins in his blue green brown white eyes and hummed emphatically
at the prospect of my understanding the rush and onset of the hushed evangelical lovely
deep tones of the colors of these tracks.
Where I lulled imagined hallucinated the sweet sunlight of King and Dylan singing
chimes of Freedom and deciding on which cowboy or astronaut or Indian to prophesize over,
even with bullet holes inhabiting Kennedy.
Where babies mourn the loss of their aborted mother’s tranquil innocence and
scorn their father’s careless prophylactic skulls.
So, I unhinged a fragment of railroad and held it behind my arms like a device of Golgotha protest,
And spoke solemnly to my mind or soul or heart or brain and to Ginsberg too if he can still hear the melodious
droning of worker bees,—We’re not the linked shackles of enslaved establishments, nor the endless asphalt aspiring
to consume a wrecked and ravaged America, we’re the color of the sunlight’s purple and yellow amphetamines and
the rendering of every artist’s pointed tabletop brush that traced fathoms of Poseidon and Icarus flailing on tepid
tawdry extravagant waves, surveyed by cameras under the great chains of centuries of fabric mountain aluminum
atomized wastebasket dreams.
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