I was just reading my “Poet’s Companion” trying to jog the muse and I found this poem “Skinhead”–used as an example for an exercise on tone and perspective.  The poem’s speaker is a white supremacist.  The author a woman of color. 

The notes on Patricia Smith following the poem say she won a National Poetry Slam Contest.  I thought “Hmm, maybe she’s got stuff online?”  How awesome: I found the poem!  Youtube sucks for a variety of reasons but this isn’t one of them.  Watch:

for Allen Ginsberg

 “I saw the best minds of my generation” turn to bark and run from the heads of the necks of the bodies divvied and owned by the

pharma-suit reps of the Neon Elixir Age, sold by boob-baring pez-dispensing lovelies, porn and pills,

who     fed on toxin pudding till they glowed smelling the nut and berry diet of hippy parents funding child-death

who     pickled brains in Butriptyline bubbly and Trazodone lying in the candied beds of doctors who could diagnose a freckle, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, hippocampus hype-shit    

who     scattered into the pockets of sweet old order to make cleaning product rat poison cocktails, to burn their lungs, to outshine those Beatniks (who get all the credit)

who     died

who     watched their parents marry strangers for the 3^rd and 4^th time, on TV

who     signed up for MTV’s taped pigeon shit eating contest to be among many in the Age of Attention-Starved pigeon shit eaters

who     shoveled angel food cake by the fistful with a page from Atkin’s while reading Star while crying for doomed modeling careers

who     carried the tired torch of the Hefner 80^th Wives Club liberation movement of girl cock-spit money shots (and beat off to so much porn they had to fetishize potted plants to get off)

who     loaned their education to The Big Golden Bank of Eternity while Mexicans pissed on babysitter wages and hopped the white van back to Me-hi-co

who     carried the profiteering thong into the ass-crack of the mega-corporacracy  target markets: addiction, stupidity, patriarchal slime

who     married young on free love internet hookup profile pics and personal blog buddy lists

who     deafened their own cries with nihilistic Cobain sexy suicide, we-got-issues grunge guitar rifts, rehab and rainbows, return to God, Christian Music, college campus fellowship group sign-up sheets

who     were not beaten with telephone receivers and branches, did not walk to school, start revolutions, grow their hair out and write a song about it

who     bit the bullet: joined the military

who     were thankful that they too, finally, got to wreak the stain of war, so those who came before would look upon their fallen and not dock them their grievances