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 3rd and 4th 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 80th 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
Buried Alive 