Cruising for inspiration as I work on writing a new piece for the Beat reading next week, I have fallen back in love with Ferlinghetti. I have decided to read two pieces that pay homage to the two cities that were the prime literary backdrops for The Beat writers, San Francisco and New York. I'm loving working on this new stuff, the second piece about a magical Coney Island... so I've got Ferlinghetti's jazzy rythmns on the mind.


From Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The poet's eye obscenely seeing
sees the surface of the round world
with its drunk rooftops
and wooden oiseaux on clotheslines
and its clay males and females
with hot legs and rosebud breasts
in rollaway beds
and its trees full of mysteries
and its Sundays parks and speechless statues
and its America
with its ghost towns and empty Ellis Islands
and its surrealist landscape of
mindless prairies
supermarket suburbs
steamheated cemeteries
and prostering cathedrals
a kissproof world of plastic and toiletseats tapax and taxis
drugged store cowboys and las vegas virgins
disowned indians and cinemad matrons
unroman sentors and conscientious non-objectors
and all the other fatal shorn-up fragments
of the immigrant's dream come too true
and mislaid
among the sunbathers