N a p a l m   H e a l t h   S p a :   R e p o r t   2 0 1 3 :   S p e c i a l   E d i t i o n

L o n g   P o e m   M a s t e r p i e c e s   o f   t h e   P o s t b e a t s

 

 

ANDY CLAUSEN

 

clausen

 

 

Insurgency

 

Ineffable undigested lament hovering
in dark lawless hallways
Cellular anger gestating in mildewed garrots
adhering to rheumy smoked skin
tremors of vericose stairways
O you've been elusive grandeur
peace of mind generation
Yes sparkling diamonds dancing on the lake
gold shining on the Sierras
emeralds like festive ornaments
hanging in the branches
And in the distance the unmistakable cries
of wounded children
of thirsty & hungry dispossessed
of those left to die

I summon and call all reserves
I must try
One word like one step at a time
staccato spontaneity
interrupted a dozen times a minute
Jolt conscious consciousness
say away the monstrous
bring the light
Samsonite optics
purgatory lip burn
Breathing like a nudged accordian
squeezing wheezing from the center
of the solar system
The streets have no home
the cries of the wounded
All the laughter & bounty
that will never be
eaten by maggots alongside
the bombed roads
Were there no me
all my working
all my so called verse
never existed
all my loves
tribulations, sins
all my desires
dead in the water
Far better than this failure
of the world
This is not about me
It's about us

I know you wrote & belted the anthems
marched & protested
led a different life than was planned
With ringing strings & radiant keys you strived to celebrate
harmony in every good atom of your willing body
scribing verse like never before
defying the customs & tired forms of the limpid parlor
ignoring muse strangling edicts
from tenured blue blood
Illuminating instead the street prison workplace
backyard river side & human gates
exonerating desire
You were born in a bombshelter
born in the exaltations of the G.I. BIll
You sprang into life listening to broadcasts
reading headlines
New Frontier Great Society War Against Poverty
Stay the Course I Have a Dream
You fought wars on foreign soil
sometimes reluctantly, willingly sometimes
Fought against war
Fought warfare with everything you had
and imagined you had

You came home doubting the identity and purpose of God
The way we walked the talk
was going to change
Each would abet this salvation
of earth by earth for earth on earth
You would turn on the world
emancipating the railroaded inmates
of calloused overweened Truth
You would both do your own thing
and collectivise against a war
and do what seldom had been done
You stopped a war without using weapons of war
You formed Manichaen communes to grow resilient bodies
& ideas
welcoming the renegade progeny
of the Madman of Kent
Arms open to Spartacus & Ghandi
Malcolm & Martin
to demand an accounting
to understand our resources at the source
to foster devotion to the Common People
to love the down trodden
to literally love one another
Freedom was going to be more
than just another word
more than a word
Your seven senses rhapsodied majestic pines
pungent aphrodisiac redwood, cottonwood & magnolia
You embraced hemlock and climbed rhododendron himals
copped a stance for snapshots, boots on receding glaciers
dutifully reporting the raucous elevated sounds
at 18000 feet
You beheld the quarried faces
the landslide jowls
the gouged & scourged breasts
desultory forlorn acres of two story piled logged Alaska
bound for Japan
the rotten cabbage-egg spumes of the pulp mills
of Springfield & Missoula
the concertina wires silently screaming
Coxsackie, Otisville, Woodbourne
You were blown out when the oxygen devouring flames
of the refineries spelled out SATAN MOLOCH
TERROR DISEASE APOCALYPSE
in the choking salmon charcoal night miasma
clinging to the windshield
on the doldrum drive to lower east
Paradise Lost & the land of Nod
You got off the couch
& learned hands-on carpentry & plumbing
dancing on red iron high in the sky
the Gotham-Baghdad by the Bay-Oklahoma City Sky
You punked the rods in the thick air valley
Santa Clara-San Fernando-Phoenix-Hudson-Williamette
Shouldered the hod, humped the wheelbarrow
Kept the rig barreling in the white line fever
cross country wail bar night
You waited on tables with weary dogs
and conjured smiles, a tip dependent thespian
You set tables, bussed & cleaned tables
polished & fabricated tables
your own and those of the rich
if you were lucky
If you were lucky had kids
went into the family business
Wanting to ease the trials of the road
for the kids, the road you no longer travel
deteriorating detonating under their innocent
wheels


Remember when you made your own music
worked out your own songs & prayers
your own steps & mudras
your own instruments
Anything was a drum
Any twang okay
Every street had a story a tune
Every country road gave birth to jigs & blues

Pilgrim & artist
pulsating genuine lived in living rooms
utilizing bedrooms at all hours
raunchy rambling garages and old time stoops
of lowdown hoods with cross blown
mouth harps, crimson eyes at half mast
messaline meadows and brown bag corners
ideoblastic parks of cities & cherished wilderness
midnight cemeteries
ancient barns gypsy fiddle lofts hustling coffee houses saxophone woodsheds swimming in clear light
atop godlike mountains down by the everyday water side
Everyone was a celebrity
all was genius

I know the jobs you had were not easy
more than once humiliating dreamless
underpaid unpaid health destroying boring
as all get out
You learned mammon has reality
on its side at its side
Nothing has a sharper blade
Nothing has colder penetration
Nothing has the concentrated will to ruin
like legal tender
Even history & scripture & medicine must consult the mighty
dollar (Or is it Euro?) before they write themselves

You decided to aim your poetic flare at merchandise
advertising promoting sometimes the best
sometimes what you knew was bunk
toting grief & guilt a million miles
purchased at Walmart
You battled forest fires, battled erosion
battled environmental stupidity
and grew old growing asparagus & beans
& catnip with home grown fertilizer
muttering, "Everyone loses...and it doesn't matter."
You opened hip rare vision & user friendly bookstores
the brightest came to browse and carouse
Wagner & Dylan in the air
You had eclectic transrational record shops
and sold posters of Anarchy & rent short artists
and went to work for Barnes & Nobles
Bertelsman Seagrams & Rupert Murdoch
You haven't yet taken off your clothes
and walked thru midtown a saddhu
You haven't yet gone for the rope
the razor the pistol the pill bottle
or 10th story window
You Here
hand fashioning jewelry, scented candles & mirrors
doing massage color gem & aroma therapy
Late at night in the 7-11, Quick Stop, U-Totem,
down on Cumberland Farm
At dawn cleaning houses & toilets too
delivering papers
hanging drapes in blocks of condos you could
never afford or want to live in
You voyaged to foreign lands went native
started sending exotic culture home
You could no longer afford America
You toiled for disrespectful pitiable wage
before and after parole
They wanted you to work scared
& act like you loved it
You were told to consider yourself fortunate

Everything you collected was consumed in the fire
Everything you knew washed away in the flood
Like the sword of Bhairav
amputating ignorance
Like Jesus put a sword between parent & child
A sword dissolving with the torn pages
of composting calendars
and grandchildren pointing at pages
yet to be
And the old anthems seemed only old
Even though you did puberty in the projects
You became the beaucoup gardener of wanton
celestial flowers, ghetto flowers, neon bouquets
immersing into the Waters of Life
precious everyday Water
You were born again
yet suffered the afflictions
of begrudged repetitive motion
sitting on the unjustifiable boils of Job
yet rode his horses when they jumped
Nobodaddy's fence-- abandoning a deity
who'd gamble away your loved ones
You guided the inhibited to the primordial pools
sailing the pre-Adamic seas laden
with contraband jazz & duty free Jai Shambeau
Days melding into endless novenas
of house car medical payments
Your Lord's first name was Land
You dug the sod with back & plow & pen
aiming, clicking the carnal camera
with excess joy inevitably
leaking sanguine droplets
of gleeful sweat
You could still dream
You could still grin
You had a mother guru
a father guru
a child guru--a consort guru
You made love with your guru
You took the mountain side for your guru
You sought refuge on Tamalpais the Flat Irons
Denali Overlook Tremper Fuji Kilanmajaro
El Capitan Sagarmartha Nose Mountain
You sought primitive therapy in atavistic pubs
the outlaw rock and roll of your sexual awakenings
& came that close to biting the dust
in a bath tub of ice cubes
with neglect came denial, false romance & viral grief
You are still here
You can get off the floor
on one knee, get the other foot on the ground
Rise Up O Uprising O Insurgency
Forget your solipsistic woes
Let your voice be heard!
Without Bombs! Let it be heard!

Are you here only to witness
every aspiration
every shred of decency under siege & corrosion?
The sustainability of mothers of earth of the stars & beyond
all the eye can & can not see, desecrated?
What it is to have choice, persecuted & condemned?
Every scintilla the poor have to protect themselves
against the whims, follies, and privilege
of the rich being snuffed?
Every religion worshipping the One God
invoked to justify killing human beings?

Every industry governed by Mammon Urizen Moloch Dog Eat Dog?
America who gave the world the transcendence
of the blues
rock and roll, be-bop hip hop the wobblies
the Summer of Love, Harlem renaissance & the Beats
America the beautiful reviled by the world
cast as insatiable bully & glutton
has become what she hated
A land of Orwellian distortion
of lethal deceit
of treacherous anti-sense
Freedom is not free ( 3 times)
Heroism is comparing bombing missions
to video games & the 4th of July
Whole families explode and burn
accidently on purpose
The duty bound the poverty coerced
compare drive-bys in Iraq
to drive-bys in Brooklyn
Patriotism is denying those who disagree
free speech
Justice is compiling dossiers
on what folk read think contribute to
Justice is retribution & revenge
Allah, Jesus Christ, Jehovah the names invoked
before committing mass murder
The Rapture exonerates lying
to vast populations
Professing fear of God absolves all bads
Love is anything very expensive
Love is chocolates, a stunning gown, a limo & liposuction
a new face, a rare breed of mammal
Love is a package dancing on a gilded stage
it's applause, O show me the love
it's a whoop for the home team
four letters on a page
a slo mo zoom in a manicured meadow
Democracy is not Whitman's, not Thoreau's
John Stuart Mill's
not Martin Luther King's
nor Eugene Debs democracy
not Thomas Paine
not Buffy St. Marie
not Paul Robeson, Rosa Luxemburg
Democracy is a twisted depraved metaphor
for doing business
America is a code word for get
the best of any transaction
You were privy to the Way is not the Way
You might have read Corso's The American Way
You know what I know
You've been out sourced
You're paycheck to paycheck
to other kind of check
And everything is rising but wages

Temperatures are rising
Tempers are rising
Rent and Real Estate rising
Threats are rising
Torture is rising
The water is rising
The sewage & effluvia
of carnivorous slag is rising
It is permeating the fabric
Injuries against nature float
like greasy seaweed
The pig-out of conquerors
has upmerged from shallow internment
like chemical zombies
But wages are not rising

What else can rise?
What can come out of the charnel sod?

You have religious practice
your rituals your prayers your solitude
facing the sun the moon east & west
in all six directions
fingers on beads emptying & filling your mind
from little round pillow to cushioned pew
and your legs behind your neck
and counted everyone of the 108,000
walked the last mile on your knees!
You have access to more information than dreamt
possible a generation ago
You can parse the gaits of rare animals & insects
machines, gold, winds & rain
that will never touch your face
at your fingertips
Everyday you affirm faith the path to unwind
will not lead you nowhere
not marooned in your cenotaph residency
in hyperparanoid domains of ravenous
matter consuming ghosts
You have your departed friends & lovers
& their indispensable counsel for ephemeral comfort
& funereal resolve
You deplore the destruction of meaning in words
of meaning of the old forests
old buildings & ways
sitting in a thousand rooms of agreement
& encouragement sans answer
without key no window
outside the war continues
You laud easy laughter
intoning your motto your rune
"It's all good."
like a mortal lock paradigm
"It's all good."
outside they are teaching you are the enemy
What else will rise?
What else can emerge
from this charnel ground?

You who hold the driving belts
to the machines of the world
in your maybe battered, maybe contorted,
maybe barely able, maybe atrophied,
maybe reborn one thing's for certain hands
Call out! O Common Sense Insurgency Organize!
Let your voice be heard! Organize!
Stop the war, let the chimes of freedom flash again Be born again! Voice it!
O Land of Beulah how can you be measured
by numbers?
O Imagination how can your value plummet so?
Politically as one man I ask you how has
smallbusiness fared under the Republicans
Nixon Reagan The Bushes
and liberal republicans like Clinton?
Ask Office Depot, Barnes & Nobles
Ask the radio waves, ask Clear Channel
How has education fared?
Ask the millions who only know a false history
or no history at all
We had one president who told us to conserve nature's yield
and withdrew finance to vicious tyrants
One president who did not bomb
& we saw what & where it got him
As long as the plastic presented consumer good life
in action & the supermarkets were well stocked
& the oil flowed into fuel
you did what you had to do
you didn't have to think about it
whatever it was
Insurgency quit working for the war don't supply the war
don't fight in, don't let your children fight in
this profiteering inexcusable bogus war
exorcise the war from your heart
this war that is all wars
this is the war fought on every plane & dimension
in every aspect & fiber
this is the war against human love
Human Love
Honest work for honest pay, cry out wail howl organize!
Out of the ashes & flotsam, out of its coffin
It is Joe Hillstrom, Emma Goldman, W.B. Dubois
Vachel Lindsay, Emmit Grogan & Abbie Hoffman
Let your voice be heard
in every day in every way
O insurgents, O peace mongers
don't mourn, organize!
O artists magnanimously the planet turns
from the desperate day
Your hand has fashioned represented & glorified
unrelenting beauty we were born to
are entitled to
But we suffer addicted collusion intent on using this
awesome fecundity to make capital
Capital that begets more capital
Money not even what money buys just money
Money inflicting pain
A society that fears its neighbors
whose gold is do unto others before they do unto you
A society that fears race & language
sex & no sex & poverty's karma
A nation that jetsams its heritage
when push comes to shove
which is its heritage & its sex
A society that conceives to make reparations
to the descendants of the ethnically cleansed
& robbed original inhabitants of These States
with long shot pipe dreams
of the poor & working losing
their retirements at the gaming tables
A society that conceives to make no reparations
at all to the descendants of slave labor
survivors of and in defacto apartheid
You saw streams of fish & revivifying drink
rendered carcinogenic & wept iodine
You saw rain seducing mysteries clear cut
& waves of stumped Mars like terrain
Orange Walnut Apricot groves bulldozed
into disposable housing
Beaches petrofried
Acres of abandoned rust
Mountain ranges of plastic plastic plastic
Mountain tombs of radioactive waste buried alive
Winds of depleted uranium & birth defects
dirging
Hills of crank & pills & lost teeth
dirging
You saw it from the portholes
of your rides
You felt it on a train to Secunderbad
to Budapest to Eugene Oregon
A bus to Cleveland Ohio
on the turnpike, O Elizabeth!
boarding a plane in Walla Walla
O Homeland Security pork!
On the 7 train
Insurgency
Uproar boiling in its bloody cauldron
O insurgents for birthright, laugh loud & proud
dance like your life depends on it-- it does
drink go ahead Jesus & Haffiz are with you
smoke it's your right, your religion
watch your ashes, notice your anger
outspoken exuberant generous forgive educate protest
wail shout out
Let it be heard
You can stop the war
You the woman & you the man
can stop the war
Who else can stop it?

Renounce virtual reality's design on 24/7
not enough virtue
not enough reality
not enough time
Tear yourself from the screen
go out the door
Insurgency without bombs & poison
renounce the media of big boy control culture
hypnotizing cheapening us
O uprising dawn new Unions, Revolutions
& outlaw outside markets
bring it to the numbered streets
& sylvan roads, the sacred airways
O non-violent heart of Jesus & Buddha
reach & touch
overwhelm these malignant cowardly
heartless vibes
Whether it be Velvet Orange Rainbow Pink Black Blue
Red or Green
by any means possible
This deadly fog must lift

Arise Tom Paine, John Peter Altgeld, John Reed
Jane Adams Helen Adam John Coltrane Etheridge
Knight Jack Kerouac Allen Ginsberg Black Buffalo
Woman Crazy Horse Langston Hughes rise
Uprising Debs and Jack London Caesar Chavez Abelardo
Delgado Frida & Diego Billie Holliday Bessie Smith
Big Bill Haywood Joe Hill Phil Ochs Malcolm X
Joaquin Murrieta Chief Joseph rise
Woody Guthrie Leadbelly Cisco Houston Harriet Tubman
Charlie Chaplin Billy Burroughs Jr. Enid Dame
David Lerner, Judy Bari, Pedro Pietri arise
Maestro Gregory Corso come with on the point straight shot
eloquent prophetics
"Know that there are millions of Americans
seeking America...know that even with all
those eye-expanding chemicals--only more of
what is not there do they see"
Isabel Eberhardt show us the New Frontier
& if need be disguise & attitude
Sitting Bull show us the route
the method the rudiments
How will we fight the most pervasive
destructive Empire the Earth has known?
I reach out to all the saints & sinners
you who are named
& you billions with no names in books
with no glory but what was
in front of you
I call to all laborers, the misrecognized
the great heroes the mothers of us all
the hammer the hoe the rags & sponges
the lactating breasts & fore arms
the steel wool knuckles & eyes aged
beyond this life-- Cold mouth
declaiming the immortal lines in mortal faces
the mop & broom, the conveyor belt
the choker and skid, the will killing pick
the ovens the ladders and swinging scaffolds
the tie wire and grill and telephone and trowel

I call to guide wire and caulked boots
the steel toes, the dollie, the ho dad, the lumpers
the victims of misogyny, the foster families
broken furniture families
the jack hammer, the jack of all, the fruit picker
pearl diver the hacks the seamstress the drill press
the death bed comforter, the lesson planners
and underpaid menders of atrocities
To all who did the dirty work
To all who made us clean
To all who were sold short overused
& deceived yet found time to live
I call on you now
Arise Help Us, guide us
We will make a future together
fit for you to live again
You shall rise!
You are not dead
O Insurgents
O Pioneers
Let it be heard!
Stop this everywhere everything
contamination
Stop this war

 

 

 

[Reprinted from Andy Clausen’s Home Of The Blues: More Selected Poems, Museum of American Poetics Publications, 2013. Used by permission of the author.]

 

 

Andy Clausen was born Andre Laloux in a Belgian bomb shelter in 1943. He was raised in Oakland, California. An ex-marine, he is the author of 14 books of poetry, including Home of the Blues: More Selected Poems (Museum of American Poetics Publications, 2013), 40th Century Man: Selected Verse 1996-1966 (Autonomedia, 1997), Without Doubt (Zeitgeist Press, 1991, introduction by Allen Ginsberg) and was coeditor of Poems for the Nation (Seven Stories Press, 2000), a collection of contemporary political poems compiled by the late poet Allen Ginsberg. Allen Ginsberg not only called him the "Future of American Poetry" but in the introduction to Without Doubt, said he would take a chance on a "President Clausen." Clausen has taught at Naropa University and given readings and lectures at many universities, prisons, poetry conferences, and cafes at home and around the world. He has worked for poetry in the schools agencies in California, New Jersey, Colorado and New York. He is presently working on memoirs of his friendship and adventures with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and many others of the Beat Generation.