by Ed Sanders

“Much has been made,”
Reverend Corrigan continued,
“of the search for the Higgs boson,
the particle which many physicists claim is
the basic entity which gives mass to ALL created matter!

and which, therefore, is supposed
to be one of the building blocks of quarks.”

He paused.

“But you and I all know
that quarks have nothing to do with bosons!
Nothing at all!  That’s a certain fact!

“You and I know that the Universe is actually made up of
extremely tiny Bibles!  (Applause erupts)  Hear me!
The little particles that make up quarks and protons
and all the itsy bitsy thingies of Creation
are actually extremely tiny Bibles
with different colored covers
that are spinning right now in subatomic orbit!

“Imagine that!  Our cells, and the cells of the Lamb
are all made of Bibles!  (Audience on its feet shouting
with approval)
“You and I know this!
But does the Nobel Prize committee pay any attention?!”

“No!” thundered the 5,000 at the drive-in church.

“We COULD USE that Nobel money
for our Institute of Biblical Microbiology!
But please!  Please don’t try, any of you, to hack into
the Nobel website or take it down!
However, you CAN do this!  Write to your senators and
congressmen and DEMAND recognition
of Micrometric Bibles!!!”

by Ed Sanders

Ode to the Beat Generation
— for Antonio Bertoli

Hail to the Beat Generation in the Time-Mist!
Hail to the Generation that rocked across the ocean
with a mighty Boat of Books that shook all cities!

                      Beat Beat Beat Beat

Thank God for cameras, o Beat Generation
for they have captured your wild dance forever!
Thank God for mimeograph machines & inexpensive presses
for they have inked your Final Type!
Thank God for the angels in your canvases, O Generation!
And may the candles in your Chianti bottles light up heaven,
o Beats,
and no one ever publish hell again!
Thank God for your Beautiful Loss, o Beat Generation
Thank God for the concept of “Gone”!
They can’t extinguish Gone, no matter how hard they try!
Sacred Gone!  Eternal Gone!  Fishin’ Gone!

Beata Beatus Beatum Beatae

They can’t extinguish the flames of your sandals, O Beat
Generation!
and the Egyptian kohl that outlines your wanton eyes!
They can’t extinguish the bongo drums
at midnight on the Staten Island Ferry
in the Waters of Gone!
nor the crevices and wild appendages insatiate
from Moscow to Moravia to Memphis!

Beat–Gone Beat–Begone Beat–Gone Beat–Begone

The strands of time are like a baklava, o Beat Generation!
So many layers, and laughs, and lines, and Lones!
Creeley typing the stencils for the mimeographed “Howl”
on Rexroth’s typewriter!
Ferlinghetti’s left-wing poems of people tired of repairing
Ezekiel’s wheel for a shot of whiskey!
DiPrima typing “Revolution” across the dead eyes of tyrants!
The dueling economies of Burroughs and Ginsberg!
The broccoli swords of Corso and Gary Snyder
The knowledge of the 1000 year sigh in Joanne Kyger’s genius!

Beat–Brain Beat–Brine Beat–Brawn Beat–Boat

I’m not going to talk about your weaknesses
in the River of Kiss-Phantoms, o Beat Generation!
Nor talk about Kerouac’s voting for Nixon one nervous November
nor speak of the cash-starved notebooks of flip-out
in somebody’s archive, or the fields of stunned Sunflowers
surrounded by so many suns
they turn to the actual Sun of Gone
to find Eternity!

Beat Beat Beat Beat

The art of the Road and the art of the Word is the art of the Rose
We hear you! o Beat Generation, down by the sunny marsh
singing for 60 years like the frogs of Aristophanes:
Ecstasy Fondue!  Sax Clover!  Tire-Sandal Soup!

Beat Beat Beat Beat
          Never a sheet so sweet!

by Peter Money

The animals greeted him as if he were one of them.
Maybe they can smell the special carbon on his breath,
the distaste, refuse, the dying.

They offer a last run with the pack,
nudge him, lick his acrid lips and eyes, playfully nip
his wrists to bring him on his way.

Enough! finally he says, sitting on the stoop;
I am long for, I am long for —
I will be long in my own good time.

The game withers and the dogs return
to what dogs do: slumber in the lulls
from play.  The man, though, what will the man do

as if after saying what he has said he will be on his way —
but no, he is there with this own remaining breath
barking like a dog, biting at the bone, consolable.

by Peter Money

In Ancient Times
          — for Chris Busa

You were standing over the raft
(it was low tide and the raft was
idle),

the one you named once you’d moored it:
“Blind Date” — optimistically a ship to sail
but this one with a stagnant destination.

On an island of sand still
where water was around
a glass & bottle on white bird scat,

you and all of it
emblems against usurpation
— the summer people’s super powered craft display;

there you stared away
to sea — & back
toward a home one row from the view.

Inside shoreline cottages, each lit
for evening, stairways & tables
had filled with yearly strangers.

A seagull sang
ragtime’s song of the rusty wheel,
warped & carrying a heavy load

in a great solitarian novel,
one with the traveling corpse
bellowing against silence

. . . and it was you,
in another life,
hauling stones down and unbuilt road.