Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish

Allen Ginsberg’s Lament, Kaddish — anaphora governs, begging time to hold still, to stop its procreant urge forward, just long enough for him to grab at a straw, straw thin brittle leg of his mother — “Only to have…”

Allen Ginsberg, you who walk in neon supermarkets, hungry for avocados and images, you who, with your mind of blooming shadows, can only repeat rapid “Only to have”s, chanting, rocking, head clutched in hands…

Ginsberg holds my hand and we walk the streets of the Bronx. We peer into shops whose windows hold rusty cooking whisks and figurines — “a nostalgia shop” he tells me. We run our hands along the cement building sides until our fingers rubbed raw bleed and we leave our mark, we follow the smell of cigarettes, rounding a corner, rounding a corner, rounding, turning in circles, wheeling a wild dervish dance, swept up into time, procreant urge forward, rusty whisks and figurines and nostalgia, always nostalgia, sucking us back, back into the bulging mother’s womb, back before insanity, lobotomy, wants his mother’s eyes to be his eyes, impels himself to inhabit her insanity, to see the robots attacking Czechoslovakia, to feel night air whipping her face in early hours of the dawn, mouth gaping, sobbing, sitting beneath a tree in the park crying for the petals she’s plucked and flung to the sky.

How much easier life would be if our mother’s mother’s mom had left a key, a key to the crazy knowledge that the sunlight through the bars of the window is the key itself.

Allen Ginsberg, always Allen Ginsberg never Allen, did your mother call you Allen, did Aunt Rose, did Uncle Sam, did your mother see you next to her bed in the asylum?

Allen, you will never be remote to me. Head in hands, gently rocking, all your images of avocados’ penumbras leak out your ears. Head in hands, chanting Kaddish, mourning the inescapable surge of time. The music, the wind in the reeds, all whisper “Only to have…”