13,061. RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,146

RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,146

(seeking gold in the railroad yard)

I never wanted to be anything;

mainly because the trying  was

fraught with peril; the accidental

kind, the kind you never see

coming. The last regular soldier

killed in the Civil War  -  east

of the Mississippi anyway  - 

was a Yankee named simply

as 'Arwood.' He lies buried

today at Asheville, NC. It

was all unforeseen; a mopping

up exercise against the local

renegade forces. Now, really,

it takes all the good intentions

of one man to live a straight

and steadfast life, but to have

it snuffed out, by some Deistic

fiat, just seems crazy, whether

distant OR near.

-

'America I've given you all and

now I'm nothing....I can't stand

my own mind.' Allen Ginsburg

wrote that; he's buried at the

fringe of Newark. Here's my

story about first finding that:

It seems funny to say, about

someone like him  -  queer,

short, chunky, Jewish  -  that

he was my neighbor, but he

was. Just around the little

corner at the Psychedelicatesan,

the Peace Eye Bookstore, Peter

Orlovsky, him, and all the rest

of that crazy crap. I met him once,

too, at Rutgers, giving a reading

when he had to take a dump, and

said so. One of those stupid phrases,

like 'when you gotta' go you

gotta' go.' Into the men's room

stall he went. Talking aloud the

whole time from inside. While

I stood at the urinal, peeing.

Like a horse in its stall, he got

his stall work done, and we went

back out. Crazy as he was. Then,

later years, when he died, I tracked

down the burial. Someone had

told me he was buried in the same

graveyard as the Kings of the

Gypsies get buried in. That was

all garbage, not a stitch of truth

to it. They're all ten miles away
from there.What's anyone know 
about anything anyway, and who 
listens to stuff like that? He's in an

old. Jewish, cemetery, under the

Anheuser-Busch sign, along the

railroad tracks. Period. No tricks 

or two ways about it, and let no

one tell you any better. I've been 

there, for years now, walked it all,

found my ways in. It's pretty

weirdly mystical, in its own 

crummy manner. 

-

'The kindly search for growth, the

gracious desire to exist of the flowers, 

my near ecstasy at existing among

them. The privilege to witness my

existence  -  you too must seek

the sun.'

-
Ginsberg's gravesite, the old part
of the cemetery anyway, is a strange,
vertical, city of the Jewish dead. Tall
stones, with carvings and etchings,
symbols and prayers, in tightly rowed
layers, a population from another
time and place. Crumbling, in places,
buy well-situated nonetheless. The
end of the gravesite area where the
Ginsberg site is (family, father, mother,
etc.) is, on the other hand, a newer,
flat, more modern, sunlight section
at the rear, at the tracks, at the
beer factory. What a site! The flying
eagle sign running the lit-up sky.
-

So, when there's not much to do

it's the time to do something else?

When everything that can go wrong

has gone wrong, there's not much

left. Walking through the Ginsberg

cemetery can give you the feel of

the creepy. But I sort of thrive

on that. What's a place like this

called. Necropolis? Tall, stand-up

Jewish gravestones' markers with

symbols and the Hebrew lettering.

Photos of the dead. Trains go by,

supposedly bearing the living, to

their destinations. I kind of feel it's

the other way around; the living are

here, and the trainload of souls

rolling by bears the dead on their

way to oblivion.

-

'A lost battalion of platonic

conversationalists jumping down

the stoops of fire escapes off

windowsills off Empire State out

of the moon, yacketayakking

screaming vomiting whispering

facts and memories and anecdotes

and eyeball kicks and shocks of

hospitals and jails and wars, whole

intellects disgorged in total recall

for seven days and nights with

brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue

cast on the pavement, who vanished 

into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving

a trail of ambiguous picture postcards

of Atlantic City Hall....under junk

withdrawal in Newark's bleak

furnished room...'