Mr. Allen Ginsberg

I shook hands – oh god – with Allen Ginsberg
in 1978 in Colorado.

Large, bald man, he gave a reading there,
timed to please participating shadow.

Into the poem, into the throbbing air,
the scratched Titanic sank before the iceberg.

Drums: he had us pound feet on the floor,
in a little church, perhaps somewhere near Boulder.

“This is the rhythm. Please, a little more…”
… wooden thuds, by which we all knew truth,

and its antithesis, this growing older,
this distancing ourselves from fame and youth.

~