From the San Francisco poets – that beat breed of jazz-backdropped cellar-dwellers – the name of Lawrence Ferlinghetti stands out among such similarly standout names as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Rexroth. Poets, pundits, hippies and chippies have hailed him; "He is quite possibly," said jazz critic Ralph Gleason, "the most important poet now writing in America." Satirist John Keefauver, a native of San Francisco's artiest exurb, Carmel, was fascinated by Ferlinghetti's recent highly praised volume of verse, "A Coney Island of the Mind," and has written for us an appreciative parody that not only echoes, joshes and synthesizes the original, but also comes comfortably close to being an insightful poem in its own right.
In San Franciscotown
there's a cooled-up cat
name of Lawrenched Forgetti
(or something like that)
who writes poetry
street poetry
walking-along poetry
not the kind that sits around all day
looking at its navel
the oral message kind
jazz poetry
of the stepped-
on
soul
beat
complete
telling you all about the icky square world
with its
drunk clotheslines
grappling with hot legs
in rollaway beds
and its beat-up landscape of
mindless supermarkets
with steamheated carrots
protesting
a honeyless world of square toiletseats
never sat on
(even by las vegas virgins
tampaxed and disowned)
a world waiting for someone
to push a mushroom button
and make bombed cadillacs rain thru trees
For cadillac ashes
are what that square-type man
was really wailing about
when he kept talking and talking
from that catless place
name of Galilee
only trouble was they cooled him
until he was hanging dead
a shame
and we're to blame
so our circus souls go marching on
stuffed soldiers carrying a sawdust cross
Oh well
what the hell
Like when they were putting up that statue
in front of a church
in San Franciscotown
and not a goddam bird was singing
I mean
oh well
what the hell
Like that man who painted
The Horse with Violin in Mouth
then jumped on the horse
and rode away
waving that violin
and then of all the goddam things to do
he gave it to a plugged-up virgin
and there were no strings attached
I mean
oh well
what the hell
What Forgetti of San Franciscotown is trying to
tell you
yell to you
is that this life ain't supposed to be a circus
attended by
governed by
make-believe monks in silktights
monkeys with teacuphandle tails
horny hiawathas
drinking out of horny-rimmed glasses
lipsticked with yesterday's mud
or dirty suds
babooned ladies
and gorillaed men
ain't
but it is
We just gotta stop chomping down
on these fake
Last Suppers
we gotta
take the locks off our pants
and start slaying old ladies
and
young lays
and make the old ones young again
and make the young ones late again
making them all
sweet
and oh well
what the hell
He says we gotta arise
even though we're not workers
of any world
of any thing
we're not even of
we're a not
without a negative to hang our not on
We're a can of sterno that won't burn
an empty bottle of muscatel
we'd recite from broken bibles
but we don't have a tongue
we're sisters in the streets
with our brassieres on backwards
we're dogs listening for our master's voice
we're Christmas trees with no balls
we're Wise Men praising Lord Calvert whiskey
we're Bing Crosby
groaning
we're hi-ya housewives
veneered in nylon snobberies
trying to lacquer-up all the scenes
we're in a whorehouse
with no whores
just bores
sores
and unfound doors
we're sunk
junk
when we let fall a sock
it clanks
What we gotta do is goose George Washington
in the seat of his cherry tree
and then give Joan a pat
on her Arc
We have only dishonorable intentions
not to mention
disintentions
we're dis people plainly
In short
we're constipations
But as Forgetti says
Oh well
what the hell
