Lawrence Ferlinghetti

[Hit The North]

I just wanted to share one of my favourite poems - it's by beat poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and very cool and funny like all his best stuff:

Sometime During Eternity

Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hip
to who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad

And moreover
he adds
It's all writ down
on some scroll-type parchments
which some henchmen
leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres
a long time ago
and which you won't even find
for a coupla thousand years or so
or at least for
ninteen hundred and fortyseven
of them
to be exact
and even then
nobody really believes them
or me
for that matter

You're hot
they tell him

And they cool him

They stretch him on the Tree to cool
And everybody after that
is always making models
of this Tree
with Him hung up
and always crooning His name
and calling Him to come down
and sit in
on their combo
as if he is THE king cat
who's got to blow
or they can't quite make it

Only he don't come down
from His Tree

Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world news
from the usual unreliable sources
real dead


Lawrence Ferlinghetti

[Stranger Than Paradise]

I have read a bit of him and he has seemed quite progressive from what I've seen. I have even seen him described as an Anarchist once. Oh I found out he calls himself a Philosphical Anarchist and used to sell Anarchist newspapers.

Here's one of my favourites of his:

[FONT=Arial]Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes[/FONT]

[FONT=Arial]At the stoplight waiting for the light[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]nine a.m. downtown San Francisco[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]a bright yellow garbage truck [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]with two garbagemen in red plastic blazers[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]standing on the back stoop[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]one on each side hanging on[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]and looking down into [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]an elegant open Mercedes[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]with an elegant couple in it[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]The man[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]in a hip three-piece linen suit[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]with shoulder-lenght blond hair&sunglassed[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]The young blond woman so casually coifed [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]with short skirt and coloured stokings[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]on the way to his architect's office[/FONT]

[FONT=Arial]And the two scavengers up since four a.m.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]grungy from their route[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]on the way home[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]The older of the two with grey iron hair[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]and hunched back [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]looking down like some[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]gargoyle Quasimodo [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]And the younger of the two [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]also with sunglasses&long hair[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]about the same age as the Mercedes dirver[/FONT]

[FONT=Arial]And both scavengers gazinf down[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]as from a great distance[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]at the cool couple[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]as if they were watching some odorless TV ad[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]in which everything is always possible [/FONT]

[FONT=Arial]And the very red light for an instant[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]holding all four close together[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]as if anything at all were possible[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]between them[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]across that small gulf [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]in the high sea[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]of this democracy [/FONT]