Doggerel for the old dogs

Wanting to be a better chef du bureau, I attempted to audit a Creative Writing course at San Francisco State. The instructor agreed to let me audit but it was later kiboshed at the department level. I understood. Paying students were desperate to keep their full time status in the face of so many courses being eliminated because of huge state budget cuts. Why should a state with the 10th biggest economy on the planet and a population of 37 million people bother to educate its next generation?

Anyway, the assignment from the one class I attended was to write a manifesto. This is it.

ANTI-MANIFESTO

Manifestos are for the young, the firebrands, the visionaries, the mad artists and the drunken poets.

Baudelaire wrote, “Stay drunk! On wine, poetry or virtue, as you please!”

But I saw the best minds of my generation tear gassed while tripping on acid, going to jail, enduring broken hearts in cold climates, forced to get jobs.

I saw them marrying, buying houses, sending their kids to college, worrying about their health plans and those goddam Republicans.

I saw them realizing that the older you get, the more dead people you know.

I saw you, Allen Ginsberg, in 1969, dressed like a sadhu, playing a harmonium and chanting Blake off key.

25 years on I saw you again, wearing a nice sportcoat, surrounded by acolytes, walking through the food court of a shopping mall in San Francisco. A few years later you were dead.

The manifestos of the older set tend to lack élan vital.

“I have had my fun if I never get well no more.”

After a certain age, manifestos are replaced by memories:

“These foolish things remind me of you.”

And elegies:

“Earth, receive an honored guest: William Yeats is laid to rest.”

Better those than admonitions and sage advice, because no one listens to that shit.

Maybe there can be mini-manifestos: “I shall not wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”; “I will dare to eat a peach!”

No. Too much like cocktail wieners, lacking the flavor of the full sized sausage.

Wait! It’s almost lunchtime.