A Birthday Poem (With Zombies)

Butterfly on Lilacs

So here it is, June 3rd and along comes the birthday of Allen Ginsberg. I love the poem 'Howl' for how dense the language is, and how long the poem sustains this. In honor of Allen Ginsberg's birthday, I present an excerpt from 'Foul', a riff on the old classic. With 88% more zombies.

Foul

by Constance Brewer

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by starving, naked zombies, it was hysterical how they dragged themselves through suburban streets before dawn looking for a brain fix,

empty-headed corpses yearning for a tasty connection of white and gray wrapped in dura matter,

whose lipids and neurons and glial cells are but fodder in the supernatural darkness of the soul of rotting flesh floating across the top of open-sore craniums

who attack mindless in waves the haven and see other Romerian zombies staggering on shambling, putrid limbs,

who pass on recruiting at universities with discolored eyes not wanting to hallucinate Sartre and Camus from feasting on the flesh of philosophy majors,

who were reanimated from the academies for crazy - pushing obscene odes to the density of the skull,

who cower in infected rooms in long underwear, saving their medullas in wastebaskets and listening politely to the Terror through the wall,

who got decomposed in their tender graves returning through reanimation with a desire for middle-class flesh from New York,

who ate cerebellum like candy or drank cerebrospinal fluid in death, or purgatoried their tissues night after night

with bad hygiene, with infection, with waking nightmares, rotting teeth and rotten nails,

incomprehensible screaming of shuddering crowds at the light-in-the-mind staggering past cases of Bartles & James, illuminated by the motionless soldiers in riot gear

Payless shoes on detached feet, shuffle through cemetery dawns, wine-drunk survivors fleeing over the rooftops hiding behind storefronts joyriding with cricket bats ignoring neon blinking traffic lights, as they roar over walking corpses and smash the apocalyptical plague upside the head . . .

(. . . Original Poem- Howl by Allen Ginsberg)