The Blue Devil (Allen Ginsberg--Poetry and Commentary)

The Blue Devil
(Allen Ginsberg)


Allen Ginsberg is singing and weeping
for emotionless love, anyone will do.
He leans against a gate, of iron and steel,
on the docks of hell, by the Rio called Hades.

(So it is in this daydream!)

He’s a giant toy, a doll,
for the misfits, in hell’s domain;
he is shaped like an nonfigurative pimp,
made out of rags, and bluish pale skin.

His face is milled like hard dough,
cracking, as one eye searches about….
He is looking for a way out of this
temple of doom, but no key is to be found.

He gazes through his boring red eyes,
thinking of the young boys he left behind.
He closes the one eye, sees the key in a
vision— and wishes it wasn’t.

—I hear him say “You would have thought
I might have planned a tinge better?
The end came quicker than I thought!
Perhaps I can find a toy to occupy my mind

in this eternal inferno…?”



#2129 (10:04 PM); Lima, Peru 31 December, 2007. In this poem, I write just before New Years (2008) for some odd reason, the beat generation comes to mind, and the poet, Ginsberg; and the inferno, where most likely he is among his kind, perhaps in the middle of some grinding journey at this very moment. He was made up of pages by the newspapers, and when he aged and could no longer make love or get it on, the old gay Jewish Poet, put his young boy lovers to the side and tried to escape within his mind (even wrote about his hardship, as if he might get some pity, for his item did not operate well). And perhaps found, or constructed his once omitting memories of pleasant human flesh, on those very walls, to remember for later days. He wrote about death, early on in his life, as Hemmingway did, later in his life. He liked Dante, perhaps because he used his poetry to please, whereas, Ginsberg, used His to intimidate, terrify (or so I feel); you see, we often pick the hell, the one we know very little about, and the one that is most pleasing, for we all know, if there is a hell, we know if we deserve it or not, and he knew he did; for whatever reasons he picked a pleasant one when he was alive, in that he tried to find readings on that subject that could comfort him, and as much as he may have found his quest, when he wrote, it did not come out so pleasant, it came out like a dog eating a fetus. And now we sell it, celebrate his genus, for the rotgut he produced. Oh yes, life has its funny twists, he surely wasn’t no Robert Frost, but then, a cup of coffee, with eggs and toast, in the morning is not everyone’s kind of breakfast.