I lay on the cold dusty hard wood floor contemplating the voice of my generation, visions of rebellion sex drugs protest and poetry
Who are we but those who walk in the shadows of beats and baby boomers
We are not the Y generation, but the why generation, everything’s been done everyone’s been challenged, so where are we left to express dissatisfaction
Helpless and frustrated
Too eager to be unique, rebelling for the sake of rebellion to the point of writing un-cited revolutionary cries of others
The stomps and scuffs and slides of hip hop — bips and bops and prose of beat rebels—images time the subtle sexuality of Walt
But wait!
What’s our sound?
We are what we write, and we write of nonsensical complaints of paradise
Occupy!
Occupy!
Occupy what?
Not the wall but we, we are being taken over by our own imaginations, occupied by hairy high hipsters trying too hard to rebel
We have lost all confidence in originality
Even our personal thoughts are plagiarized
The claustrophobia of endless possibilities restricting creative thought to that of another
Originality is dead
Now writers are just readers, not thinkers, watching life pretend of a screen fake and artificial just like the literature of our future
Creativity is no longer creative, originality origin-less untraceable plagiarizing plagiarism, the original cultural carbon copy lost in meaningless prose, an endless cycle of literary nonsense
And where does it end?
As I lay on the floor flying over cities contemplating jazz
No wait that’s Ginsberg
Even when I try to protest the loss of creativity, I’m conforming to the flawed norm of unoriginal writing
Memories of our poetic saviors dominate no infect no destroy our imaginative thought
Pounding chords on the typewriter resounding stanzas of Jazz, classic notes of Ginsberg and Kerouac
Typing prose on every note of that piano, dust leaping at every punch, covered by a black sheet in the pitch white basements of beat revolutionaries
Not a minute to myself
The philosophies of my favorite poets are my dreams my nightmares my memories and poetic ambitions
Buddha Brahman Bacchus and Big-Brother watching controlling our thoughts beliefs and ability to challenge common authority
Creativity dying like a psychopath in the chair, lobotomy, Livergant, Freud, Jung, psychoanalysis analyzing the minds of brilliant mentals
What if I want to be insane?
Where’s my hospital?
Where’s my Solomon?
Because as history tells us the way to be brilliant is to be what others fear
So yes Williams, we are going through hell, because as I lay here on this cold dusty hard wood floor all I can think about is a mental hospital
Tell me what to do!
Anyone!
Sal, Dean, Carlo, Bull, a familiar pioneer who will teach me how to become my own writer
But I cannot be taught to be a poet, we cannot be taught to be a great, we must find our own unique voice
And I will not stop these pleas for originality, because creativity is what keeps us alive
So my hypocritical pen will keep sprawling and keeping spewing these calls until someone much wiser than I breaks through our writing wall wailing, preaching a new story, a new style, a new speech, the new voice, the new Howl for our generation.
Gabe Kittle is an 18-year-old poet from Santa Cruz, CA who currently attends Emerson College in Boston, MA studying Acting and Writing. He previously attended Santa Cruz CA Monthly Meeting, and has been involved with the Ben Lomond Quaker Center for many years.