How I Ended up in Allen Ginsburg’s Kitchen by Taylor Gorman
…So it began around “Beowulf,” which was told orally by a man I could not comprehend. Next to him, an Irishman was translating the Old-Anglo words for me: Seamus Heaney, actually, which was odd: why could I recognize Seamus so easily? Regardless, I had to interrupt the translation—
“What—the—fuck!” I yelled at Seamus.
“I’m sorry?” he said, Irishly.
“What, the, fuck, Seamus! Where the hell am I? It looks like Sweden—and why do I know your name? Why are you translating that old man? Why don’t I know his name? Why—“
“Please, please, ca’m down. This ‘ere man is telling the epic story of t’ese men from Heorot. I am Seamus—“
“I know, I know. What’s oldie’s name?” I cut in.
“Wha’, ‘im? Dunno. Nobody ‘noos. It was los’ in ‘istory.”
“Why don’t you just ask him? You obviously speak the lingo…”
“Why’s it matter so much, ‘uh? I cannot as’ ‘im ‘is name because I only know what I’ve read, and ‘is name wasn’ recorded.”
“So why can I talk to you?”
“Why sho’ I feckin’ know? I ‘uess because you know who I ‘em—“
“Barely.”
“Well ‘en your pro’ly off your trolly is wha’ Ide say.”
“Do you always speak in syncope?” I said, defending myself.
“Wa’ch yourse’f lad. Now Ide bugger off now if you know wha’s good for y’a, I have some transla’n to do.”
I walked away, having had my fill of apostrophes for the day. I sat down and looked down the hill at an army of warriors who were fighting a horrid monster with fierce claws. More terrifying than the creature was the fact that many of the soldiers were naked for some reason. It was kind of gross, really: I mean, everything flopping everywhere… it’s like choosing to run naked through an apiary; even if it’s exhilarating, you’re bound to get stung, in the worst way. Except here it’s not just bees, it’s bees with swords…
“Well? Are we buggerin’ off or aren’t we?” Seamus cut-in, interrupting my spacing-out about bees (does he know they have swords?). “I sa’d, I’ve got transla’n to do.”
“I walked away, you Irish bastard.”
“I mean, get o’t o’ this place.”
“And go where? Didn’t I tell you I don’t know where the fuck I am?” I said, but he wasn’t listening; he was walking back to the old, nameless man. So I decided to walk conversely to his steps and find a knoll to lie on and fall asleep. If I can’t find any sense here, I thought, I might as well get some rest.
Then I met Bashō,
Trees, waterfalls, metaphors,
Then it was over.
After I saw the overly-poetic tree (no pun intended, for that is a terrible, terrible pun), I found myself suddenly in New England. I had never been to New England, but I felt it in my marrow that I was indeed there. A young girl was weeping; she was bonny, pale, fragile, and thin. I didn’t know what to say to her, and all I could murmur was “Are you alright?” She glanced at me with incredibly soft yet piercing light-blue eyes. She didn’t answer. “Don’t be freaked out, but… I’m not sure why I’m here. I think I’m trapped—”
“Trapped? Oh yes— we’re all trapped I’m afraid,” she muttered. “Trapped in this vessel, this—fleshy prison.”
“Yeah… I…I’m Leonard.” I extended my hand to her, but she didn’t move.
“Emily,” she said, sniffling with her blush-red nose. She decided, I know not why, to tell me why she had lost all her mirth: “I knew a Leonard once, and now he is sleeping in the churchyard. Tears are the only tribute I can pay him–oh, my dear Master…” It worried me that she didn’t find it odd that I just suddenly appeared in her house. I would certainly have found it at least interesting. “Tuesdays are deeply depressing days—“ she said to herself, mournfully and susurrantly.
“Why Tuesday?” I asked, noticing she had a letter in her hand.
“Because today is Tuesday, and every day is just brimming with sorrow it seems—remorse… remorse is something even God cannot heal. It’s a cureless affliction…” She put her head down upon her arms, wiping her tears on her sleeves along the way.
You are the most depressing women I have ever met I wanted to yell, along with do you always speak in dashes? I restrained myself, though. I’m not sure why, I guess it’s because she was pretty. “So, this Leonard died—”
“How dare you!” she erupted. “Do not speak of him to me! He is mine and mine alone to remember, and you— how dare you have the audacity to show up in my house, speaking of my Leonard–stealing his name! How dare you! Never speak of Leonard, Leonard is dead!” She looked me in the eyes. It was a painful glance to match. “You are dead, Leonard. I am dead! We’re all dead in due time—eventually the windows will fail, we will cease to see—“
At this point, I began to back up. It was obvious she needed a straight-jacket, maybe even some chains around her, but I had neither (nor would I even attempt!), so I retreated towards the door. I turned quickly and, realizing I really didn’t have anywhere to go, I stopped and attempted to at least try to probe for information: “Look, I believe I’m stuck in a poetry anthology, and I know that sounds crazy, but I thought maybe you would understand…”
She froze in a stupor, completely mystified by my question. “Because I’m what—crazy?” she said, quite…well, crazily.
“No, no, not exactly—just, you know… you just seem so—smart! Yes, and se–“
Thwack! Emily had slapped me across the face with a wooden-flyswatter, which she apparently had grabbed from the table. I didn’t even get a chance to tack on the xy, but really, I don’t think it was the greatest time to hit on a poetess who could pack a punch. I’ll admit it, she really walloped me good. I sank to the floor, emasculated, and seconds before I lost consciousness, I swear I saw Billy Collins walk in, although I don’t know why that would make any sense.
I had an array of strange experiences with poets. I’d tell you all about them, but for the most part they weren’t very interesting, so here’s abridged version:
• Shakespeare was confusing. He spoke English but I only understood about half of the words he said. It was kind of like meeting Elvis, if Elvis was the English noble-type and had a cockney accent instead of being bloated and drug-addicted. Actually, it wasn’t much like meeting Elvis at all.
• Edgar Allen Poe was drunk. And crazy. But nice; very pleasant guy.
• e. e. cummings was… actually quite normal, really.
• T. S. Eliot was… perplexing. We sat in his garden and talked about… books or something. I wasn’t really paying attention.
None of the poets could explain my odd situation to me, and I was becoming agitated. So anyway, I eventually ended up in Allen Ginsberg’s kitchen. Why Ginsberg? I will never know. I had just left Tom’s garden and my mind was still spinning.
“What’s wrong with you?” the heavily-bearded man asked. He stepped out of his pantry and put his groceries on the counter. “Why are you in my kitchen?”
“I really wish I knew, I really wish I knew.” For some reason, he wasn’t very shocked to find a complete stranger standing on his white-marble kitchen-floor.
“Well, are you hungry?”
Eating some fruit at the table, I tried to sort this whole ordeal out. “So, I’m stuck in a poetry anthology…” I paused to see if his eyes would widen with the Oh my God he is a lunatic look, but they didn’t, so I went on. “I went from Beowulf to Poe to Eliot and so forth until I ended up here, in your kitchen.”
“Ah, the greats,” he said, peeling a banana. “Where do you think you’re going next?”
“I don’t know, that’s not really what’s on my mind right now. I just want out.”
“And why’s your cheek so red?”
“Emily Dickinson slapped me with a fly-swatter.”
“Lucky guy. I saw a few poets at the store a few minutes ago. Walt was there, Lorca was there. Both in the produce aisle, weird huh?”
I ignored this. “So, never hit on Emily. That’s what I learned today.”
“Hah!” Allen laughed. “Interesting, interesting.”
“And haiku are weird; I think I met Bashō.”
“Oh my, you are a lucky one. Jack would kill to meet him. If he were alive right now he’d be asking you question after question until you either passed out or punched him in the face.” He chuckled slightly then suddenly went silent. He looked around the table in somberness, as if he suddenly remembered a thought mentally unvisited in weeks. He inhaled slowly from his mouth and, eyes closed, exhaled through his nose. Opening his eyelids slowly, he glanced at the lilacs in a vase at the center of the table and decided to change the subject. “So, you’ve been spending a day with the dead too?”
“I’m sorry?” I grabbed a knife and a peach and halved it.
“Whitman’s been dead some sixty years now. Lorca for almost twenty, I think.”
A thought crackled in my head like a heat-lightning bolt, and the second it struck, I verbalized it without even thinking: “Allen…I believe you’re dead too.” I began eating a peach-slice.
“Am I? That’s strange. You mean I’m dead in whatever time you come from?” There wasn’t a dab of sadness in his speech; it confused me.
“Yeah, and why don’t you care? If someone informed me that I was dead, I’d be quite surprised and pretty fucking angry.”
“Oh, it’s not too unsettling. I don’t brood much over my own death.” He grabbed an avocado from a grocery bag and took the knife I had in my hands. As he was cutting around it and trying to pull out the brown oval seed, he changed the subject. “Well, I don’t think you’re trapped in a poetry anthology.”
“Why?” I asked, unable to tell if he was joking.
“Doesn’t seem right. You’ve been meeting literary specters all day, but I can’t really see why.” He began eating his slices of avocado, offering me one.
“No, thanks… so if I’m not in an anthology, what the hell am I in?”
“Don’t know. Probably a short story, maybe even a novel. But it’s definitely prose,” he said, chewing the piece of avocado offered to me.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Am I just trapped in some warped writer’s mind? Why me?”
“Why anyone?”
“You’re a poet, not a philosopher, Allen.”
“What I mean is, whoever it happened to be that was stuck in this story, they would ask why me.” He was still unnervingly calm, just eating and talking as if this was a typical table-conversation.
“Well, how do I get out of this?”
“You end it,” he said, reaching for the other half of my peach. “Obviously.”
[Page break]
“I wouldn’t just end a story like that, not in the middle of the page. There has to be a way to extricate yourself from a something like this—”
“You’re afraid that, if the story ends, you’ll die,” said Allen, very matter-of-factly like a psychologist.
I didn’t want to admit it, be he was right. I was terrified. I couldn’t bear the fact that I would just march off into nebulous darkness. The unknown. I couldn’t face it. “Yeah, Allen. I mean, do I have to kill myself just to leave this story, or anthology, or whatever the fuck it is that I am trapped in?”
“You could always hope for a TO BE CONTINUED to prolong it.”
“But I would still be stuck between the pages of some book or magazine or notebook… stuck even longer, really. I just—I don’t want to die, Allen, I don’t want to fucking die–”
“Everyone dies, Leonard. The people you met today were dead, hell, I’m dead, and look at me.”
“I don’t think Seamus is dead. Or Billy Collins… but are you saying heaven is a poetry anthology?”
“Short story.”
“Whatever.”
“Maybe it is, who knows? I mean, the world is crazy Leonard; one day you’re writing poems, the next day you have an atom-bomb up your ass. Maybe it’s better to just to be here.”
“But I had a life out there, I—I—“ I stuttered and paused. I felt a black cloak drape over my thoughts… I couldn’t remember anything about my life. I couldn’t recall anything that preceded my literary journey, aside from two minute details: I remember fluorescent lights and a moaning door hinge. Did I really see that? It didn’t seem real. “I don’t know anything anymore, Allen.”
“Perhaps you were always in a story. Maybe you were created specifically as a character for someone’s prose, and that’s it.”
“But who?”
“Who knows? How could you ever find out? Perhaps you are just his creation for some parable or something. Just a character in his book—
“But I’m not! I’m not words on a page—“I said as I rose from the table, thrusting my arms about, fiercely. “Can’t you see me, Allen? I have boney-hands and pale arms! Dirty-blonde hair that needs washing, blue eyes! White, imperfect teeth! Can’t you see me? How can I be fiction? I can feel the thin hairs along my arms, I can touch my callused fingers–you can’t see those things on a page comprised of words and letters… you can’t see the redness in my face…the sadness…you can’t see those things goddammit! You fucking can’t! You can’t…can’t you see me, Allen?” But Allen just closed his eyes and exhaled despondently. I sat down at the table, weeping like Emily was; I took the peach-knife, holding it tremulously in my right hand.
“Well, goodbye, Allen. If my existence is–this, whatever this is, then I can’t–I can’t stay. I can’t stay in a world where I cannot be something; I am something…but not of my will.” The tears, they fell onto my shaking hand. “How can I not be me?” I turned the knife, angled it, pressed its edge against my wrist. I was searching for words–any words, anything, to express the cold steel on my warm skin, but Allen, with his eyes still closed, said it for me:
Grab your oar. Your about to cast-off, Leonard. Perhaps I will see you again, on the smoky bank of the black waters of Lethe.
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it is so disturbing to know this is true
you conveyed it well
i felt her horror, her weariness, the kids draining innocence, his madness.