“Sleeping It Off in Rapid City,” by August Kleinzahler

This is a really nice poem, plus you can understand everything in it for a change. This guy is a modern poet, but he’s also quite a good one.He’s a bit of an enfant terrible, hates all the other poets. Spends his time in San Francisco and New Jersey where he grew up.

He was a good friend of Thom Gunn’s in San Francisco. He also knew Allen Ginsberg pretty well. And yep, Peter Orlovksy is just as nuts as everyone says he is. I saw Ginsberg read once and Orlovsky was with him. He looked pretty crazy even back then in 1982. Met Ginsburg too. Didn’t like him. He refused to talk to me. Just glared at me with contempt while some self-hating gay in my English Department kept trying to worm his way into Ginsburg’s lap. Ginsburg refused to talk to anyone in the bar except his one fat guy who everyone hated and was called “The Bore of Long Beach.” They talked about astronomy. That’s all the bore liked to talk about.

Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and Gunn were all gay. Ginsberg is gay and I think Gunn died of AIDS. Gunn was a very good poet. He wrote a nice book about having AIDS, brutal stuff. Ginsberg was great of courser, but he was also a huge asshole in my opinion, but a lot of artists are pretty insufferable.

I assume Orlovsky is dead too or locked in an asylum somewhere. It’s hard to put into words how gay the beatniks were. At least the hippies and punks who came afterwards weren’t a bunch of homosexuals, for God’s sake!

The Italian lines below are from Dante, in case you were wondering.

“Sleeping It off in Rapid City”

On a 700-foot-thick shelf of Cretaceous pink sandstone Nel mezzo … Sixth floor, turn right at the elevator ‘The hotel of the century’ Elegant dining, dancing, solarium Around the block from the Black Hills School of Beauty And campaign headquarters of one Jack Billion (‘Together we can move forward’) The exact centre of the Oglala known universe Cante wamakoguake Or only 30 miles or so away, south-west, off Highway 87 I waken to the sound of the DM&E Rattling through this sleeping town Sounding its horn as it snakes its way through Hauling coal from nowhere, through nowhere, and then some Old rocks and distance, a few hawks overhead 4 a.m. – per una selva oscura – Kwok, kwok, kwok, shrieks the Velociraptor In the closed dinosaur shop – Vroooom Roars the Triceratops, like Texas thunder They keep the tape-loop going through the night Always have done, no one knows why The Bible Store respires in its sanctum As if in an outsize black glass humidor This is a sacred ground, a holy place 4 a.m. in a sacred place I can tell this is a sacred place, I needn’t be told It’s in the air I feel it This old heritage hotel, this is a sacred place The tour buses are lined up outside it Awaiting the countless pilgrims On the floor, my shoe, under the bed Even my shoe is blessed The Lord’s blessing is everywhere to be found The Lambs of Christ are among us You can tell by the billboards The billboards with foetuses out there on the highway Through the buzzing, sodium-lit night Semis grind it out on the Interstate Hauling toothpaste, wheels of Muenster, rapeseed oil Blessed is the abundance, blessed the commerce Across the Cretaceous hogback Hundred-million-year-old Lakota sandstone, clays, shale, gypsum And down through the basins of ancient seabeds Past the souvenir shops and empty missile silos The ghosts of 98-foot-long Titans and Minutemen 150,000 pounds of thrust Stainless steel, nickel-alloy coated warheads Quartz ceramic warheads, webbed in metal honeycomb Eight-megaton payloads Range 6300 miles Noli me tangere God bless America We’re right on top of it, baby This is why you’re here Close enough, anyhow, just 11 miles west of Castle Rock In a pasture, right off 79 The middle of the middle of the heart of this great land There’s a sign This is a sacred place Up there in the hills, the vast, ponderosa-feathered batholith You can see it from space Two-billion-year-old exposed rock, rising from the prairie A faint blue shape on the horizon When approaching from a distance But seen close at hand ‘grim and black’ Paha sapa ‘Savage cliffs and precipices … fantastic forms Sometimes resembling towns, some castellated fortresses …’ A sacred place Custer once came through, in the summer of ’74 With that moustache and golden hair And espied here the multitude of flowers 17 varieties in a space of 20 feet One could pick seven different kinds at dinner Without ever leaving one’s seat – It was a strange sight, he wrote To glance back at the advancing columns of cavalry And behold the men with beautiful bouquets in their hands A sacred place The Great White Fathers dwell in these hills Noses and foreheads blasted out of granite Crazy Horse, too, 30 stories high An enormous pod of migmatite glowering east Big chiefs everywhere On every street corner in town Life-size bronze likenesses See the chicana brushing President Van Buren, bless her Bless the chicana in pink rayon, the dutiful city worker Brushing the statue with a toothbrush in the night There’s Nixon at St Joseph and 5th Seated, hands folded on his lap, the way he did In the midst of ‘delicate negotiations with Mao’ This is what it says at the base Bless them, Nixon and Mao both Men of peace, soldiers of God The bronze is cold in the High Plains night The eyes they gaze out of are holes Here, at the exact dead centre of America Or close enough, just north of here, off Highway 79 The buffalo roam in these hills Paha sapa The bison graze in the shadow of these hills One angry bull tosses a Harley 30 feet in the air A big fat biker, attached to it, 30 feet as well The sacred bison He would have ridden among the sacred bison, the biker Ridden as if he were one of their own – Tatanka, Tatanka, cries Kevin Costner – Tatanka, concurs Kicking Bird – Tatanka, agrees Wind In His Hair Bless Kevin Costner I saw that one on the wide screen, in Dolby Surround Sound Kevin Costner stayed in this hotel Babe Ruth and Calvin Coolidge, too This is a sacred place I have come here from far away After many years of wandering Disillusion And found surcease here from all my cares Surcease here from doubt Here, at the centre of it all On a great slab of Mesozoic rock This sanctified ground Here, yes, here The dead solid centre of the universe At the heart of the heart of America

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