Epitaphs

The poets of the East Village
belonged to the ages,
rolled their joints with pages
torn from phonebooks,
and nightly drank a bottle of rum
and drifted high
above the city,
and one by one
burst like roman candles -
so fame bright lit each one,
so fortune slow to come,
the critics deaf and dumb,
the poets wrote to haunt
the coming dark
of a generation.

Greenwich Village poet Saint Paul
suffered a fall, when he slipped
on dog dropping in the middle
of Bleecker Street;
half-conscious, wrote two sonnets
on the way to the hospital.

Jeremy "the wretch" Thackeray
slashed his wrists last night
with a piece of glass
as he was riding in a taxi.
He was taken to Mt Sinai Hospital,
where the nurses on the nightshift
alas, all smoked grass
and asked for autographs.

Queen Elizabeth macho-feminist
made complex all that was simple,
smoked two vials of crack
then shot herself
in the left temple.

The late poet Godfrey Mumpower
won two Pulitzers, a gold medal
from the Vatican assured his fate,
though his obituary recalled his arrest
for urinating in the offering plate
at St Patrick's cathedral.

Tom Hopkins dressed in women's clothing,
leaped off the Brooklyn Bridge,
freed himself from greed and loathing.

Hubert "the Swami" made love
to his Mommy, wrote a long poem
about it all. Seventeen weeks
on the bestseller list.

Christmas day an oncoming uptown E-train
crushed the brain of poet William B. Brothers
and spilled the contents of his skull -
a sheaf of papers, two rubbers,
a barking dog, three thousand lovers.

Ernest Slyman

If you've any comments on his poem, Ernest Slyman would be pleased to hear from you.