Allen Ginsberg’s “HOWL”
(For Sean Spicer)

Sean Spicer! I am with you in Washington
Where you seem very angry with members of the press

I am with you in Washington
where you must feel very strange

I am with you in Washington
Where even the tall bushes of the White House press office cannot conceal you from the flashbulbs of journalists

I am with you in Washington
where you speak to us through our televisions, providing facts and alternative facts

I am with you in Washington
Where you were once beloved by children and President Bush as the White House Easter Bunny, harbinger of springtime and Cadbury eggs

I am with you in Washington
Where your boss has flown away to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend for endless rounds of golf, leaving you again to stand at your lonely
podium in D.C. to field questions about Russia and wiretapping and the President’s tweets, about why he refuses to release his golf scores to the public

I am with you in Washington
Where I, too, struggle with my symbolic space, adrift on an existential quest of my own imagining, since the Inauguration when a cold January wind blew across the land speaking of tombstones and American carnage

I am with you in Washington
Where your American flag pin has been turned upside-down by parties unknown, and nobody can explain how or why, or if you are trying to tell us something important, something vital about the state of the Republic

I am with you in Washington
Where traffic scoots away forever into the beltways of the city, rushing like a river into the night, to gerrymandered districts neither of us have ever been to or even wish to go

I am with you in Washington
where your inner child may peer out occasionally through the dusty windows of the soul, despite all that has happened and continues to happen across the nation

I am with you in Washington
Where you are a restless spirit haunting the television cameras of the nation, everywhere and nowhere at once, beaming down into our homes across the lonely and desolate highways holding the nation together, across these United States

I am with you in Washington
Where you seek the boughs of the shrubberies outside your office, that you may disappear among the greenery and landscaping of the world, absorbed into the grass and the American soil like Walt Whitman intended, to finally be one with its land and people