Asphodel

O dear sweet rosy
unattainable desire
…how sad, no way
to change the mad
cultivated asphodel, the
visible reality

and skin’s appalling
petals- how inspired
to be so lying in the living
room drunk naked
and dreaming, in the absence
of electricity …
over and over eating the low root
of the aphodel,
gray fate…

rolling in generation
on the flowery couch
as on a bank in Arden-
my only rose tonite’s the treat
of my own nudity

fall, 1953

© Howl, Allen Ginsberg,