Romania, a Ginsberg pastiche

România

                        (A Ginsberg Pastiche )

       Romania, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

            Romania four thousand and two hundred lei in my pocket.

                                                                                    -January 17, 1995.

Which is about how much my metaphysical past and present is worth.

I can’t stand my own mind and imagination.

            Romania when will we cease our wise cannibalism?

           You can wash your hair with your postrevolutionary victory.

           The Revolution was one thing, but the Post-Revolution is something else.

           The Post-Revolution is a tin can that rattles.

           A hoax with lumpen revolutionaries

and scurvy knave parvenus…

           A shlock shoe polish.

           An historic fart from historic farts.

           The filth and the rascaldom of a

new-old generations of unwashed toad-eaters

fair-weather ‘liticians.

           I don’t feel good. I’m going to throw up.

           I won’t write this poem till I can come to my senses.

          Like this I can’t come to my senses

          Romania when will you be sober?

          When will you throw away your fucking proletkult rags?

The vulgarity of democracy and the democracy of vulgarity.

          When will you look directly inside yourself from this muddy grave?

          When will you be worthy of your millions poets?

          Romania why are you bookshelves full of tears?

          Romania when will you send missionaries to Moldavia?

          I’m sick of your Mafia restorations.

          When can I penetrate the pages of the newspaper with MY TRUTH and with my own personal charm?

Romania after all it is you and I who are the Perfection and the next world which escapes us

         Your machinery is too much for me

         You make me wish I were out of time and maybe I am out of time

         There must be some other way to settle my consciences’ dispute

between my earthly and my holy hypostasis

         Romania you’ve given yourself a hemorrhage

         My friends and brothers are scattered throughout the whole world and I don’t think they’ll come back

It’s sinister.

         Romania you have a sinister vocation or is this some form of practical joke?

I’m trying to come to the point.

I refuse to give up my obsession.

Romania don’t nurse me.

I know what I’m doing.

 Romania the plum blossoms are falling there’s an image that I think would be worthy of me

      I haven’t read the newspaper for months

everyday someone is judged for all kinds of crimes that are dismissed

      Romania you’re becoming a case disnussed.

      On the other hand Romania, I feel sentimental about the C.A.P. pensioners

I feel sentimental about the pensioners and kids lost drifting.

       You know Romania, I used to be a hippy when I was a kid

I wore old blue jeans, flowered shirts, long hair and I listened to the Doors

I don’t regret it.

Even now I waste my nights at the jazz club whenever I have the opportunity.

While the days are long , I would like to stay home and to gaze

at the roses in the political trough

What evil have flowers done to you Romania?

When I pass through the Stalinist slums

I need to get drunk and become a misogynist.

I keep myself from talking about humanism.

About this I’m certain. Trouble’s coming…

You should have seen me reading the Party newspaper “Scanteia”

My SRI angel thinks I’m perfectly right

I won’t say the “Our Father”, like others, in front of the TV cameras

     I have mystical visions and comic vibrations.

     Romania I still haven’t told you yet what “thieves”

     did to my neighbor after he came back from the Revolution.

     Romania I still haven’t told you yet how one really dies in a Revolution…

Romania I still haven’t told you yet how one really dies after a Revolution…

      I’m talking to you.

      Are you thinking about letting your emotional life be run by Romanian Radio-Television?

I’m obsessed by Romanianradiotelevision.

Every evening I watch the news

The screen stares at me every time

I slink behind the corner of the city library

I follow the broadcast in the corridors of the City Council

The WC buzzes with impatience to see the press conference

My sheets are wet from all the tossing and turning in my sleep

       I have nightmares of neutrality in politics

       I have reproofs of conscience from this lack of discernment

       It’s always telling me about responsibility

Business people are serious

Politicians are serious

Honorary citizens are serious

        Everybody’s serious but me

        I’ve gone crazy.

        It crosses my mind that I represent Romania.

      I’m talking to myself again:

      Hungary is rising up against me

      Europe might be a lost cause.

      I’d better reconsider my national resources

      My national resources consist of two or three spiritual knots, a few thousand sleepless nights and an unpublishable impossible to translate confidential literature that moves at ‘89000 kilometers per hour and 25.000.000 insane asylums.

       I have nothing to say about the “interviews” by the Securitate  not about the millions of under-privileged who live in the files of my humanitarian foundation under the intangible brilliance of my myriad suns.

       I’ve denied access to books in the nether regions.

       I’ve abolished the discreet miracle of friendship

       The Surveillance Department has a new headquarters.

again, Timisoara is the next to go.

        My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m an orthodox-ecumenic.

        Romania how could I write a holy psalm suitable for your block-headed simpletons?

        I’ll continue like those who got rich from the Revolution

My strophes are as bright as their neon signs

and my strophes are even filled with blue blood.

       Romania  I’ll sell you strophes for 25.000 lei each

at 500 lei less than your indexed , flat inhaled strophe

      Romania free us from this cheeky masquerade of party ghosts. Count until ten and stop!

      Romania save the Moldavian loyalists

      Romania our intellectuals mustn’t emigrate or I’ll just remain us bozos…

Romania, I’m the prick of the political independent!

Here’s a confession:

Romania when I was ten

“The Party “  made me a pioneer

It took me to Great National Defilings

I ate hot dogs, meatballs with mustard, cotton candy and roast sunflower seeds

I wiped my snot with the Red Tie

I sang patriotic songs until I turned blue and I stared at activists

And everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers

it was all so sincere

You have no idea what a good thing The Party was during ‘68

Gheorghe Maurer was an imposing old man, a real “leader”

Ceausescu made me cry then about Czechoslovakia.

Once I even saw Ion Iliescu clearly.

Each of them should have been “ a man of his time”.

Later on I understood: of everything that’s red, I like the wine.

        I say to myself:

        Romania you really don’t want to call in the miners again

        Romania those are the evil foreigners.

.       Those are the foreigners, those are the foreigners and that one’s the King.

        and those are the foreigners.

        The West wants to choke us alive. The force of the west is mad.

        (It really is mad)

It wants to get its hands on Caracal

         The King wants to steal from us

our blue collar slums

He wants to saturate the national press with his family’s “boudoir stories”

He wants our metalworks to be Switzerland

His gigantic family to own our Agricultural Machines and Tractors inherited from The Party. That’s no good. Ug-uh.

          He’ll make the gypsies study the civil society code and architecture.

‘cause democracy needs big black gypsies in big black cars. Ooweeee.

          He’ll make the rest of us work eight hours a day. Help!!!

          Romania this is quite serious!

          Romania this is really too much!

          Romania this is the impression I get from looking at the television set.

          Romania is this correct?

          Even better, as you say, I should put my nose to the grindstone

I should stop farting about and earn some honest money

        I have too much time.

        I’m too impatient.

        It’s true however I don’t want to join the Patriotic Salvation Army

nor to glorify the utility of

Development Many-sided Internationalism

        I’m farsighted and obsessed anyway

and I can hardly breathe.

        Romania

with all my love

        I’m putting my gregarious shoulder to the wheel

                                                                                       Timişoara ‘95

(Translation:  Marcel Cornis-Pope,  Virginia Commonwealth University)

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EXPLANATIONS:

3.000 = 1 US $;

C.A.P. = Agricultural Production Coop. ;

roses = symbols of some contemporary Romanian parties… ;

Scânteia = …means “Glitter” – top communist newspaper;

SRI = Romanian Intelligence Agency;

In this instance “thieves” refers to the fact that Romanians fell as if “the old red forces” absconded with the Revolution

25.000.000 = Romania’s population

Caracal= an insignificant town on the Danube

P.S. :

in 1995: 1 US $ = 3.000 lei

in 1999: 1 US $ = 16.000 lei