The Guardian‘s Paul Lewis wrote a great profile of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ years as mayor of Burlington, Vermont. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there, including excerpts from Sanders’ correspondence with foreign heads of state, but let’s cut right to the chase: Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem for Bernie Sanders in 1986.
It goes like this:
Socialist snow on the streets
Socialist talk in the Maverick bookstore
Socialist kids sucking socialist lollipops
Socialist poetry in socialist mouths
—aren’t the birds frozen socialists?
Aren’t the snowclouds blocking the airfield
Social Democratic Appeasement?
Isn’t the socialist sky owned by
the socialist sun?
Earth itself socialist, forests, rivers, lakes
furry mountains, socialist salt
in oceans?
Isn’t this poem socialist? It doesn’t
belong to me anymore.
I think we know James Franco’s next movie.