Dennis J Bernstein
In a bedroom with Allen Ginsberg across the street
from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,
circa 1979
right up front I told him
I wasn't gay, but I wanted to fuck
his knowledge, take his full mind
in my mouth, up my ass, in any orifice.
He winked and we held hands;
No need to hump, he howled;
How about a walk through Kerouac's eyes.
**
Too young to know
what god looked like,
I turned on my tape recorder
and tried to record Allen's smile.
Silence filled my tape for hours:
The walls started rhyming with the moon—
Bio
Dennis J Bernstein is author, most recently, of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom, which received the 2012 Literary Achievement Award from Artist Embassy International. His poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, Chimaera, Bat City Review, The Progressive, Texas Observer, ZYZZYVA, Red River Review, etc Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Color Purple, writes that Special Ed "...is art turned to us through the eyes of love." Carol Smaldino says in The Huffington Post that the poems remind us how "...we are all connected to the sorrows as well as to the grandness of being human..."Bernstein, who holds a master's degree in Education, has also taught media literacy and special education, working in some of the poorest communities in New York City and New York State. He has also taught writing and reading literacy in various prisons in New York City and New York State, for the CCNY/John Jay College and Mercy College.