Lew Welch

Lew Welch and Allen Ginsberg outside City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco, October 30, 1963, (the day of the Madame Nhu protest) – photo c. John Doss Atlantis Was Crete  a poem for magick-dabblers

A long time ago, on a clear day,
hairy little men with greedy eyes sat 
looking across blue water     fingering 
sharp bronze & breathing quick:

         "Sissy Island! 
         Bull Jumpers! Their females lift their breasts in  
         cages of silver . . . 
         One took feathers & wax and stuck them into 
         wings & his boy fell all the down from
         Sun (like anybody could have said he would)"

So they sacked it. 
Burned it down to 
Myth and sheep farms ever since

Dreamed Atlantis in our later brains

You can walk about that palace now
flush, I suppose, those oldest toilets in the world & 
eat a dish of fish-head soup with
natives looted 35 hundred years ago

who do not know or  
give a damn about it