If I was a girl I would be a
hardcore bisexual punkass bitch girl with short spiky purple green hair
I’d be kinky as all hell
I’d wear tight leather and spikes and nuts and bolts and chains
a stark contrast to
my current long original blonde pseudo-hippie estilo.

Because guys are expected to have impeccably trimmed hair
I grow mine long and messy.
Girls are expected to have long free-flowing hair,
so if I was a girl, I’d cut mine short
make it furiously bitchin’.
Guys are expected to rage with instinctive, aggressive testosteronal tendencies
and so I am a pacifist.
But if I was a girl I’d be one
rambunctious
rhinoceros.

I like to do the unexpected. It’s in my nature to rebel against.
and I think the establishment and status quo wouldn’t have such a firm grip on our state of mental or physical freedom if this was inherent in everybody’s nature and we’d all been acting on it for the past hundred, thousand, million years.

And when would I choose to live if I didn’t live now?
I don’t much like living now.
the Cultures the People,
not so invigorating.
But maybe that’s the thing I like most about now
the Feeling that I have to do something about it
to completely overthrow the state of affairs.
But I still fantasize about living in the 60’s
on an ecologically self-sufficient tree-hugging commune
just the way I think all living things are meant to live.
And the anti-war protests
were so much better then
the music too
trippy like nothing before nor after

I would love to have been one of the catalysts who
spurred
lived through
embodied
the hippie revolution.

Timothy Leary? but I’m not into science
or LSD for that matter
Jerry Garcia? but I don’t have any outstanding musical talent
Maybe Allen Ginsberg. The poet of the three.
That would be my ideal role, my ideal era.

We can’t decide what our gender shall be.
We can’t decide when we shall be born.
But we can decide how we shall live
and take strong action to forge our role in society
and history.

And that was why I was happy when Peter Chellnik and the East Coast Jazz Explosion Trio told me I was going to be the next Allen Ginsberg.
I was coming home from an all-day-long poetry marathon/benefit on Christopher Street.
Peter Chelnik had been there,
did a 45 minute set
reading his poems while the band played.
I knew him from the open-mic at Cornelia Street Café
He’d dug my stuff the few times he’d heard me read.
Finished his set,
announced an open-mic to close the night,
so I read a poem protesting the recent nomination of George Bush and Tony Blair for the Nobel Peace Prize.
I was hyped by the jazz,
so I read well,
was accepted by the audience.
Peter offered me a ride uptown with the band in the drummer’s $300 van named Bessie,
so we all talked for a while about the poetry,
which feature poets were good which weren’t
discussion of the general NYC poetry scene
mentioning of some of our favorite poets (Rumi to Kerouac to Lao Tzu),
listened to a tape recording of the day’s performance.

And they told me they’d liked my stuff a lot,
maybe I could gig with them some time
get paid to read my poems
while they dish out some Coltrane to groove to.
Said something about Miles Davis being discovered at only 17 years old,
said I could be the Miles Davis of poetry
or the next Allen Ginsberg.

And come to think of it,
I hadn’t read too much Ginsberg at the time
But I know
he was a poet,
politically charged,
he led a movement.
It all sounded like a pretty decent gig to me
and I didn’t even have to
travel through time
or get a sex change
to hear it.
I only need to be passionate about something
and pursue it.