Anti-Heroin Chic
  • Home
  • About
  • Blog
  • Music
  • Art
  • Comedy
  • About Our Contributors
  • Masthead
  • Issues
  • About our contributors - 2019
  • About Our Contributors - 2020
  • About Our Contributors - 2021
  • Home
  • About
  • Blog
  • Music
  • Art
  • Comedy
  • About Our Contributors
  • Masthead
  • Issues
  • About our contributors - 2019
  • About Our Contributors - 2020
  • About Our Contributors - 2021
Search by typing & pressing enter

YOUR CART

​

4/12/2020 2 Comments

Poetry by Charles Rammelkamp

Picture
                     much0 CC



The Trip

“Think about your future, baby, forget about your used to be.” – “Confessin’ the Blues,” Jay McShann, Walter Brown

“I had a father complex,” Nena laughed –
more self-conscious than amused –
“so even though he was twenty years older
and my first impression of Tim
was he was
overweight, boring, full of himself,
we married, went to India together
for the enlightenment.
But it didn’t last even a year.”

Ever since the photographer Parkinson
discovered her in Stockholm
when she was just fourteen,
Nena’d never had time
to  think things through,
the big questions about life, purpose:
the whirlwind modeling career,
Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar,
the Village types, her movie
with Edie Sedgwick, Warhol’s superstar actress,
the disastrous marriage with Tim –
Pennebaker’s You’re Nobody Til Somebody Loves You. 

“I met Robert in the kitchen at Millbrook,
when I was begging Tim for a divorce.
He was trying to persuade Tim to stop
taking so many drugs.
Learning about Buddhism from Robert felt like déjà vu.
What serendipity, meeting my husband there!
It’s like a skateboard is hovering
just outside your door.
You can close the door,
or you can jump on and take a ride.”

​



Working on a Noble Cause

Looking for an alternative
to bullets and bombs, 
during the Cold War,
Lieutenant Colonel James Ketchum, MD,
experimented with psychedelics 
on hundreds of healthy soldiers –
drugs that caused delirium –
PCP, LSD, BZ.

Though volunteers weren’t told
what they were taking,
how they might react –
“not really informed at all,”
according to the chief medical officer –
Ketchum declared they’d
“performed a patriotic service,
not guinea pigs at all.”

Ketchum built padded cells
for test subjects taking drugs,
filmed stoned soldiers
in a makeshift “outpost,”
like a Hollywood movie set.

Another brainchild, Project Dork,
examined using BZ on the battlefield
to stupefy enemy soldiers.
No need to shoot them;
just get them wrecked!

But still, he said he struggled
with the duties of a doctor
and those of a soldier, convinced
“I am doing more the right thing
than the wrong thing.”





Attempting to Turn on Tillich

Leary and Alpert tried to recruit
people from Harvard Divinity School
to replace the psychotic model the psychologists used 
with a mystic model,
to explain the psychedelic experience.

Harvey Cox, author of the bestselling Secular City,
almost tempted but turned them down,
though they’d mentioned the religious imagery
Concord Prison inmates had used
to describe the experience.
“Some are seeing hell,” they said,
“Others are having beatific visions.’

One morning they encountered the great Christian existentialist,
Paul Tillich, having breakfast in a restaurant,
invited him to join the research.

The grand German theologian, who dropped wisdom
like a groundskeeper scattering seed –
Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone.
Solitude expresses the glory of being alone. 
The courage to be
is the courage to accept oneself, 
in spite of being unacceptable –
likewise declined the offer.

“Do you really think that this
is for someone like me?” he growled.
“Someone who grew up in a medieval German town
with all its culture?
Do you really think all that tradition
can be found in the form of a pill?”

“Yes!” Leary and Alpert exclaimed.  



​
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Me and Sal Paradise, was published last year by FutureCycle Press. Two full-length collections are forthcoming in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books.
2 Comments
Robert Cooperman
4/17/2020 12:53:17 pm

Excellent poems, esp. the moral ambiguity of the second one.

Reply
Clarinda
4/17/2020 01:05:16 pm

Love these poems! They remind me of Edgar Lee masters and Edwin Arlington Robinson. In a great way

Reply

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview.

    Archives

    December 2024
    November 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    March 2023
    December 2022
    October 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    August 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.