Bu'gly

Bean Newton

Issue 9 * Summer 2002

As often as Newton attempted to play off of the Ginsberg classic "Howl," he was not very often successful. Until now, nothing longer than the fragmentary attempts previously published in this journal were known. Recent research into old files in the Newton family home (old filing cabinets, specifically, whose fascinating contents could be cause for analysis - perhaps comprising an entire book) has unearthed a much more fully developed take on the aforementioned beat poem.

We present it here in its entirety, as written (or as closely as Newton's often problematic handwriting will allow). "Bu'gly," after much research into obscure slang, has been discovered to be a compaction of the phrase "butt-ugly," the third most ugly thing there could be, with "fu'gly," a compaction of "fucking ugly" being the penultimate in ugliness, and ultimate ugliness being deemed "fu'bu'gly," a compaction of "fucking butt-ugly."

Special thanks to "Bubs" and "Chee-to" at the Fluid Flipper Arcade for their linguistic assistance. -- E.W. Wilder

Bu'gly

I slaw the best limes of my generation into meringues, pies, the dies are cast to the shadow of the last Heathrow night! Stop scratching, Hernando, there will be no powder tonite, no powder just soul-searching fu'gliness, deep-scratching fu'bu'gliness, the pungent scent of an all-day foamy to the rooftop Colosseum, to the God's wide eye in the steel-grey sky, to the menacing heights of the police-helicopter zone, the place where shingles get nailed on the houses, tar gets laid down, seedlings grow in gutters from the cottonwoods nearby. I have seen them literate and well-trained, drunken and stooped-over phonographs playing "My Melancholy Baby" in two-four time due to a defect of the belt. I have seen them rescued from wells, from overseas raids on Taliban-controlled caves in the middle of a decimated, desiccated landscape. I have seen them bouncing off walls at raves and police-stations, green-haired and trancing, smoked-out and falling out of Dodge vans onto the streets of Leadville out of season. I have known them to hurtle down sidewalks on monkey-bikes tripped-out on licit medication, Percocet, caffeine and wine. I've seen them lay on tracks for the idiocy of it, slam-dance to glam bands and speed metal, to punk and Puccini, to the dancing valves of alcohol-fueled funny-cars and gold-tone Aztec lo-riders sporting Jesus as the Jaguar Prince on the hood hopping down Broadway at midnight. I have known them in the backseats of Buicks, felt up their soft tufts of pubic hair and breasts like white gold in the sodium arc-light, Amerasian princesses and Welsh goddesses twice removed. The Indian blood did not move me until I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. A doctor's son, he was the rich kid 'til he ditched that track to follow The Dead. And great minds aren't born alike; some are poured into molds and crack later on like the Bell that rang out liberty, and some grow up free as the weeds and have to twist themselves around textbooks and the thighs of fallen angels--and I've seen these too, too soon gone to seed and spread out over straight fields of hell that are the city streets, the rows of desks at our institutes of higher learning.

This much is certain: we'd left the building even before they'd poured the stucco.