My best friend at Wesleyan University, already a better poet than Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg at age 22. Held Norman O. Brown and Richard Wilbur spellbound with stories he told at Downey House. Free-associated for fifteen minutes on the "Great Truffle Blight."

Became the lover of Joanie Tessler, a friend of mine from South Orange, New Jersey who visited me at Wesleyan. He met my best friend from Columbia High School, Tom Baum when Tom visited Wesleyan and they became spellbound with one another ("for genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand").

 Hung around at the West End Bar on 114th and Broadway after he graduated--with my High School friend Jeff Lilien. Couldn't adjust to the "real world."

 Committed suicide at age 33.

If you remember Spike, write to me at rakoenigsberg@libraryofsocialscience.com or bookexhibits@libraryofsocialscience.com
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VISION

On my fabulous journey

I saw warriors grappling in the bowels of 2nd Avenue

I saw puzzled poets with leaky umbrellas

I saw whole schools of highschool teachers sidestroking westward

off the coast of neverneverland

I saw kings mowing lawns in yellow dungarees

I saw planets bouncing together like maladjusted pingpongballs

I saw angels playing the outfield in Boston and making errors

I saw thighs closing like scissors on many bedspreads

I saw manacled geniuses in Harlem and in the Vatican and in the

Pentagon sleeping in their chains

I saw seagulls and other birds justify everything with great

splattering swooping inspired runs on various penthouses

I saw the seagulls prudently returning to the sea

I saw my own true love standing in the midair between Moses and Elias

and I have seen my true love’s face glow

with a strange and radiant light

I saw horizons and housetops and sunsets that you will never

see from hilltops that you will never know purely

in the hope that you might someday know and have given

up and come back my food ran out but I’ll return to all

that and some I cannot tell for

once

I saw the unseen and I felt a single silent secret silver hand

touch me

as never before