Laraine Pinnone

After a very long hiatus, Laraine Pinnone returned to writing through attending the motivating innovative ABTP workshops and programs. Laraine has had a fiction piece published in The Platform Review, Fall 2025, and she has a poem that will be featured in the 2026 Moving Words film project.

What Thoughts I Have of You Today (POEM)

Dedicated to the forebearer of Modern American Poetry, Allen Ginsberg

Oh, Allen Ginsberg, if you had lived

today would be your glorious 100th Birthday

I remember talking to you I remember listening as your lilting sonorous voice

filled the cafes with your solid lyric presence, so many times

I saw you read your epic whirling poems, sing your dervish songs,

chant your holy holy holy mantras, entranced by the ellipses of your lines

I still have those small paperback books of your poetry

that sold new at City Lights book store for 75 cents or a dollar

and each time you signed your name in one my copies of Howl,

you transformed the sacred halo of Howl’s O into a ring

of petals creating a flower in black ink, I have three

I remember the gray day I sat in East Village cafe Veselka 

I remember I waved to you over a cup of tea

as you on littered sidewalk walked by the window,

I saw your compassionate eyes squinting through your round eyeglasses

peering at me for recognition through dusty glass cafe window

I remember you were wearing classic rumpled suit jacket white shirt tie

I wasn’t anyone, not one of your cadre of famous fellow writers

but you saw me and smiling waved hello back

then hurrying on your way perhaps to another neon fruit supermarket,

where I ever since also go shopping for images.