Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – 1997) was one of the best American poets to “follow Walt Whitman’s beard…”
Ginsberg’s role in the Beat Generation and subsequently in the counterculture of the 60s and 70s was incomparable. His consistently confessional and political poetry will stand among the best of the 20th C.
In Back of the Real
railroad yard in San Jose
I wandered desolate
in front of a tank factory
and sat on a bench
near the switchman’s shack.
A flower lay on the hay on
the asphalt highway
—the dread hay flower
I thought—It had a
brittle black stem and
corolla of yellowish dirty
spikes like Jesus’ inchlong
crown, and a soiled
dry center cotton tuft
like a used shaving brush
that’s been lying under
the garage for a year.
Yellow, yellow flower, and
flower of industry,
tough spiky ugly flower,
flower nonetheless,
with the form of the great yellow
Rose in your brain!
This is the flower of the World.
— San Jose, 1954
via Ordinary Finds
ralph lichtensteiger says: 
r3ckon 