Thomas Edison, beat poet

When he wasn't busy inventing little gizmos like the light bulb or the phonograph, or electrocuting elephants, Thomas Edison relaxed by writing surreal, jazzy poetry that would've done Ginsberg proud. Read the following untitled piece, and you can almost hear the bongos in the background.

A Bowery angel smoking a palm tree stubbed his toe on a comet, and pimples came out on his toe nail as big as mountains. He swore so much that God made eight new planets out of the conversation & peopled and fauna'd and flora'd them eccentrically. The almighty has a vein of humor. He made these planets & peopled them to give amusements to beings on the rest of the celestial plantation. The men were 800 miles long & 1/4 inch thick. They slept on telegraph poles, and animals with bodies as big as a pea with 900 eyes each as big as a saucer lived on these long men by catching them by the feet and sucking them in like macaroni.

Man, that cat they called the "wizard of Menlo Park" was, like, outta sight! To dig more of Edison's real gone prose poems, bop on over to NPR's website to listen to an interview with Blaine McCormick, editor of the Edison Papers Project. (Click the image above to purchase McCormick's book, At Work with Thomas Edison.)

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