The Beatnik Café’

Cigarettes, coffee, a ****** beret
Blue smoke and Blue Mountain, blue verse, blue rhyme --
O Come to the side-street beatnik café;
Here present-tense yourself; caffeine the time

Here order your Bacon very well Donne
And jam your java with croissants and Keats
Orate from Spenser; groove with Tennyson
Tap out a line of Seafarer-four beats

Tap out a manifesto; everyone does
Pulp-print Red rags yelp “Revolution Now!”
The typewriter is holy, and Up the Fuzz!
Bongo that Kerouac, and Howl, but how?

Bongo that beat, oh, yeah, it’s crazzzzy, man
Sheaffer that rhythm, cat; Parker that line
Ferlinghetti your truth to a yellow pad
Sharpen your verbs to a rebel design

Sharpen your verbs from a bottle of ink
Light up a Camel; blow intellectual smoke
Teach the ****** bourgeois how they should think
Grey-suited capitalists – what a joke!

L’Envoi – Time Slouches On

Tee-shirted capitalists joke in Mandarin
The latest chained coffee’s inside the mall
English and Apples are original sin
On glowing screens where the pale pixels crawl

And no one crawls through rhythm, rhyme, or verse,
Or bongos out an existential cry
For poetry is dead; the twitters terse
Reduce the ancient loves to I, me, my.