beatnik threads

[revolutionR]

I follow the example of the beatnik myth
time is a circle or does not exist, or has shifted
like the sands on the beach of eternity
I have written in poems before my first memory
was coming across the desert
in the back of my parents car
it is like I'm still sitting in the back seat
looking at myself, and reading a poem of life

I follow the beatnik thread
from my childhood,
that spoof Hollywood movie with the poet
and a thirteen year old sees bongos and cool
words being recited into the crazy cool night

this is where I take my signal where the beat comes
where the poetry surfaced through the cracks of society
all the things that are secret somehow find their way
into the poetry however obscure, in the beat days
began to surface through the jazzy words

we come from a kind of hula hoop insanity
things we thought were cool are not so cool
take me to your leader is no joke, and doctors who smoke
on television to tell us their cigarette is better

what we thought was cool, was different ways of saying
things that did not make sense in the usual sense
and that was more sensed in the beatnik lingo
and if you could not dig it, then you were a square

what has happened in our world since those beatnik times
when the living end was out of sight and out of mind
when poets drank vino from old shoes and walked
on the moon that hung over San Francisco
and made the poems that lived in cheap hotels
and wandered through book stores of the mind
and into infinite alleyways where the hep cats go