अंकल अल TwentyTwo

The Big Bang Beat

The big beat of 1956 rolls through like a plague
Hungry wolves following the scent of verbs
Action words for the action set
Eisenhower Dreams shattered like cheap carnival glass
The beat moves on through the deserts
Through the landscape faded and peeling
Through the heat of endless sands
Deserts dry and crying for a voice
Cigarette smoke chokes on human carnage in nightclub din
North Beach crawls with the worm of change
Slithering like a snake of dissent
Rolling like a plague of one eyed jacks
Whiskey jacks and hearts on fire
Desire of a darker thought
Dreams that come with the midnight hours
The desperate hours
Hands possessed and writing in tongues
Strippers grind to go go go beats
Sweaty brass poles dripping with lust
Wake up America
Your rose colored glasses have turned to dust
Like the dust bowl depression and Oakie caravans
Pushing forward to the promised land
Promises of alcohol driven frenzy on summer nights
Men and women, eyes dripping with sin
North Beach calls it's siren's song
Grinding to go go go beats
Grinding on the pole
Words grinding under my pen's weight
Fingers burning from thoughts on fire
A big country filled with hungry minds
In search of the spoken word, a holy grail
A lost horizon
Wisdom rolling out from ball point pens
Mapping out the roadways of the searching mind
In search of the new frontier
New Territories in a brave new world
Held together with know how and gumption
Grinding words in a grinding world
Ever grinding, ever changing
Grinding
From the farms of Iowa to the streets of Boston
Searchers on the road
Seekers of uncomfortable truths
Spoken in broken tongues
Grinding to the go go go beats
In the clamor of the Hungry eye
Eye of the storm
Jazz beat booms in muted tones
Trumpet spiraling into red brick landscapes
Drum beats like Gene Krupa pounding skins til the hours fade
The desperate hours between heaven and hell
Fade into that in between time when the shadows fall
Strangely against the shops of Stockton Street
Shadows that walk along the gallows pole
Like condemned men searching for salvation
Like wisdom being spun from a spider's web
Spun out into silk of hard luck
Always changing, yet always the same
Spun against the blood red moon
Grinding, always grinding
Moving always moving
The web sways in the fog of night, cool and moist
Inviting like the Siren's song, sung when streets lie barren
Void of the life that flows through them like blood
Jazz club beats break the silent fog like fragile glass
Shattered into a sea of glimmering jewels caught in flux
Caught in flux by lone street lights
Casting shadows like fate
Illuminating
Like a photograph stealing the soul
The big beat bangs forth into the fog
Calling out to the terminally hip
Singing to the rats and roaches
Below in the dark heart of the city
Down in the bowels of a no man's land
Crying out, an empty epic journey of ancestral temptation
Temptation to sip from the cup of fate
Your words crush the the blurred line of the righteous
Words that echo like fallen footsteps upon concrete
Concrete, steel and sweat carved out in urban landscapes
Carved with blistered hands
Hand of our grand parents
Hand of tradition
Ancestral hands, hard and wrinkled
Your voice, now ours fades out in empty streets
Grinding to the go go go beats
Hipster junkies of literary opiates swoon
Swoon like a drunken money style sway
Sway like a tree in a storm
Clustered like grapes upon a newborn vine
Clinging to the sticky sweet sugar of life
Their cigarette smoke twisting like leaves between their seed
Their vision like the architecture of sullen design
Shaping the new territory with blistered hands
Blistered by a withering sun somewhere behind false horizons
Fires burn within their eyes, cat like slits on hazel domes
Tomes passed around in battered composition books
Eisenhower days cracking under the midnight sun
Shattered under gravity's arm of justice
Swift, without mercy
The big bang beat spews forth
Washing over the masses like rabies and viral foam
Enveloping in it's wake all that was
All that will ever be
The big bang beat lost in Milton's paradise
Strangers in a promised land of yesterday's milk
Of tomorrow's honey
Sticky and dripping with adventure unseen
Searching for a peg on which to hang the hat
The hat of worn wisdom and ancestor's ghosts
The hat worn by those before us
Leather cracked with aged efforts upon thy face
Thread laid barren against the smokey landscape
They wear it well, as they grind
Grinding to the go go go beats
Grinding down the complacent set
Grinding down the rose colored tears
Grinding to the go go go beats
Grinding to the go go go beats