Jack of Clubs - Tobacco
16 - Beat Poem
"It Was My Comfort In Those Miserable Times"
When perched at what seems like the end of the world
When striking another match out of habit
When shaking not sure for what reason
When impotently watching pass young milk legs
When staring dagger-eyed ravenous, ranting at a romantic rival moon
Or kneeling before it begging forgiveness for broken oaths
After slithering like a pair of serpents sniffing each other with our tongues, aware as I watched that moment fall backwards into the kaleidoscope of memory
When holed up in a tired tobacco going-nowhere-novel room, listening to John Lennon sing about Sir Walter Raleigh and being tired
At those furious times of wanting control, peacefully lighting a cigarette in order to give up six minutes of my life and by the time it burned to the filter losing more than six minutes
Or now
In this bar
In a fury of coughs
Feeling at once connected
To the past and present
To all those wanting control
To trenches smelling of excitement and excrement, flames hidden in infantrymen fingers
To the lungs of a tense child in a somber family restaurant in Osaka, Japan
To the thick haze in Terminal C of Charles De Gaulle Airport
To businessmen and women like huddled pigeons puffing away below the subway overhang of rainy Manhattan morning
To their bosses in silent towers savoring lonely cigars
To the quivering lips of blind revolutionaries, backs resting against Argentinean brickwork
To the quivering lips of their young executioners
To the underside of the doomed fingernails of Roanoke Island colonial pilgrims
To Biloxi, Mississippi, to a bar where good ole boys with faces as red as Croatoan Injuns guardedly enjoy each others' company, spitting snuff
To the shisha-scented belly of some aging dancer in an unnamed underground Tunis hookah lounge
To the sweating tank-topped golden skin of a crooked Laotian dice game on the steps of some late-night basilica in back- alley America
To the beaches of Lagos
To the cafes of Madrid
To that same Biloxi, Mississippi bar, where now I'm half drunk with a young woman who claims to be a gypsy and is trying to read my fortune, not listening when I'm telling her that I already know when I'm going to die, and she's turning over a card with her yellow cigarette-holder fingers. It's The Hanged Man and I whisper “get over with it,” and the next card is Death. Grabbing from her yellowed hands that skeletal black knight and up standing on the table kicking over volcano ashtrays I scream, “Strike, Man, Strike”
To you, Sir Walter
Where you're not in your cell, you're away
On some new beach in some new world
Watching pass young bronze legs
Fingering your scallop-shell of quiet
Dreaming about your City of Gold
While you imagine the words
“My soul will be-a dry before
But after it will thirst no more”
You too pack your pipe
