Out of Beat
October 17th

    (Note: This is a beat poem. (Beat is a genre from the 50's that had those  poets who wore berets, turtlenecks, and sunglasses inside and read poems to bongos.) (Yes, I just put parentheses in parentheses) ellipses indicate dramatic pause for bongos)

(Extra note: stupid protag keeps breaking up my longer lines, so I have put a slash at the end of each line)

I feel the full force of being constantly thrown backwards/
Into a teeming, steaming world of pleasure-seeking /
Where the underworld fog flows gently/
Around the crowds, shifting, sifting/
Faces floating disembodied/
And under the blazing gaze of the lights, I feel/
Disquieted…/

I push past shoulders in quiet desperation/
Asking every sane-seeming person I see/
Which way… to the top?/
They shake their heads and say with a smile/
“Don’t you see? This is the best you’ll ever get/
Why would you want to leave?”/

Black-bereted heads bob in the darkness, whispering, speaking, singing/
Lost in the fog, the words, themselves/
Black silhouettes backlit by neon lights/
Unaware of my deep distaste for counter culture/
For a bunch of drunken, turtlenecked druggies.../
On a high horse of “We’re artists”/

Trapped in the alternative underground, perhaps it was Stockholm Syndrome/
I lost my distorted, preconceived notions and began to see/
They were artists, not something to be laughed at/
But revered…/
Because like me, they were strange, like me, they didn’t fit/
But while I struggled on my hands and knees for acceptance by the mainstream/
They embraced their strangeness, and decided to just be/
Be drunken, turtlenecked druggies, living free and loose and joyful/
Be a bunch of misfit, reject weirdos who came together and found a place/
An unestablished place they made, out of beat with society but in beat with/
Their own beautiful, flowing, stream-of-consciousness system… /

I walk among them, one of them, I am a face in that crowd/
I am the glow of the light, the fog in the air, the tinge of darkness/
I am a night of 10 straight glasses of wine, and I/
Am the morning after, headache, heartbreak, and hangover/
I am protest arrested for causing civic unrest/
I am one of them, I am none of them, I am marching to a beat/
You can’t possibly hear, unless you listen for it…/
So listen with me/

Black-bereted heads are bobbing, faces floating disembodied/
In this teeming, steaming world of pleasure-seeking, the underworld fog/
Flows gently, and I flow with it, knowing/
This is the best… I will ever get/
Why did I want to leave?/

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