I am, alas, a fan of beat poetry. I like the insanity of it all: anyway, here is a poem called: 'Pauly's Days in Cinema' by Pete Simonelli (a modern US Beat poet, who has recently been doing work with the band 'Enablers'):
He's stepping heavily, a humbled sort canting his course in random lines
down Mission Street: a grave heat on.
It's the photographs again, their captured time fingered once too often
and now spun to pique, never settling in the same dungeon
twice -- and never mind what's taking hits in the abstruse deeps
of his belly.
Baja drifts peevishly in him now, its memory jabbing at his nerve
like a wayward crank inclined to correct strangers.
Pity him.
He craves the vacuous shoulder, a female he can treat like a stooge
and pitch his tales of woes to. Pity him,
and you'll have a helluva load on your hands. A helluva load.
In the last week alone he's seen a rage collect hard in the pith of him,
lift a hundred pound desk over his scrawny, rummy-wan frame
and swing down, smashing the ****er to kindling
right in the middle of the street,
the neighbours stopping their varied business
to gape at what might come next.
Meanwhile, Hope's on the line from Seattle.
She worried, she says, her voice itching with years of untenable kinship.
My brother, she says, fashions himself on some kind of Tarantino cowboy!
she says.
Yeah, well, Pauly hates the phone.
Ask anybody.
Countless blinks later, he says he wasn't quite sure.
Something just broke and washed over him,
as though the body had suddenly addressed its own uncanny agenda.
So weighted -- and lately a man who falters on his heels and disassembles
altogether quite a bit -- Pauly picks himself up on one hand and one knee,
one foot at a time,
stripped of the controlled badass who waves away phantom help
under the hazy line of streetlamps burning coal-like and suspended
through the boulevard.
That's quite a frame when he takes that critical left turn into the bar,
where solace of the peopled din is soon lost
once the quick glimpse of Her
strikes.
