SALAD DAYS AND POETRY
There’s strange drinks and there’s poetry.
There’s a bizarre kind of salad
with bits and pieces of stuff
my nervous fork has a hard time identifying
but there’s also poetry.
And for every person here
eager to bite into
the latest in holistic sandwiches,
there’s a scrawny few upfront,
dressed in the latest thrift-store ware,
hugging their all-night coffees,
so close to the stage,
they’re splattered by the pain and suffering.
Because there’s poetry dammit!
Pass it off as the price for going vegan,
or slumming in the once thriving jewelry district,
now a slack commune of artist’s lofts
and poets and trendy restaurants
and poetry, lots and lots and lots of poetry.
And not your grandmother’s poetry either.
unless, that is, your grandmother
is an unrepentant anarchist, beatnik-hippy,
who slept once or twice with Jack Kerouac in 1953.
It’s blood poetry.
It’s asshole poetry.
It’s turd poetry.
Just the thing to half-ignore
while sipping lentil soup.
Or when returning to the jungles of that salad
with more curiosity than hunger.
Until the poet gets to the part where
she screams how his love
is like a rusty razor
ripping down her naked chest.
Then my fork stops suddenly in its leafy tracks,
its prongs apologizing to some kind of bean.