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.

 

-John Grey