Beatnik Dream

I sit in a room, surrounded by darkness,
Engulfed by silence, lost in nothingness.

Broken by a sound -
The film crackles, the reels click as they turn
And Greenwich Village appears before my eyes;
The pulsating heart of the Beat generation.

I smell the cigarettes and the cannabis,
I feel the jazz vibrations filling my soul,
I hear voices of genius, horns and shouting,
I taste the air polluted with creativity, revolution.
I see the stuff of legends.

Kerouac's face before me, cigarette hanging from his lips,
Kerouac's hands, fingers that carressed thousands with the words they wrote,
Kerouac, eternal genius, soul-mate, idol,
     before he drowned in a bottle of whiskey.

I see flashes of the Gaslight;
Sax; trumpet; sweat; piano; love; pain; life.
The duotone glory of the Beats,
The dynamic lives of the poets;
Meaningfully dirty, sinfully profound - liberators of literature,
Looking up at the world from the gutters of the Village,
Peering down at society from their throwns of knowledge.

Benny-fuelled mayhem of friendship,
Of discovery, invention,
Sex and drugs,
Love and loyalty.

And I see myself amongst them;
I appear in grainy black and white, amidst this gang
that represent the beatitude of existence, to join them
In sleepless nights and broken mornings
Spent in rundown apartment blocks
Smelling of whiskey and smoke
And overflowing with opinions, ideas, insanity;
Circles of cross-legged word swilling artists of the night.
Close-ups of each stubble-strewn face
Amid the endless party of their lives.

In the background the wail of a trumpet,
The laugh of a piano,
The moan of a saxophone;
The soundtrack of freedom.