Jim's Retro Village Coffeehouse: Six

It was warm and steamy in the Village Coffee House this evening. The aroma from various exotic blends of coffees mixed with the smell of freshly baked muffins. The Folksinger was doing a particularly poignant interpretation of “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s my Brother.” The Older Bald Guy wryly thought about how the song fit his present mood.

Since his return to Canada some time ago, he had become increasingly troubled by the plight of the homeless, and by the subculture of the street. He was attempting to capture some of his impressions in a series of poems collected under the broad heading of “Anger in the Street.”

The Resident Radical was in the middle of a diatribe concerning news that the federal government was about to pump millions of tax dollars into propping up the franchises of Canadian NHL teams.

“The Proletariat must now throw off the yoke of big business bottom liners and their government lackies,” he ranted. He added that the crisis of the medical emergency services, and the situation of the homeless were much more worthy recipients of tax dollars than millionaire sportsmen and wealthy club owners.

The Poet-in-the-Beret agreed, mentioning the recent report that the Human Resources department had no paper trail at all for billions in grants for makework projects. It appeared as though government had lost touch with the electorate.

The OBG listened, and thought about the “long, long road” that Canadians had stretching before them into the 21st century. He wondered if there could ever be a government “of the people, for the people.” He glanced at his steno pad, upon which the next instalment in the “Anger in the Street” series was scrawled.

The Teacher

Another when,
and he ruled his Eng Lit classes
from the comfort
of tweeds well worn.

Today, though,
stumps of pencils, flags of paper,
were now secreted willy-nilly
deep in the rags
that called him home.

Teaching when and where he could,
urchin and ancient alike
found benefit
from his memory of a life
before his Fall.
A name spelled here,
welfare application there,
laboured reading
of gutter-trapped headlines;
the street seemed less ugly
for his students.

Shorn heads and hard booted,
the Furies fell upon him
one cold night
for possession of his half bottle
of fortified wine.

Surrounded by his small blank bits of paper,
and short, sharpened stubs of pencils,
his body resembled nothing so much
as an incomplete jigsaw puzzle,
its meaning not quite clear.

Snowfall

The snow falls quietly:
white flakes
softly floating to the ground,
like the passage
of the seconds,
the minutes,
the days
that silently mark
our brief sojourn.

Like the snow,
the accumulation of time
ultimately forms
a blanket,
a shroud:
a transient monument
to the fleeting blaze
that is our lives.

If we examine each flake,
each precious minute,
slowly we comprehend
a minute portion
of the magnificent complexity,
the glowing splendour,
the magical triumph,
the living tapestry
of our passing Season.

Jim's Retro Village Coffeehouse: Five

The Folksinger has lost her voice after singing her heart out all evening. She was now sipping a café au lait and listening to the Poet-with-the-Beret who has a Che Guevara look in his eyes. He is more than pleased to have the opportunity to explain his vision of what the Lake Poets were really saying. The Folksinger’s guitar stands forgotten, as she considers the depth of the poet’s eyes.

The Older-Bald-Guy sitting in the corner is contemplating universal truths. He is considering poetry as a Performance Art form. He visualises the title “Poetry as a Plastic Art” wrought in pink neon tubing using a wonderfully retro Art Deco style. He is waiting for a new pot of his favourite blend to finish dripping.

The words that he has written in his steno pad are arranged in a roughly circular pattern. They reflected his appreciation of Hinduism, and the form of his words represent the eternal Circle of Flame within which Siva, as Nataraj, dances his cycle of destruction and rebirth. They are reproduced below, and should be read down the left side and up the right.





Note: To see this properly, you may have to copy the jpeg image then enlarge to view.

Jim's Retro Village Coffeehouse: Four

The Retro Village Coffeehouse was muted tonight. Although the usual clientele were present, the decibel level of the background conversation, which often was more than a tad acrimonious, tonight was subdued. It could, perhaps, have been due in part to the fact that the Folksinger had left the stage for a break and, in her absence, had put on a CD of Jane Siberry singing the traditional “The Water is Wide.” Siberry’s voice was, as usual, thought-provoking, but her treatment of the song enhanced the inherent melancholy to the point where the Coffeehouse habitués were almost spellbound by the song’s bittersweet refrain.

The Resident Radical carried through the boat image, and was thoughtfully haranguing the Capitalist Establishment for using the proletariat as gallery slaves to power the ship of state. The English Literature major thought that, as a traditional work of poetry, the words of Siberry’s piece were sadly simplistic.

The Older Bald Guy sipped a cup of black Guatemala Antiqua, flavoured solely by one spoon of demerara sugar and a shake of cinnamon. On the battered steno pad upon which his pen rested, he had jotted down some thoughts based on the boat analogy.

As a Sail on the Horizon

The boy looked out to sea:
past scrub spruce on rocky tors,
his gaze skipped over gravel shingle
whispering an ageless sough to the sea.
There! Across the reach,
beyond the island!
The tiny sail touching the horizon
would stay with the boy for hours,
traversing his lilliputian world.

Later, as an economic refugee
"going down the road,"
the boy was reminded of the sail
as he watched through the night
on the "Maritime Express."


Small pools of light would appear
in the Stygian darkness
of a New Brunswick night:
promises of comfort and home.

On the horizon of my life
I have seen many sails.
Some have docked, sojourned,
become part of my life for a time.
Others passed, unknown,
into the vortex of Time.

I only wish, at this late date,
that I had tried harder,
made more effort,
to make the journeys of others
as joyous as my own.

Jim's Retro Village Coffeehouse: Three

The Older Bald Guy was sitting at his regular table in the corner. In his cup was a blend of Kenyan Estate AA and Indian Peaberry that he savoured as he tried to rid his mind of the funk that had settled upon him. He had just passed through a nearby mall, and was disturbed by the nihilist lyrics of some of the music being played publicly throughout the popular shopping centre. On the small stage, the Folksinger gave a full dose of poignancy to the old 1965 song, “Bright, Elusive Butterfly of Love.” The OBG felt the despair of innocence lost more strongly than was his custom. A great believer in the truth and sincerity of the hippie movement in its’ seminal days, the OBG wondered if some aspects of modern music and lyrics were not spawned in cultural reaction to the Sixties’ aborted quest for truth, love, and peace. He hoped not: he preferred to think that violent and aggressively sexual music and lyrics were legitimate responses to difficult societal times.

The Resident Radical was berating the Owner/Hostess over her inclusion of Guatemalan Arabica on the list of coffees available. He claimed that the running dog capitalist government of Guatemala exploited the coffee workers solely to provide Wall Street robber barons with a cheaper cup of coffee. He would not listen to O/H’s argument that the present Guatemalan government had assisted in streamlining the coffee industry in Guatemala, thus creating several thousand jobs that had not existed previously.

The Poet in the Beret was having a discussion with the English Major Coed about whether the Lake Poets were effete elitists, or if they actually were aware of the class struggle going on around their Olympian fields of daffodils.

The OBG sighed, ordered another blend with single cream and double Demerara sugar, and looked over the lines he had been writing on his steno pad.

The Echo in the Storm

The tempest continued to grow
in unabridged intensity.
At some other points in time
it had seemed almost as catastrophic,
but not quite.

Years ago, perhaps yesterday,
breaks had appeared
in a cloud cover that threatened to erase
all memory of a sun
dimly remembered.

Several times, before today,
sunbeams fell on streets
and on meadows, illuminating
life with fond remembrance
of better days.

Did we, by not pausing
to appreciate this fleeting splendour,
signal to unknown gods our proclivity
for eclipsing light and order
with self-imposed Chaos?

Jim's Retro Village Coffeehouse: Two

The Older Bald Guy sat quietly in his easy chair, listening to Loreena McKennitt on his stereo. The view across the bay and down the harbour was peaceful, and yesterday’s snow had melted. Although he was perfectly content and fulfilled in his retirement, he occasionally found himself thinking about the joy, and the madness that had been “The Village Coffee House.” He smiled to himself as he remembered how the holiday season would always drive the coffee house habitues to greater leaps of creative energy. He recalled, for example, one typical day in December not too very long ago...

The Folksinger was playing her Celtic harp, and singing an excellent rendition of “In the Bleak Mid-winter,” while the Music-Student-Who-Looked-Like-Bob-Marley joined in from the floor with a complicated, but very poignant counterpoint based on John Lennon’s “War is Over.” The audience was rapt in collective silence.

The banner behind the postage stamp stage proclaimed “And on earth Peace, Goodwill toward People.” The Feminist-Art-Major had trouble with the original wording, and so had made that portion of the Scriptures gender neutral. The Resident Radical, as usual, had trouble with the sentiment of the banner, and vented his view that banners should only be used to reflect the wishes of the proletariat, or, at best, quotations from Lenin, Marx, Che, or Mao. He favoured something alone the lines of “Throw off your Capitalist yoke, and recidivist religious superstitions. Exceed Five Year Plan quotas!” The OBG quietly preferred the “...Goodwill toward People” choice.

The OBG was having his third cup of a blend of two-thirds Kenya Estate AA and one third Mocha Java Brown, a blend suggested earlier by the Poet-with-the-Beret during their (argument) discussion of the efficacy of metered, rhymed poetry in conveying a poetic message to a 20th Century audience. The discussion was left unresolved, but the OBG still favoured his own view that rhyming was overly confining in communicating the immediacy of modern thought. There were, however, times when rhyming could be used to create a feeling, or a mood, more effectively than prose. The piece on his steno pad was case in point...

Stars

The laughter of children,
The suddenness of Spring,
Fond memory in an old man’s eye,
A well-worn wedding ring.

The dancing of the Northern Lights,
The wind upon the sea,
Comfort of an oft’ read book,
A cup of Ceylon tea.

The lights upon a Christmas tree,
The scent of new-mown hay,
Remembrance of an absent friend,
The moon-path on the bay.
* * *
These stars I’ve used to mark my way
Home, through soul-dark night:
These memories that ensure I shall
Always walk in light.

Monument to the Unknown Soldier

He stands there, carved in granite chill,
outlined against the sky.
He had to fight, against his will:
to live, only to die.

Alone there in cold autumn rain,
he stands aloof and proud:
he wears a look of death and pain,
with fallen leaves his shroud.

Still, his head is held up high,
determined is his chin.
His eyes look far, beyond the sky:
on his lips, a cynic’s grin.

For when he heard his country call,
to a foreign land he came;
and hard he fought, at last to fall
where no one knew his name.

Jim's Retro Village Coffeehouse: One

The Older Bald Guy was enjoying a blend of Kenyan AA and Viennese Roast beans, with cream and brown sugar. He was reflecting on the song the Folksinger had just finished-a cover of Frank Sinatra’s "It Was A Very Good Year." Although the OBG was comfortable with old age, there were several aspects of becoming a "senior" that bothered him. The lifetime of knowledge and wisdom that seniors accumulate over their lifetimes is largely ignored as a resource by busier, younger people. Society in general seems to marginalise seniors, and place them out of the way, perhaps in an unconscious effort to ignore the relentless inevitability of aging. In return, it seemed to the OBG that seniors reinforced the marginalisation by being self-effacing, and by seeming to become almost invisible in their manner and actions.

An older couple had come into the Coffeehouse a few minutes ago, and were sitting quietly and unobtrusively at a corner table, their conversation, clothes, and body language doing nothing to attract attention. They were unnoticed by the Resident Radical, who was in the middle of a rant about how Medicare was not free to the people, and how the government made everyone think that it was a federal gift, when, in fact it was a capitalist tax grab. Neither were they in the thoughts of the Poet with the Beret, who was deep into a creative surge that the PwtB thought worthy of Kerouac.

The OBG looked down at the steno pad upon which he had been scribbling. This is what he had written:

Fog People

You often
almost see them
from the corner
of your eye.

You sense
a wisp of grey,
a floating,
e t h e r e a l
movement
that suddenly
d i s s o l v e s.

They drift
quietly,
gently,
on the edge
of our consciousness:
these pale,
these grey,
these haunting
people,
whom all,
but Time,
have forgotten.

If we chance
to pause,
to peer beyond
the d r i f t i n g veil,
we see,
within the shroud,
a preview of ourselves
tomorrow.