Jim's Retro Village Coffeehouse: Eight

The Folksinger was singing one of the Older Bald Guy’s favourites: “Teach Your Children” by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. The idealistic simplicity of the lyrics normally invoked the feeling of lost innocence that he generally had when thinking of those long-ago halcyon days of Flower Power, Love and Peace. Today, though, the OBG was depressed. Even the strong brew of Brazilian Santos he was drinking, sweetened with Demerara sugar, did not dispel his mood. The problem was that he had made the mistake of turning on the radio when he was driving in to the Village Coffee House. The news headlines had featured yet another case of a child taking a gun to school and killing several classmates.

The Resident Radical was discoursing on the lack of motivation for youth in a capitalist society. He thought that work camps and education through labour should be mandatory each summer for all children between the ages of twelve and eighteen. The Poet with the Beret disagreed, saying that youth needed more understanding of life and beauty, through poetry, and much less of the popular culture force-fed them by commercial TV and radio.

The OBG sighed, and looked down at the few lines he had written on his steno pad:

A Random Act of Violence

Chimeric wisps
of anger
filter through
the fog of being.
Chance encounters,
choreographed
by Chaos,
put spark
to tinder-dry emotions
shaped by hormonal
hopelessness.

The sudden, explosive,
culmination
of a wasted life,
irrevocably,
irretrievably,
changes the lives of Innocents.

Jim's Retro Village Coffeehouse: Seven

The Coffee House was more crowded than usual this evening. The Older-Bald-Guy was listening attentively to various conversations taking place, not feeling at all guilty about eavesdropping. The Poet-in-the-Beret was trying hard to impress the English-Major-Coed with a diatribe against traditional, metered Lake Poet style poetry. The E-M-C challenged him to come up with four lines as poignant and memorable as four lines she quoted from Emily Dickinson’s “Aspiration.”

We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies.

The Resident Radical said that poetry was an affectation of the petit bourgeoisie, and should be banned, and poets forced to compose Workers’ slogans to advance the cause of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The two Businessmen-With-Ties drinking café latté told him that any form of Socialism went against the natural rule of currency, and should be against the law. They returned to talking animatedly about a hostile takeover their company was planning. The takeover would permit the parent company to maximize return to the shareholders, and would permit streamlining of operations by a levered downsizing of 19 percent of the production staff.

The Older-Bald-Guy hadn’t written any rhyming poetry since his Protest Days, but his cappuccino-stained steno pad now held the following two poems.


The Mirror

Come my friends, and gather round,
a hidden window I have found:
we'll throw the curtains open wide,
and we shall view the folk outside.

What people are these who mock and sneer,
and hold their noses high;
who laugh, and point, and gawk, and jeer,
when a beggar passes by?

What creatures are these who act so sad,
who shake their heads in wonder;
who watch a friend in trouble, glad
to see him trampled under?

Ah! Surely they are strangers,
not friends that we hold dear.
The monsters that we view there,
no kin to us...no fear!

If wrong, I stand corrected,
are they not ourselves, reflected?


The Gourmet

In these brief lines, we shall explore
the habits of the carnivore.

The mighty lion, noble beast,
has oftentimes been known to feast
on animal with grace known well,
the fleet, the lovely, wild gazelle.

The black python, it is known,
if little pigs are left alone,
(oh damn his dark and greedy soul!)
will crush and swallow them quite whole.

The great deceiving crocodile,
will float quite quiet for a while,
and then, with one enormous crunch,
will have some swimmer for his lunch.

In parts of Asia isolate,
I do believe I'd hesitate,
before supping, with great zeal,
on a large green snake for my evening meal.

And yet we find we can forgive,
for all must eat if they're to live:
but sympathy I cannot find
for devouring one of one's own kind.

For I believe the greatest crime
and custom of the present time,
is the credo of man today
to devour anyone in his way.

To sum up my thoughts, most inner,
anyone could be someone's dinner.

OBG