…becomes an hours-long dream in which I was a beat poet in the 2020s. Maybe not a beat poet, actually, but at least a poet who works all day, mentally hanging upside-down like a bat in a cave, to later come out at night steaming with lyrics and verse. And during the night, my fellow poets and I (a cult? language wizardry, verbal dorans, maybe?) meet the same old speakeasy in New York whose password we individually punch into a nearby deterioration of a telephone booth to ease the entrance yawning.
As we stumble through the dark descent to the speakeasy, giggling nervously, scratching the backs of our hands against blackish graffitied plaster and later against terra-cotta, we all know that the speakeasy will not have Sharon Jones over, and the song “Katrina’s Eyes” won’t tease us into a lotus stupor. The New York urban landscape disappears from our radars as we approach the House upstate early in the morning.
I surmise that “beat” is not an accurate description, but we do recite in a ritualistic manner. No chalice, no feast, apart from the gasses of phrases and concretes of instringent words; we are all wiry and thin from suffering writer’s block (although I never thought writer’s block really existed as any more than an excuse) and from food and sleep deprivation. None of us is fit, and the clothes we wear now, down to our underwear, are most probably the same ones we wear every time we meet.
Our Ted and our Sylvia are a ridiculously handsome pair. Have you ever seen such a fine metal typewriter, and bottle of violet ink? The general agreement somehow transmogrifies into a citrus-enriched feud between those who believe Cirencesterians fails as a morality play and those who argue that Cirencesterians is “grey area, and therefore artistically ambiguous.” In the midst of the pretentious hysteria, I wheel myself away from the hubbub into the garden, smoking from my newly opened 20-pack of Benson and Hedges (sure, Selvon), thinking with fury and embarrassment and regret that the verses I had carefully written in dactylic hexameter will only be ignored. And this hurt is not directly felt by the so-called writer, the upper-middle class female with the doubtful artistic career; but it is felt, piping hot and glowing green like the WAY OUT signs in London theatres, by the words she had typed onto the pulpy cream sheets.
Why do they disregard me, the words exhaled. They were the innards to the stanzas, and glared at me, vinegary, from gaping open wounds. Not even the beams on the roof of Rodarte’s opera house experienced such loneliness. Even black enamel had fair say, the words complained. Frank was a gracious enough man to expose the enamel, bring the mic in, and let it trill. DIE FAHNE HOCH! it screamed. But our existence as written word gives us no such freedom if no one is here to hear us wail.
I am sorry, I thought to the Verses. People would rather pass judgment on Cirencesterians than allow their own inked words to be spoken.
Love from
Grace J. Choi
27 04 2012 S
A Tasty Burger for Dinner Tonight! 