Wandering Valhalla a beat poem

Wandering Valhalla                 a beat poem

I lit out for Times Square, hungry rebellion fearful and vengeful simultaneously

“Something strange was happening” acrid notes of be-bop landed in a primeval

heap upon the interlopers heads searing like raw strands, like Pollock paint, like

thick Ginsberg lenses focusing the light

New York draws the artist, moths to a flame, the wandering scribes documentarians of the revolt,

Isle of discontent, surrounded by the consumed, the conformed and already dead

Jack left an hour ago, saying something about a Lolita for the night, the dawn soon to Bang!

Light pierces the brazen windscreen, entering into the vernacular in unique puddles of letters-

Strung together in Jazz-like tempos, in cadences of ups and downs and buck-shot scatterings, random

Charlie Parker, Jack says he has a record, black vinyl truth, pure form and free thought

He says he wants to write like saxophone notes, tonally, ascending, descending

Neil’s ruse was not very clever, if he wanted to write he should have just sat down and opened the vault, let freedom reign over the valley of the disenfranchised, never stopping to think, just feel it man

 The American dream of a land without limits, that’s something Neil already understood,

None better behind the wheel, into the night he never shut up tripping over soliloquies in a personal sermon rife with expletive, refusals, norms and jobs………not mine man

There’s a rabbi sipping coffee, black and tired, withdrawing into the street never clean, never his own

Are generation discarded for seeking our own way, If manacled by decay, by time-clocks, by Swanson foil trays then into the night, the asphalt leading West, always West inside and out

Hear the beat, likened unto steel-belted turnings of ribbed hubcaps and snuffed cigarette butts

Jack would only share, what we all knew,

Throwing fetters roadside into that never-ending night, wandering yet still knowing not unlike the hobo, clakity-clank, clankity clank, clankity clank, steel wheel on steel track into that West

It’s a scene man

Jack pounded porcelain keys with fervor, his own clakity-clack

The scribe headed south and his ultimate demise, St. Petersburg's problem now

Could have been the booze man, or in the alternative, sublime toxicology of a liver trying hard to process the poisonous ruin of a demanding collective angst.

Jack is still wondering, Valhalla, Odins scribe, throwing rum wrappers into the gutter they don’t talk about anymore, hoping Time Square’s still lit by discontent, fresh for a new generation

Daniel Williamson 2016