How to find…
“The casual kicks of San Francisco’s beatnik underworld”
Take the Hyde st. cable car to Broadway.
meet a one-armed man named Sid. He’ll lead you home.
South on Columbus where the Chinks hang out in opium clouds.
Sid has a whore holed up in a second story flat.
She don’t speak English, but she speak love.
After, play chess with the commie who calls himself Romanov.
He’s from San Jose, really, but got in with the wrong crowd.
He hasn’t lost a chess match in fifteen years.
That’s check, baby, that’s mate.
Don’t fuck with the sailors at the strip club.
They like to fight. It’s what the Navy taught them to do.
Instead, plunge North with buddies in tow,
buy some Tea in the alley behind the colored bar.
Smoke in a parked car with a nurse from Sacramento.
Her name is Ethel, but she tells you it’s Virginia.
Follow the blue notes inside where a sweating man blows his horn. He don’t know what time it is in Berkley.
He don’t know this fragile city once burned for a week.
He don’t know what flame is left beneath Sansome, Market, Lombard street.
What he knows is in that horn and he’s got to blow it out.
That’s not music, man, that’s fire!
Nice work oggy! I moved into a storage unit beneath an old building in North Beach when I first came to San Francisco. I’d shit in a plastic shopping bag and walk out to the corner and throw it into the public garbage can.
It wasn’t like that paperback for me.
How to find…
“The casual kicks of San Francisco’s beatnik underworld”
Take the Hyde st. cable car to Broadway.
meet a one-armed man named Sid. He’ll lead you home.
South on Columbus where the Chinks hang out in opium clouds.
Sid has a whore holed up in a second story flat.
She don’t speak English, but she speak love.
After, play chess with the commie who calls himself Romanov.
He’s from San Jose, really, but got in with the wrong crowd.
He hasn’t lost a chess match in fifteen years.
That’s check, baby, that’s mate.
Don’t fuck with the sailors at the strip club.
They like to fight. It’s what the Navy taught them to do.
Instead, plunge North with buddies in tow,
buy some Tea in the alley behind the colored bar.
Smoke in a parked car with a nurse from Sacramento.
Her name is Ethel, but she tells you it’s Virginia.
Follow the blue notes inside where a sweating man blows his horn. He don’t know what time it is in Berkley.
He don’t know this fragile city once burned for a week.
He don’t know what flame is left beneath Sansome, Market, Lombard street.
What he knows is in that horn and he’s got to blow it out.
That’s not music, man, that’s fire!
Comment by oggy — October 15, 2007 @ 1:21 am
Nice work oggy! I moved into a storage unit beneath an old building in North Beach when I first came to San Francisco. I’d shit in a plastic shopping bag and walk out to the corner and throw it into the public garbage can.
It wasn’t like that paperback for me.
Comment by Rolston — October 15, 2007 @ 11:48 am