Focus Your Radio, This Story is Slated for Crashville

beginningtoend (69)in #poetry • 8 years ago (edited)

Best read when dixie fried

In the 1950’s and early 1960’s there was a subculture known as Beatniks. They were mostly young that were drawn to the arts. They were abstract expressionists: poets, painters and philosophers who rejected conventional values. They were often but not exclusively associated with the Beat Generation of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

To be a Beatnik was to hang out in basement coffee houses; listen to folk music and snap your fingers for quality poetry. But most important it meant being cool, using Beatnik vocabulary, like a girl was a shape in a drape and an old car like your parents would drive was a lead sled.

Daddy Spins Platters Like He Was In Coolsville

Zat Dah Bottle Daddy-O is written like an abstract expressionist paints. It throws words and phrases around like Jackson Pollack dripping gallons of paint. It was fun to write and is filled with my childhood.

Note: The video below the poem includes my narration.

Zat Dah Bottle Daddy-O

I’m on the flip side
Queens, maybe Brooklyn
Sputnik's in orbit
Khrushchev's rap is his shoe
Look… a nickel on the ground
Take Five,
Put it in the jukebox
My riff is the A Train
Fading to Levittown
HI FI
Re-enlist, fight again,
Be someone this time
Before the fifth grade
Before you hear Birdland
Fall to your knees
And ask heaven above
Is that your wallet Sir
I think that you dropped it
Is that cherry top flashing
Duck down the alley
This lick is ahead of its time
Or the A Train is Elvis
Or Elvis is the Rat Pack
Chugging Martinis,
Trying to get jazzed
Throwing big gobs of paint
in abstract expression
Then selling art for a song
Like MADE IN JAPAN
So frequent old jazz bars
Hear yourself asking
Zat dah bottle Daddy-O
Well pour me a drink