the beatnik oyibo blues

I've got money,
small money, albeit money
on my shades,
on my shoes...
a demon in my brief-case,
a burning casino chip
on my shoulder

and a cause
to sing the blues...
walking around like
a people-watching corpse,
can't hear the drum
they march to...
I know a lot about things
no-one would pay
a person like me to do
not even with coffee money,
though I have that
half the time...

See,
it's hard for a man
to keep frugal accounts,
when the worshipers of money
are the majority-class,
and to him it's a crass demon
we must live with to pass

and 'society' and 'community'
are myths he learned about
in grammar school:
he looks around,
daily reads the news...
it's anarchy and hubris he sees:
ugly painted human-masks
covering the even uglier faces
of the monsters we've made ourselves,
in our myriad modern experiments,
these cold, high-tech jungle labyrinths
we've enshrined ourselves in

The truth is ninety-percent nihilism:
like good Father Tony
the Anglican orator, conferred to me:
"It doesn't matter. nobody cares,"
reacting to my apology
for wearing sunglasses in church,
but it turned out
despite friendly affinity
with some of the flock,
I wasn't meant to be
an Anglican at all...
stomach pains

see, I don't belong
to any generation
but 'the beat generation'
which transcends time,
but also my peers and I
are somewhat similar in senses
to the 'original' hallowed beats...

it's another hollow era
and Lord Winston's 'black dog"
drifts across our mind-scapes
like a manically libidinous meme-virus,
growling whenever the chi settles
for a moment,
dropping data and 'duka'
upon our cherished memories
and myths...

protecting us from a world
secretly gone mad,
but also too often
stifling our higher human stirrings:

We've been
roboticized in red-brick education factories,
indoctrinated in shady corporate 'rehabs,'
degraded in cobra-pit psych wards,
and animalized in Orwellian profit-farm jails
after satire-like, assembly-line 'trials...'

Many of us,
finding ourselves,
so cheated and cheapened,
have (in bold defiance)
thrown ourselves against
the machine in question, and
found ourselves
again and again,
badly beaten...

but this
is a common fate
for too brave youth
and too beautiful souls...
and there's a lot
of ways
it can go from there