Chain Letter
By Paul Cameron Brown
I'm sitting in a "sixties bar." No put-on.
All around old Rolling Stones music is playing.
I can tell it's a sixties bar by the spiffy waiter recycling sheets for
tablecloths. The sixties was "into," environment.
It's the eighties now as Heineken was unobtainable in 1969.
Someone reminds me in order to run a tab a credit card is needed.
This seems logical but very out of sorts with the people power complex I'm nurturing.
Even the jokes above the bar are old hat.
This confirms with certainty that Madcaps is Nostalgia.
It's too built up for Sha-Na-Na, fintails or Nancy Sinatra's,
These Boots Are Made For Walking.
In my sensible decade that tune is considered sadistic. Obviously,
the effect is too sophisticated to imagine I'm even a temporary
time traveller. Still, poetry is a communicable disease
invented in the 1920's by a snooty degenerate named Pound.
I bide my time. It's an oasis for waiting. Old time experiences seem strangely current in this campy pub.
Occasionally, someone in a zoot suit comes in but realizes he's missed the last act of Grease.
Old Blue Eyes might make it here if he looked like Bogart in drag.
Like them, Presley was by-passed by the theme of this decade.
There's a fleshy table and chairs with a knock out chick that looks like my Bridge Over Troubled Waters.
The waiter scowls like vintage Ben Casey.
Beehive hairdos mingle casually with early "Mod."
Rockers wishing Cherry Reds are served drinks instead.
Comfortable sleaze.
The window is up on the future now and New Wave is out to spray paint graffiti artists all the way.
"Either you are part of the solution or you are part of the problem." Now there's a sixties homily that still delivers.
Nice to think the social history of three decades is indistinguishable and that silence comes as its own reward.