I feel like I am fading

I feel like I am fading
Originally uploaded by HyperBob.

Oh Jack, Oh jack, you were the one to steal cars and drive from coast to coast with Cassidy, picking up cars and women at the same rate and abandoning them at the crossroads just as fast. It was all about the speed of things and bebop, and the maniac howl of Ginsberg who was searching for the third chord that would enable him to play the blues, and when the saxaphone blew, it blew cement dust that covered the sunflower that was growing in a wasteland. T.S. Elliot said it would all end with a whimper, but he was proved wrong because the beat poets from Liverpool came along and said it would end with a Wimpy. And where was I when Shearing played at Newport and Anita O'Day scat sang in white gloves and a big white hat with feathers on it, and everybody wore Ray Bann's and didn't even know it was cool. Where was I when they jived on the rooftops and played classical cello naked on a hot afternoon and called it jazz. Where was I when Chichester sailed around the world, and braved the southern seas in a boat no more than a rusted bucket. And at Newport the water vibrated blue to the sound of a double bass, and Britain was practising once again to get beating in the America's cup. American technology would win everything even the war in Vietnam. When did purple haze turn to purple rain and how did it happen, was I asleep for so many years dreaming of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and penguin dust. I had my own dust to observe. The dust that settles on the window ledges of deserted houses. Boarded up villages abandoned and neglected. The dust from coal that solidifies lungs. Lungs that will never function again not even in the cleanest and purest air. Not even with pure oxygen from a compressed bottle. The miners with ruined lungs played in the silver band. Played show tunes from South Pacific, and on Sundays really thought they had a chance at the national championships in the Usher Hall, but they got too drunk to blow, and half the band spent half of their time working the valve to let the spit drop from their cornets, their trumbones, their euphoniums and their tubas. Black spit that could be Guiness or coal dust. Take me away from all this decay and failure. This futile striving that never pays a dividend, co-op or otherwise. Tune me in to Radio Luxemburg on 208. Take me away Pharoah Sanders. The cool calm nights at the corner, the cigarette smoke keeping away the midges, the distant laughter coming from under the bridge down by the river, as people watched the salmon come up to spawn. I will tell you where I was. I was in a room near George square ratcheting a manual calculator and listening to a small bell ping then a satisfactory answer was reached, but my mind was in Morrocco, in Marrakesh where I wore a berber cape against the cold of the desert air. Where snakes were charmed and men in the marketplace spat fire instead of coal dust. I slept on beaches from Barcellona to Algeceras while John Lennon sang of revolution #9. He was nowhere near the Paris barricades of 68, he only became a working class hero later. It was Tariq ali who rolled the marbles under the police horses hooves at Grovsner square. A Pakistani radical leading a bunch of white skinheads. The madness of the whole idea. I was there when the black and red flags of the anarchists broke away from the main demonstration heading towards Hyde park and wheeled past the Playboy club. I was there when the bunnies on the balcony were encouraged to jump. I was there when we linked arms and charged the police cordon. It was like a game in the play ground. If we had ever broken through we would not have known what to do. When the flag was lowered on the embassy that was victory enough and we all went off and had a Wimpy, so Elliot had got it wrong after all... or it might he might have been half right since the endevour ended in a whimper.