The Smell of Polynesian Capital Lyrics

Once, I was a beatnik

And in the grand tradition of great beatniks

I, in forests unchartered, wandered

No clear path to nightfall

In the great foreplay of every day

Lightning striking, breaking experiences

Into inline blisters, all adding up

To nothing much but love

Now, years later

Walking those old North Beach streets in a new century

The smell of Polynesian capital

Frankly, on a Bohemian dawn

Of sacred grooves over stiff whiskey and cappuccinos

Beneath cigarette clouds, is dizzying among bamboo

Beer-soaked streets stripped

Of innuendos barking suits, and movie sets

Stir in the directionless laid-back sobriety

Of beat otherworldliness

Open after closing time to chat about Afghanistan

Guns and capital in place of infrastructure

Maddening delight of recklessness relay purpose

To a stupor of identity

Trust misplaced in a middle-class seance

Brown haze and laugh tracks

Out of sync with the sensei

Necessities deactivated

Asian whirl of a girl in skinny jeans taps into the news

Where middle-aged goatees just twist

Obama or Kazai, who would want to be president

Juju guitar cries like Charlie Parker

Among wind-tossed Chinese lanterns

Renewing the capacity for fate and folly

Opportunities and setbacks

Zoot-suit riot or grapefruit diet

Mix the two maniacally for a stale free sunrise

Routed towards that inner state

Of tumultuouslyunstraightened affairs frozen

In hot light of loneliness

Surrounded by strangers familiar with dejà vu indigestion

Wondering, oh, where has significance gone

Buoyed by betrayed delusions

Surviving beyond the sneer of ego's dogma

Pampers and shaving cream, Rice-a-roni in a jar

A magician's smokescreen, velvet top hat tipped

To a magic afternoon on Haight Street

I can't surrender the cosmos

Nor San Francisco absurdity

Assistant in lace more captivating

Than the magic draw of the main event

Italy, where the sea whispers of heavy experience

Its metaphors strongly whirling ominous to China and Japan

Not knowing when to quit, hit on, or begin in the interim

Sneakers hiking up Nob Hill

With pencils and notebook

Sweet reefer waffling through the street

Indiscrete and luscious

Steeper than hopefuls dining on delivery

Vaguely rendering salient tomorrows puked

Up for sense of love in a porcelain toilet hugged

Purple shag, narrow plaid

And the smoke, I'm telling you, those cigarettes

Banquettes plump, bumping timid smiles into alleyways

To rendezvous with late-night ferocity

Before the heartbreak of cirrhosis

Hounds purists of future ages

Endowed with friendlier integrity than tourists

Who love to play the bongos barefoot

Long hair waving in the breeze

Living to dance, dancing to live

While, I'll be forever working till my dying day

Coughed up by the past, crashed on the rocks

Left for dead, hounded

By dried blisters, It's all so fleeting

Yet, for a moment or 30, I felt such happiness

Wandering into Spec Adlers' on a Monday night

Like 25 freaking years

After first discovering postcards on the bar

Those messages from other lands

That jumbled conventional logic

Animating the dawn with heavenly whimsy

Feeling such satisfaction

Such spartan vagrancy of certainty

Such warmth inside

Facing the humble compromise of tomorrow's goat

As perhaps a winning after all