The beats came and went; those that came looking for the scene were often disappointed. This is one story.

She came late on the scene.
Kerouac hadn't even published On The Road yet,
But already he's wailing a 5/4 riff,
Saying how sick and bored he is,
Wishing he'd never have to see another beat, hipster,
Or even one more poet. 'Nuff is enuff!
In a Tangier hotel he's drunk, yelling: "Get the hell
Outta here, Bill! And take yer damn cutups with you!"

Getting hip to the scene meant finding it.
But everything was mobile then, floating
First around one place, then another.
In between they filled the time
With aimless runs, coast to coast
(The best kind, Cassidy says).
Then, bummed out, they lurk, paranoid,
Sitting in shabby lobbies of low-rent hotels
Drinking absinthe and avoiding the watchful eyes of
Dark figures in dark suits and well-shined shoes.
You could smell the fear and desperation.
And Paris had its own special brand of expatriate
Sweet 'n sourness, causing more than one to fall
Face down onto any number of filthy city sidewalks.

Knowing none of this, she had set out to find
The people making it happen, and where, exactly where
It was happening now.
She knew it would be in the RIGHT city, of the COOLEST
country, in THE cafe.



She knew that finding it meant talking the right talk,
reading the right books.
She followed a trail that began in the well-thumbed pages
of obscure lit'ry magazines
Then jumped off the page. She gave chase, running
Breathless after every clue,
Down dark and exotic alleyways, through crowded markets.
Sometimes she thought she had found it, digging instead
some cool customer who knew the buzz
and dug Coltrane.

These mistakes took her to more than one strange time,
More than one night in a musty and dirty hotel room,
To find that the crazy night didn't hold up well
In the morning light.

But she persisted, and when she finally closed in,
Finally showed up at some poetry reading,
Like Ferlinghetti in North Beach,
Or peered through a haze of opium smoke at Bowle's house,
She found that the ones she had been chasing,
The ones she really wanted to know,The ones who had started it all, had left.
Some had swapped the scene for three bedrooms and a Chevy
in the burbs.
Some were babbling in the streets.
Some were just dying.

So, because she came late on the scene
She went home disappointed.