Coffee Cup Complaint

—  for all the dharma bums,
              hanging out beneath broken
              down bridges


I want to rant like a over sexed rooster, staggering toward    
  some decadent hen house full of skeletal politicians,
      I want to blow out the pilot light on the stove
        in White Houses that compose songs about burning      
  wheatfields and magnifying glasses that inspect
      the lovers in every bedroom in America.
Get the hell out of our bucket of tears will you. . .
  for Christ’s sake, release the scaffold you’ve got
      draped around our unfulfilled mysteries
        and archbishoped medicine cabinets full
      of broken dreams.
Oh you cancered catastrophe conundrum of drop dead
  open window blues, I blow my continental harmonica
      up your swollen ass and blind your insightful eyes
        with shooting stars and the poetry
      of Charles Bukowski.
I have heard an ode of blistering pleutonium,
  have met Jim Morrison inside the hidden doors
      of his trembling sensitivity, watched as you battered
        him senseless because he would not conform
      to your biblical pablum and water fountain
  of supposed normality.
Like a cockroach inside the guesthouse of a magnesium        
  monotony you bleed with the retired blood
      of a 1940's radio station, offering nothing but
        the same old static and untuned guitar chords
      of a toilet bowl that flushes the remnants
  of your pretentious bombs down the drain.
I traded in my new testament for a used copy
  of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, I stripped myself naked
      on a Kerouacian highway and ran screaming past
        the sunflowers, chanting something about
      the berries of a forgotten wisdom,
waving a Tibetan prayer flag from the portal
  of my eyes.
And as the amphetamine parade marches on the legs
  of expiring diplomats, as the molesting ministers
      are unrepentant outside native sweat lodges,
        as Hieronymus Bosch repaints his garden
      of delights, I collect the crushed flowers
  of our history and place them in an envelope
marked FOR GOD’S SAKE, RETURN TO SENDER.
  So you skeletons peering through my window,
      you purpled and bruised excuses of humanity,
        get thee back inside the abstract abyss
  where you belong, where mirrors of spiritual earthquake
      will haunt you forever and let me get on
  with the railroad truths spoken by the hobos of yesterday    
when freedom was as simple as a meal around a campfire        
  and there were no epilogues of confining grief

                          in our coffee cups.


– Marc Creamore


Marc Creamore is a poet living in British Columbia. His early influences include Beat and Chinese poets, Eastern philosophy, spirituality and musical songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Tom Rapp. He is the author of The Wrong Side of the Curtain, Bleaker Street and Other Observations, Tea Leaves And Denim, Corridors, Notes From The Abandoned Orchard of the Moon, and Bohemian Highway which contains Coffee Cup Complaint. Recently, Marc has been recording various poems with musical accompaniment on Soundcloud,"to give the bones of the words a more fully fleshed out existence." Coffee Cup Complaint appears here with the author's permission.