Bowery Blues (With Steve Allen)

Cooper Union Cafeteria
Late cold March afternoon
The street, Third Avenue
Is cobbled, cold, desolate with trolley tracks
Some guy on the corner is waving his hand
Down /knowing/ somebody emphatically
And out of sight behind a black and white pillar
Cold clowns in the moment horror of the world
A Puerto Rican kid with a green stick stooping to bat the sidewalk
But changing his mind and halting on
Two new small trucks parked
The withery gray rose stone building across the street
With its rhyme heights in the quiet winter sky
Inside are quiet workers by neon and tablatures
Practicing fanning lessons with the murderous marblе
A yakking blonde with awful wide smile
Is macking her mouth, lip-talk, to an old Bodhisattva papa
On the sidewalk
The tense quickness of her hard working words
Meanwhile a funny bum with no sense
Tries to panhandle them and is waved away stumbling
He doesn't care about society women
Embarrassed with paper bags on sidewalks
Unutterably sad, the broken winter shattered face
Of a man passing in the bleak ripple
Followed by a Russian boxer
With an expression of Baltic lostness
Something grim and Slavic and so helplessly beyond my
Conditional ken or ability to evaluate and believe
That I shudder as at the touch of cold stone to think of them
The sickened old awfulness of it
Like slats of wood wall in an old brewery truck
For I prophesy that the night will be bright
With the gold of old in the inn within
Shin McIntyre with no money no bets no health
Hauls on by pawing his inside coat, no hope of ever seeing Miami again
Since he lost his pickles on Orchard Street
And his father stutle-fettered him to hospitals of gray bleak bone
Drying in the moon that mortifies his
Coat and words sing what mind brings
Bleeding bloody seamen of Indian England
Battering in coats of Third Avenue
With no sense and their brows streaked with wine sop
Blood of o'gliggid sad adventurers far from the Pipe of Liverpool
The bean of bone bottle liffy brown
Far hung unseen top tippers of ocean wave
God bless and sing for them as I cannot
Cooper Union Blues
The Muzak is too sod
The gaiety of grave candidates makes my gut weep
And my brains are awash down the side of the blue orange table
As little sneery snurfling Puerto Rican hero
Bats by booming his coat pocket
Fisting to the vicinity where mortuary waits for bait
What kind of service do broken garrels give?
O have pity, Bodhisattva of intellectual radiance
Save the world from her eyebrows
Of beautiful illusion
Hope, O hope, O nope, O Pope