Pepe's Coffee Lounge

I was one of the cool set, navy blue duffle coat, scarf around my neck, seated at a table in Pepe's Coffee Lounge discussing Baudelaire and T.S. Eliot and the demise of the political elites. The conscription ballot hung over our heads helmeted in a flowering of uncombed hair in the winter of 1966. We thought the world was about to tip, that the old regime was coughing its last on Craven A and Camel cigarettes. Booze was cheap and jobs chased us down the street. In a hundred buried silos, annihilation was just a push of a button away. We partied hard beneath the threat of that mushroom cloud. We're old now, sit under the cloud of our own thoughts, replaying scratchy, worn out tracks retrieved from the sleeves of our neural LP's. What we tore down back then has been replaced with more sinister demons that eat away at the collective soul. In the end, everything is just reabsorbed. Some of us still frequent coffee shops and discuss Baudelaire and T.S. Eliot, still write poetry, shed a tear at the melancholic beauty of a setting sun.