Christmas concert

They were planning a revolution
                        to end want and hunger

They were plotting a new form of thinking

They were arguing in blue smoke
                      a direction for art

They were friendly and querulous
                      chaotic and sensuous

They were ready to fuck
                        They were ready to flee
They were ready to fight
                      They were ready for jail

They were ready
                      to topple the towers

                      in the Rebel Café

Hail to the Rebel Cafe
Hail to the Rebel Cafe.

The poet
   came in a skiff
     across the Nile
with satires in his pocket
      on long flakes of stone

The metalsmiths came from their shacks
in the Valley of the Kings

The priestess-singers
sneaked away
from the Temple of Amon
to play the long necked lute

      while the painters passed around
      their rebel art
                on rolls of papyrus

      They came from all around
      to the linen tent
         by the half-finished temple

      They came for a whiff
      of chaos and mating, lust and leisure
      music and art

      They came to laugh at the pharaoh
      and all of his snitches
      They came to the Rebel Café

      All hail to the Rebel Café


The Philadelphia taverns
       of 1776
were rebel cafes

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams
        talking about the Declaration of
                         Independence in the
                  City Tavern

or Benjamin Franklin
in his fur cap & spectacles
Thomas Paine
  in a three-cornered blue
lifting pewter tankers in the Indian Queen
the night a pamphlet called Common Sense
 came off the press

They were drawing a nation with ink
 inside the Rebel Café

All hail to the Rebel Café


Twenty-five Yiddish speaking socialists
left the Thomashevski Theater
on a June night
    in 1894
and packed
        the front of the
         Café Royale
on 2nd Avenue

planting
 the orchids
        of sharing
for 200 years
in the moil of a Rebel Café

All hail to the Rebel Café

Gérard de Nerval
walks with a lobster on a leash
           into the Rebel Café

All hail to the Rebel Café

Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire
  meeting each night to talk
   and to plot
           in Austin's Fox Bar, Paris, 1904

All hail to the Rebel Café

         --da da da da--
          Five poets chant at once
        --da da da da--
                   the world's first simultaneous poem
        --da da--
          in the Cabaret Voltaire
        --da da--
           1916
        --da da--
           ¬Zurich
--da--

 All hail to the Rebel Café

Jean-Paul Sartre
   sitting with Simone de Beauvoir
   in the Café Flore
       waiting for Hitler to fall
         in 1944
All hail to the Rebel Café

Janis Joplin
         leans against the bar
with a guy from Detroit, a
      guy from Texas,
and a guy from
          Salem, Missouri
   to sing "Amazing Grace"
     in the Rebel Café

All hail to the Rebel Café

Hail to the Stray Dog, to the Caffé Trieste!
Hail to thee, o Total Assault Cantina!
Salutes, o Greater Detroit Zen Zone!
Hail, o Sempiternal Scrounge Lounge of Topeka!
Hail to Dusey's Truckstop! To the Silent Fiddle
Moon Tent,
to Manducca's on Avenue B, to the Golden Bard
Retirement Home's
       Saturday Night All Thrills Café!

      All hail to the Rebel Café

     We'll have to keep on
      opening & closing our
      store fronts, our collectives,
      our social action centers
      till tulips are in the sky

      The cafés come     The cafés wane
      but the best and the final rebel cafe
      is inside the human brain

All hail to the Rebel Café
All hail to the Rebel Café
 Rebel Café