In some old dark cafe,
Vesuvio San Francisco, 1968.
Jazz is playing,
cigarette smoke fills the air.
This is where the romantics go
to escape the rain.
A man in the back room says to me,
his voice low, crippled with a flicker of conspiracy—
“Would you sell your soul to discover the secrets of the artists
to be free?”
There’s a dim tiffany lamp
casting a bruised light over the piano man
crooning a dirge about the death of all men.
As beatniks pass around their poems,
the artists, the lovers, the loners,
the losers who’re stone cold sober—
all circle around together
uneasily entertained by society’s ways.
“Break out now! don’t look behind!”
they shout,
“There’s no freedom in a manufactured mind.
Traditions and lies, superstition’s control,
they steal your spirit,
they sell your soul.
The psychological chains are hidden but they bind us tight,
caught in a system where they convince wrong to feel right.
They say it’s for your own good, but can’t you see?
It’s just a prison,
disguised as being free.
Are you sure it’s your truth that you’re chasing?
Or just a hollow dream society’s placing?
They built these walls and called them schools,
Where we’re all shaped by unwritten rules.
The laws we follow, who made them real?
A life of labor with no joy to feel.
Because in this system, it’s freedom that dies
but the rebellious and questioning nature
of the new generation
will create new gods, new religion—
in which only we can save ourselves from these lies.”
It brought back memories of that day in the Chelsea Hotel
when Leonard said to me,
“The way to live is to belong to no one and nothing,
yet be the center of everything.
It’s just the art of existing.”
That was the night my true artistic desires first unfolded—
a bioenergetic command of the soul to create,
to consume, to possess, to escape.
But there’s a fine line between freedom and addiction,
between desire and destruction.
You can take every drug in the world,
become the Warhol you always wanted to be,
but in the end,
the art of immortality is a choice, not a decree.
My mind drifts back to the café,
the man still watching, a question lingering in his gaze.
Should I take the first step down the artist’s path of uncertainty?
Will a walk on the wild side shatter the big man’s cage of conformity?
And will I become a rebel against the destiny others built for me?
I hold out my hand as a gesture towards his offering
And he whispers in my ear,
“Welcome to your new world darling—
It’s time to be free.”
And as I step into this San Francisco rain,
I feel each drop washing away
every last bit of sanity tethered to my brain.
I know from here on, I’ll never belong to anyone or anything again.