How I wish I could’ve visited the Beat Hotel

On rue Gît-le-Cœur,
rooms bare as a monk’s cell,
paint peeling,
floors creaking like tired moans.
bedsprings thin as nerves,
walls curling like old bones. 
But inside…

A fire,
a generation of misfits
mad saints,
holy outlaws.
who followed the echo of Stein,
the smoke trail of Fitzgerald 
and the spiritual ruin of Hemingway.

There was Ginsberg, 
lungs full of lightning,
howling scripture
to the broken.
Burroughs, scalpel in hand,
cutting language open,
slicing until it bled.
Corso, street angel
laughing at death in his Sunday shoes.

The walls heard it all.  
Confessions, explosions,  
lines of cocaine  
sold as wisdom.  
The hotel itself  
a breathing poem.  

I came too late to those doors, 
but found my own halls to haunt
It was the 90s 
I missed the nights of raw language…
Yet, I carried the torch,
Filled with a contraband of words
Into a decade that wanted 
none of it

Poetry…
they sneered,
called it weakness,
told us to drop it.
We didn’t.

Paris taught me otherwise:
South African barmen,
Irish journalists,
expats with wine-wet voices,
they handed me tools sharper than any textbook.

We were the next generation
Z.W.Mohr, Buster, and I,
young, unshaken,
sitting long into the night.
Philosophy and pistachios 
a feast

We were young and stubborn,
let the night air fill us with daring.

We spoke into subway cars,
into bar smoke, or the echoes 
found only in cafés.
Our words rang out
to anyone,
to everyone

Because we were young,
because Paris is magic,
because silence is death.

Now I am older.
The nights sit heavy.
But the fire,
that roar of passion,
it leaps to other mouths.

Virtual cafés,
streams of verse on glowing screens.
TikToks beating into the night
like jazz riffs that create
new rhythms for a new world.

The torch passes.
It always does.
Yet still
one voice,
joined with millions,
refuses the silence.

Fighting for change.
Fighting to breathe.
Fighting, always,
against the dark that
would snuff us out.