Ed Sanders

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