And these will be the last two there are tap rooms
all over America in the cities.
There are breweries in cities, which had tap rooms attached
right to them.
So that workers after they finished brewing beer all day
could walk through a door right into one
of these tap rooms and tank up before they got in a car
and drove home.
And a number of these breweries are now-- you know,
they're extinct.
But some of these tap rooms are still going.
And there's one in Philadelphia, in North Philadelphia,
the Badlands really is the place-- it's 3rd and Brown.
There's the old Ortliebs, terrible beer.
Ortlieb's a brewery, which is closed.
But the taproom that was attached to it,
where these workers often--
there's no club, its just folks go, hang out.
Usually on weekends, they have these very
cheesy can't even call them jazz bands-- they're combos, right?
Combos, jazz combos, cheesy combos.
And this poem is about that now and in another time.
There's an Italian word in the poem.
And the Italian word is zampognari.
A zampogna is a primitive bagpipe
the mountain people play.
And at Christmas, mountain people
would sometimes come down to the cities and play their zampogna
and ask for handouts for them.
So the title of this one is "Ortlieb's Uptown Taproom".
"Tonight, the sax's rayon shirt flames flamingo, pink parrots,
and blue palms.
He trues his pork-pie so the pinky diamond
winks into the smoky room.
The top hat tingles the drummer's skull plates.
He sees things we don't, winged things cutting the air.
A second set at midnight, the brewery
long closed down behind that door.
After their shift, the cookers and machinists
passed through for beers and shots,
punched Bobby Darin into the candy jukebox.
By 3 AM, they're home, leftovers in the oven,
or TV dinners, upstairs a sea of restless dreaming, roller
skating on ice, a wet finger in the toaster.
And this night, he remembers waking as a child
to mountain zampognari, in his village, Christmas morning,
bagpipe music breathing high and thin under the window.
Their pig gut bladders call like animals.
The herdsmen's arms muscled like his own,
checking heat and pressure gauges, breathing a tune,
dreamed up as he goes along, like our flamingo sax
in his ecstasy tonight, who blows bagpipe
music through our hearts and the sudsy breath of drinkers
quitting work."