The Beans
– Parody on Poe’s “The Bells”

 
 

Smell the aroma of the beans –  coffee beans

What an odiferous effluvium for human beings

How they grind, grind, grind

In the friendly café air

And the poets expound

On the heavens and they resound

With a cosmic delight

Keeping time, time, time

In a sort of Runic rhyme

From the celestial insuflation that is so

pleasing and kind

From the beans, beans, beans, beans

Beans, beans, beans

From the release of aroma as they grind 
 

Hear the poets’ golden words,

Golden words!

What new worlds in prophecy they foretell!

What wrongs and misdeeds they set aright

How they sing out their delight!

From their molten-golden throats,

What a liquid ditty floats

To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats

On the moon!

Oh from out the sounding swells,

What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!

How it swells!

How they dwell

On the Future! How they tell

Of the rapture that impels

To the droning, whining, grinding.

Of the beans, beans, beans

Of the beans, beans, beans, beans

Beans, beans, beans –

Whilst the poets are rhyming to the

grinding of the beans! 
 

Hear the grinder louder now –

Brazen machine!

What a tale of terror now those woody beans!

In the startled ear of all

How they scream and drown out all!

Poets too horrified to speak

They can only shriek, shriek,

Out of tune,

In a clamorous appealing

to the mercy of café hire,

But the grinding pitch

grows higher, higher, higher

Like Geoffrey Dommer drilling

With a resolute endeavor

A pre-frontal lobe lobotomy forever

To send poets to the far side

of the pale-faced moon.

Oh the beans, beans, beans!

What terror they instill

And despair they entail

How they grind, crash and roar!

What a horror they outpour

On the bosom of the palpitating air!

Yet the ear it fully knows

By the droning

And the moaning and grinding

How the clamor grows and grows:

Yet the ear it fully knows

That the grinding of this machine

Is but the howling of a fiend

And he dances and he yells

Keeping time, time, time.

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the grating of the grind,

To the throbbing roar of the beans –

Of the beans:

Keeping time, time, time,

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the roaring grind of the beans – 

Of the beans, beans, beans, beans. –

Beans, beans, beans –

To the droning, grating, whining, roaring

Of the beans.



J. T. Brown