Out Of Town Cafe Poem by Edwin Hopper

If you're fed up with the tired old cliché,
bored dancing at the local palais,
if you want a place that's really risqué,
then drive out beyond the street lights and stray,
past a crash site with a dead rose bouquet.
Turn off the tar onto gravel and clay,
then park outside the Out of Town Café

The waitresses smile and say yes, okay,
to tea for truckers on a cheap tin tray,
and chips with ketchup from a red sachet.
Men look, sigh and smile, while watching them sway,
lips, hair, hips and breasts, and then they fall prey,
to magic spells stolen from Morgan le Fay,
ending in thrall to the Out of Town Café.

There's grown men frightened to disobey,
the mysterious accountant in grey.
A boss with followers who like to slay,
those who let morals slide down to decay,
fulfilling desires all weird straight and gay,
then fail with dismay to finally pay,
all that is owed to the Out of Town Café.


Cops search out villains like the brothers Kray,
look round, see no evidence on display.
They never find goods from the Rio del Ray,
or someone who's travelled from far Cathay,
back of the car park in a dark chalet.
So cops say, next time, and drive away,
to type reports on the Out of Town Café.


No one really knows what they purvey,
or how they get it through air port x-ray.
Excise are enticed and laid in hay,
or end their days under a motorway,
skulls crushed up like papier mache.
Well it's all rumour. It's just what they say,
I've never been to the Out of Town Café.