Poet Ted Burke’s The Kensington Beat invites us in to join him and the late-night crowd in The Kensington Club, a San Diego haunt fondly nick named “The Ken.” In this song, we are part of the scene at The Ken - part of “warm nights and drum solos…where store front lights burn into the dark and get diffuse in the amber glare of bottles and rim shots clinks and reporting the news of the night.” This is a place where “everyone steps up and takes a solo” - where the poet’s brother “plays and demonstrates the history of sticks on drumheads, what the hands do when getting busy is the business,” and even though “we have to go to work again on Monday” and “all there is left to do is sing and consider bills to pay” each of us steps up and takes our solo and our “life stories end up as notes on sheet music.”

The poem, The Kensington Beat, is found in “sitting in the dark” poems, Ted Burke, Old House Press, San Diego, CA, 2002