NOT A LOT of poetry has poured out of me in the past year, year and a half. Two years. By poetry I mean poems, stories, songs, novels, one-act plays, and postmodern shopping lists – all modes of expression which used to flow forth from my pen like ... like ink, from a pen. Now all I have is Cheap Eats once a week and some 55-gallon canola oil drums to hammer on – a noisy, not very poetic business. But, in the immortal words of my exceptionally mortal Uncle Big-Six, "Whatta y'gonna do, huh?"

I'll tell you what I'm going to do, Uncle Big-Six. I'm going to drive out to the beach and park in the parking lot facing the ocean, roll down my window, crank Rush Limbaugh or Dan Savage or whatever the hell AM talk show I can find, drink a bottle of wine out of the bottle, fall asleep with my hand on my balls and the sun in my face, dream about onions, and wake up a fucking poet again.

SIDEWALK NATURE WALK

A butter knife.

A volume knob.

A pigeon feather.

Cracks.

I kicked that out at the coffeehouse the other day, and I publish it here because it represents for me an important monument to my reemergence as a post-midlife poetic dude – a second-half kickoff, if you will, which harkens both forward to a hard-fought, newfound maturity and backward to fifth grade.

I'd like to thank my wife, Crawdad de la Cooter, for her patience and support, and the visiting Pittsburgh poet, Moonpie, for reading me my horoscope and helping me edit the title of the poem from a three-line-long, rambling sentence fragment to three simple words. I'd like to thank the guy behind the counter at the Last Laugh for loaning me his pen, without which the poem might not have ever been written. My new favorite coffeehouse: the Last Laugh on Dolores and something-or-other.

The next day Moonpie and me decided to have our coffee and work on our poems in North Beach, it being after all quite possibly the most poetic neighborhood in the city. I worked up an appetite nailing down six more four-liners at Cafe Trieste, and then, by way of a lunch break, we bellied up to the bar at Mario's Bohemian Cigar Store Cafe, corner of Columbus and Union, on Washington Square Park.

Would you believe I've never yet reviewed this place, let alone eaten there? You can practically see Richard Brautigan in the park across the street, eating a spinach sandwich. Except we sat at the counter, so all we could see was the guy behind the counter, cooking up stuff, and the waitresspeople hustling back and forth, serving it.

Small place. Besides the counter there's just one row of tables, windows looking out onto Union Street and Washington Square. Plus a couple of tables outside on the sidewalk. I recommend eating inside, because Mario's has a real-feeling old-timey bohemian feel to it – and I'm assuming that's what you came to North Beach for.

What's for lunch are hot focaccia sandwiches, or else lasagna, cannelloni, or polenta. All they have for cooking purposes is a small two-tier pizza oven wedged into the corner behind the bar. There are stacks of focaccia squares to one side of the oven, and on the other side, under the bar, all sorts of fixin's. These get slapped together into drippy, melty, saucy sandwiches full of sausage, chicken, meatballs, eggplant, turkey ... you name it.

Moonpie got a veggie sandwich ($6.50), which consisted of eggplant, roasted red peppers, and Swiss cheese. It was deliciously crispy and big enough that I got to eat a whole section of it. As much a pal as Moonpie is, though – and she's my second-oldest pal in the world – I have to admit that I'd have traded her in a hot second for the guy sitting on the other side of her, wrangling his way through a sausage sandwich just dripping with sauce and melted cheese.

I got polenta and sausage ($8.50). Polenta's a funny thing. Sometimes it's mushy, sometimes cakey, sometimes cubey. This was cubey – six cubes smothered in marinara sauce and straddled by a plump, split-longways sausage. No cheese. But plenty of bread and butter.

What with all that to eat and a couple glasses of house red ($3.75 each), there was not a lot of poetry written after lunch. Here's one of the ones I penned beforehand, at Trieste, which I publish here because it made Moonpie go, "Aw."

SHOES AND HATS

Somewhere between the dog shit

on her shoes and the

propeller on her hat

She is naked as a number or note

That's where I love her.

Mario's Bohemian Cigar Store Cafe. 566 Columbus (at Union), S.F. (415) 362-0536. Daily, 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Takeout available. Beer and wine. MasterCard, Visa. Wheelchair accessible. Dan Leone is the author of Eat This, San Francisco (Sasquatch Books), a collection of Cheap Eats restaurant reviews, and The Meaning of Lunch (Mammoth Books).