Poetry in Motion : Cabbies in the Hack Poets Society are pedaling verse about their bizarre life and times on Manhattan’s mean streets. And it ain’t Emily Dickinson.

It’s a tough world for hacks.

With any luck, the guy who drove the taxi on the day shift before you cleaned up the condoms, pantyhose, gumballs and beepers that passengers left behind. On a good night, the cab doesn’t stink and the turn signals blink as you speed toward the lights of Manhattan.

Uptown, downtown, the bridges are jammed. From Harlem to Wall Street, the taxis are crammed, with crackheads, pinheads and punks in denim. The creeps who shoot up and beat fares if you let ‘em. The grind, the tension, and when you get home, it’s enough to make you dash off a . . . poem?

“What else you gonna do, kill somebody?” says T. Butler Gelber, hack extraordinaire and poet emeritus of the yellow-cab jungle. “I figured it was easier writing poems than going crazy. And I’m not the only one.”

These days, some New York cabbies sweat over poetic meters as well as the money-grubbing kind. A sample, from Gelber’s Early Angry period:

Uptown rich dude, hates to talk

I’d personally prefer it if you’d learn to walk

Choirboy, beggar boy, little boy, whore

Trying to be just like the girls, what the hell for?

Fat man, skinny man, on your way to work

90 hours on the seat drives a man berserk

“Some people say cabbies and poetry don’t mix,” says Gelber, 35, whose friends call him Terry. “But in a crazy way, they do mix. At least they do in this town.”

Earlier this year, New Yorkers began seeing strange yellow posters heralding the first public readings by the Hack Poets Society. The fledgling group of taxi poets, organized by Gelber, debuted in a chilly SoHo loft several months ago and has won growing media attention.

It’s no surprise, given the city’s love-hate relationship with cabs. For many residents, the act of getting into a New York taxi is the most compelling theater they experience, a crapshoot on wheels. Riders can wind up with raving psychos, brooding Slavs or Borscht Belt comics who won’t shut up.

Everybody in this town has their favorite cab story, a bizarre interlude that sums up life in the Big Apple. Now, hack poets have turned the tables, telling audiences what it’s like from their side of the plastic partition.

To be sure, it ain’t Chaucer. Much of the poetry is reminiscent of high school assignments, written in strict rhyme and rarely taking metaphorical flight. But the work has a raw vitality and just enough rage under the surface to make the writers compelling and believable.

Like Gelber--a starving actor, part-time carnival barker and former bar owner--the other hack poets have a checkered past. Some are burned-out professionals; others are aspiring artists, and a few drifted into New York seeking their fortune, only to wind up driving a cab at night. One member, known only as the Cabbie Prince, bills himself as New York’s only masked taxi driver.

They work out of a garage in Queens, scribbling down poems when time permits--at red lights, in traffic jams or at the end of a rotten day behind the wheel. Most of the hacks, now numbering seven, say they have taken a crack in earlier years at novels, short stories and verse. But nothing like poetry.

“There’s no better preparation for you as a writer than to drive a taxicab,” says Tom Ostrowski, 26, a long-haired refugee from Golden, Colo., who has been driving for two years. “The material is sensational.”

Ralph (Ulysses) Alster, a 42-year-old former architect, says chatting with the people who pile into his cab gives him an open state of mind--and a flood of new experiences--that are crucial to good writing.

“When Gelber told me about this group, I thought he was a little off, but then it sounded OK,” he recalls. “I thought, why not give it a shot?”

It sure beats the daily grind. In New York, the typical cabbie rents his or her car for $79 to $93 a day, depending on the shift, and also pays for gas and union dues before leaving the garage. Working 10-hour days, drivers have to make all that money back before pocketing their first dollar.

The mathematics of hacking are simple: $1.50 for the basic fare, 25 cents for each additional fifth of a mile and an extra 50-cent fee at night. After that, it’s 44,000 licensed cabbies against the world--and each other.

Some drivers do quite well, pulling in several hundred bucks a day. But others struggle to make their daily payments. It’s frustrating and also dangerous work, since cabbies constantly worry about being shot or robbed.

As they cruise the underbelly of New York, the hack poets reflect these concerns, writing verses that are dark and abusive, humorous and haunting. The material may in parts strike some as racist, because there is friction between Caucasian cabbies and the growing numbers of immigrant drivers. Most of the work, like Alster’s “Cabbies Aren’t Born,” explodes with indignation:

Cabbies aren’t born,

they’re made of sterner stuff

than mortals; they are torn

from life’s fiber

cast-aside rejects,

foundlings in the river tiger.

The sinking sun can’t sink soon enough, for darkness

needs to get around

The lights of night and damn damn the macadam

dance beneath the wheels of cursing cars.

The poems tell stories most riders never hear: like the nightmare of cleaning out a car and discovering that someone vomited on the floor. Or that a hooker who took care of business in the back seat left a used condom in the ashtray.

“Cab driving has made me more aggressive and cynical as a person,” says Gelber. “So that’s bound to creep into my writing. How could it not?”

It’s 1:30 a.m. on a freezing Saturday, and the founder of hack poetry is racing his engine at a Chelsea intersection in the West 20s. Across the street, a prostitute screams at motorists and a legless man in a Santa Claus hat wheels himself on a board between cars, begging for money. Tonight, nobody’s feeling generous.

“Earlier this evening, I picked up two drug dealers,” says Gelber. “Then I picked up a college kid with a hooker heading for a midtown joint. Then I picked up Ma and Pa Kettle, who haven’t been to New York in 50 years and are surprised that their Times Square hotel looks different than they expected.”

Steering his taxi north, toward the Empire State Building, Gelber smiles and makes a mental note to jot it all down. The next performance of the Hack Poets Society is coming up soon, and there’s always a need for new material.

“I’m worried, I’m real worried,” Gelber confesses, as the lights go down at the Castillo Art Center, the current home of the Hack Poets Society. “The Cabbie Prince has been drunk all day, and I gotta get him under control.”

In a small room, filled with fewer than 50 chairs, the poetry reading is about to begin. The lights go dim, and Gelber welcomes the audience with a few wisecracks about cabdrivers who have the gall to think they can write poetry.

Then Ostrowski takes the stage and recites “From JFK,” one of the group’s most popular works. His sarcastic poem about a ride in from the airport is read in a heavy Indian dialect, taking potshots at immigrant taxi drivers:

I make a right, I make a left, perhaps this is SoHo,

I do not know where your hotel is, please tell me how to go

I start to driving just today, I am an honest man

You must no longer yell at me, I do the best I can

That other guy just hit me! Now he tries to get away!

I must speed up and hit him back, by God he’s going to pay

Go back you silly bastard, do you see what you have done?

My passenger is very bad and says he has a gun.

The performance picks up speed, with Gelber doing a nifty Brando imitation in a poem about the Cabbie Godfather. April Gzella, a part-time soap opera actress and former cabdriver, weighs in with a poem about the first cabdriver, “Proto Hack,” concluding:

So mortals beware how you treat the hacks

They’re not just a pack of mutts

But sons of the god of poetry,

With fire in their guts.

Suddenly there’s a stirring at the back of the room and a rustling of paper. The Cabbie Prince is ready to read, and he makes his way unsteadily to the stage. A tall man with short-cropped hair and cauliflower ears, he wears sneakers, faded blue jeans, a workshirt and a Zorro mask.

Motioning for quiet, he launches into an epic:

I’m the prince of the cabbies and I’m a prince of a fellow

I’m red in the face, but my blood runs yellow

I go out to the cage and I pay three bucks

For a lousy ticket, the union sucks!

I honk and I honk, I screech and I skid,

From the downtown tangle to the midtown grid . . . .

All at once, he falls silent. The Prince, wobbling a bit, has lost his place. Fellow poets shout out the last line, urging him on.

“Oh yeah, oh yeah,” he says. “Right.”

Let’s start up our engines, turn on the lights

A final salute and we’re off in the night

Then up to the Milford, I’m in the morass

Of the theatre district, that pain in the . . . .

Once again, the Prince falters. “Uh . . . gee. Help me out here,” he mumbles. Gelber yells out encouragement and from somewhere deep inside, the cabbie finds new strength. He stretches his arms wide, shouting the last lines:

Through the window I hear with a strange sort of pity

The relentless, heartbreaking sounds of the city

I’m part of its energy, power and pain

Tomorrow I’ll do it all over again

And again and again, till I’m shot in the head

Get killed in a wreck or just plain drop dead

Potters Field, Randalls Island, not known for its beauty

On my stone let it say: Prince of Cabbies, OFF DUTY.

Applause fills the tiny room and the Prince, who refuses to reveal his name, finds his way back to a chair. Soon, the building empties, the lights go out and the hack poets are back on the road.

Gelber is preparing for the next performance, scheduled for January, and hopes to raise enough money to keep the group going. So far, the bulk of the funds to rent halls and print posters have come from him and other members.

“We’re a strange bunch,” he says. “But we keep it going. Tell all your friends, the hack is back.”