Fraudulently
carrying books, not read
Smoking
endless cigarettes and drinking coffees
in
the student union at Reed
in Eugene, in Portland in the south end park blocks
let’s
all drink espresso
to
express our individualism
let’s
go to the Café Espresso
Obscurity
and ambiguity
the
chosen raiments of the faux intelligentsia,
lets
be incomprehensible, but say inscrutable
lets
read Alan Watts,
lets
backpack in the north cascades, lets be Kerouac, Ginsburg, Snyder, Burroughs
lets
be vital, lets drink Cribari Brothers Hearty Burgundy or Sweet Sauterne with Kool
Aid,
heralding
the arrival of Boone’s Farm Apples
folk
songs, folk singers
fiddle
sticks, dulcimers, jug band music, blue grass music
Mimi
Baez’ husband’s book
before
he died on a motorcycle, with his cat
in
New York, …its been so long,
….since
Dylan preformed
at
the Gas Light, in the village
the
in-between-ers were stuck
with
the beats pulling them back to the 40’s-50’s
10-20
years gone in the past
and being
pushed forward, into the soon to be drug culture
of
the hippies, who were coming real soon
with the
trappings of a full grown culture
The
times are changing …quickly; Janice is coming, and Jimmy, and a magic carpet
back
then it was hard to be 16
tugged
and pulled, and pushed and pulled back,
with
tension building churning
the
guts of iconoclastic Kerouacians
churned
with resentment at the hedonists
great
literature
reduced to watermelon sugar and fishing
unwashed
and barefoot contaminating
the
steps and floors at city lights
barely
able to read but standing where giants stood
their vicarious
intelligence to comfort them
on
their way to the Haight
stopping
at Mike’s place
to
watch the pinball addicts before heading east
but
the cold hard truth about 16 year old boys
was girls, and whatever it took to try and
have sex
Siddhartha
was a lure to attract the braless
and
Kant’s Reasonable critique only good when applied to the sun shining,
through
a thin cotton dress, blowing in a summers breeze, bronzed slim legs another
lure
as
the beginning of dialogue about intimacy
one dialogist
trying to convince the other about the spiritually-earthy requirement for sex
the
16s became 18s
and
the calendar moved through this idyll time
until
it was 1964 and the adults went to war
in some
off the edge of the world place
and
the some of the 18s went to war, and some went to school,
because
Beaver’s
dad stopped telling us what to do
