I didn’t know it at the time,
but my misspent youth was planned
The training ground for what I’d write,
then hard to understand
The many schools, the teachers chides,
expulsions my reward
Postgraduate work for future truth,
all voices untoward
The risks were high, survival mined,
Shangi-La, a vagrant’s room
My pen disclaimed, all actions shamed,
flat broke one afternoon
From the diner’s window I heard the song
that turned my life around
As Gregg Allman sang ‘Melissa,’
my true destiny was found
And today I harbor no regrets,
there’s no one left to blame
As I write the words for me hard one
—my sinful past reclaimed
(Strafford Pennsylvania: July, 2019)
‘Thank You, Gregg—I Miss You’
Categories:
postgraduate, life, time,
Form: Rhyme
Yucatan, etc.
Cortez, DeMille are gone.
It's now the locus
of postgraduate honeymoons,
urban fugues, a minor literary genre.
Knowledge and ejection predispose us
to technological parody--
antique busses, burros, plumbing, pyramids--
as if nothing ever caught on.
There is no CHRONOLOGY, the pace and mores
are too counterproductive--
poster Indians pee along the road,
the women never dust.
We like the Sartrean-Spanish askewness--
bugs, sex, dysentery, moonlight--
as if, though settled with us,
the Fates vacation here.
Categories:
postgraduate, fate, holiday, irony, leaving,
Form: Free verse