Big thanks to the brand new literary journal Sepia for including this poem in their inaugural issue! Check them out online, here.
On seeing a scanned Polaroid of a friend before a Grateful Dead show, 1980-something
Look at you: there was nowhere you’d rather be.
It’s obvious in your eyes, the obligatory if uninspired
tie-dye screaming why wasn’t I born in the 60s?
(your sandals evidence you weren’t thinking
because I and a few of my buddies would be busy
killing or being killed in unpronounceable places—
or else doing hard time for a first offense
possession, no rich father to wave the magic wand
chemicals can’t approximate in a courtroom.)
You didn’t know what you didn’t know,
which is the artificially sweetened edge
of adolescence—where we become more
or less assimilated; those ahead of the curve
on either extreme either interning and making
down payments on mortgaged futures,
or else already eliminated from adult discussion,
even or especially if they’re unaware of it.
Are you experienced? you didn’t ask because you were,
and so were the people who, without second thought,
would climb in a car and catch the next several dates
anywhere on the east coast. The show never ends,
you knew, the kind of epiphany not found inside
textbooks and locker rooms. Glowing like baby gods,
the tables won’t turn for some time, months for a few
of you; years or moments for everyone else (it seemed),
and you were sorry for the friends uninterested in,
or even afraid of, the back roads you felt compelled to traverse.
Those trips add up, of course: the sort of carnage not measured
by money or memories. Like the Magic Bus that made it
from the Meadowlands to Atlanta on one tank topped off ten times.
Encores and everything runs fine until, all of a sudden, it doesn’t.
And you’re stuck, freezing to death or overheated on a highway
named after some slave owner. You were a story seldom told:
not notable, somewhere on the psychedelic spectrum in between
the kid on the roof after the fruit punch got spiked trying to fly
(and dying), and the burn-out with acid rain in his brain living outside
in a cardboard box on Haight or Broadway or even your home town.
But isn’t that like any war? Most of the casualties are unknown,
unspectacular, used up, dead? But you lived. Once again,
somewhere in between the comfort zones of the born-again
believer who exists to denounce his past sins, content or
committed to taking everyone else down (because if only
they all knew better or had his faith & intention…), and the cliché,
eschewing aesthetics, married either to money or else avoiding
animal products and tied to a partner whose soul was vacuumed
out of her body by the tornado also known as accountability.
Would you do it all over again? That parking lot, circa 1987,
in need of neither a miracle nor remonstration? Some mistakes
follow you like a stray dog the rest of your life, a stinking cloud
of need or regret, or else the itch of a love you came to fear,
or the whispering trail you can always see in the corner
of your eye, even or especially when you’re asleep?
So was it a mistake? Isn’t just saying no also a kind of death?
Even those who don’t take the ride will still die someday, right?
What’s worse than an existence scripted out by ascetics, centuries ago?
And here we are, over half a lifetime later. Did Time become
tenuous, slowing down and speeding up in a ceaseless loop?
Did Reality rewire itself, a language nobody else understands?
Can you explain how—and why—each human brain is coded like a computer,
clicking with history and happenstance? Are you grateful you’re not dead?
Or are you counting out the seconds until you’re in peace, at last, to rest?
