Positively loquacious today:
One night in Phoenix:
Cheryl, the girl I had moved to AZ with was bored and we went down to Mill Ave, the hub of bars at the university. We'd score from the street people hundreds of disillusioned college trust fund babies lived in the streets shrugging off the amenities that their parents and scholarships paid for to live the hippie free life, I met only a few that their parents had stopped sending them survival money. One evening sometime we sat on a green hill of grass that was right along the cruising strip.. hippie people littered the grass talking sleeping and playing with devil sticks. I myself had sewn a patch on my jeans to cover the large hole in the rear, I had no money for new jeans, in a marvelous display of hippie ingenuity I gathered yarn from ?? And embroidered random flowers on the patch, then on something for Cheryl, then something for some dirty old hippie on the street. I was not a hippie however and they could feel it. I gave off too aggressive a vibe to be accepted, to confrontational glaring at the pigs and car pimps and jocks as they made their way up and down the strip. I wrote poetry constantly, Cheryl liked to accompany me as she was looking for a boyfriend and most of the real weirdos stayed away, when she finally met her Mike I wasn't there, I wonder if that would have changed something sometimes, but it's moot. They had babies and disappeared. That night on the grass I pulled out a poem I had written, not so much a poem really, actually I wrote it to mock all the college lit students who sat in the coffee shop endlessly groaning and moaning and droning on about this or that poet or poem and it's fantastic societal message. In truth I was probably a little jealous, my own reading has meandered through some classics some moderns some existentialists but without the benefit of a college reading guide. I didn't know the poets names they read, but I knew some of the poems, I'm a poor reader of poetry. My poem was the words "to be" repeated again and again with different enunciation and stresses. And every once in a while I added a word like toaster, or pineapple.. It's still in my journal. In a most uncharacteristic show of bravery and lack of self consciousness I stood atop this hill and read it as loud as I could. I read it more than once looping through it randomly changing it as I read always to be to be, amazed that no one shouted at me to shut up or sit down. I thought for a while that no one listened, but then noticed a soap-box preacher across the four lane street was stopped and glaring at me. I had disrupted his harangue, but that was beautiful. One hippie on the base of the hill sat their the whole time looking the other way, when I finished he stood up turned to me and said " I been there man." smiled and walked away. What a wonderful thing to say to me on my mocking poem. It lit up my mind which wasn't even high or intoxicated, I've spent years no contemplating his sentence more loaded with meaning than the 5 minutes I spent babbling.. Did he agree? Was he mocking? Making a drug reference? Calling me nuts? I never asked. It would kill the moment to know. But a connection existed for him that didn't for me and that forged a connection for me..