Something Or Other

I am not a lunatic but madness might be a factor.

Do we wait for a savior, or bring one into existence?

Music resonates in consonance with the creator’s voice.

What isn’t transformed by fire is eaten by envy.

Many Boomers couldn’t get enough of the world;

everything opened, everything poured in, then too much.

One day, several years ago, I realized everything had changed.

Inner voices were unhinged by my confusion. Ageing does that.

Innocence has become more important as I have gotten older.

And I have wondered if idealism is another form of innocence.

Little by little, while on the road, a new voice

emerged that I came to recognize as my own;

the extraneous bits of life fell away.

There is no language for that,

only the surge of the soul 

and the swelling of the heart.

from: Buckle Up! A Boomer’s Meandering Musings on

Innocence, Time, and Love, From Then to More Recently

Unpub. MS p. 39

Retrospective Of A Boomer (part 2 of 4)

For nine months of 1969, I was drunk most of the time, 

self-medicating, hoping to silence a vicious demon.

At the university,* I studied walkers, runners, 

rock climbing, landscapes (with houses and without);

sidewalks, clouds, bones, music, rocks, sonic booms, 

searing desert sunlight, and once a day I recited Desiderata.

I loved being the random university student. 

I had good friends and was active in several clubs.

But the sixties and early seventies were full of rampage,

riots, kidnapings, fire bombings, and Vietnam.

It was as if the times were conspiring to destroy

what little was left of everyone’s innocence.

I ran naked at Gate’s Pass and at Mt. Lemmon.

On a dare, I streaked on the university campus.

My girlfriend was French and wonderfully assertive,

but stalked me for a month for breaking up with her.

Classical music remained my source of solace,

and rock and roll kept me in the groove of things.

The Navy saved me from the train wreck that was home, 

but after that, I feared the volatile nature of my anger.

For two chaotic years, I lived in a kind of feral panic,

thinking that would make up for my abused childhood.

But no, it doesn’t work that way, not at all.

*Tucson, Arizona

From: A Rambly Search for 

Innocence, Time, and Love

Unpub. MS p. 9

Start A Fire

Coyote lays it on the line to some 

backsliding Boomers

There Earth, there Heaven, those I know.

From the Divine, interventions we crave.

It’s the Divinity close we want to touch.

We of course cannot, as I have before said.

Poet knows, Watcher knows, Traveler knows.

But you and you and you do not know.

Didn’t we learn something from The Moody Blues, 

In Search of the Lost Chord?

Cat Stevens’ Tea For the Tillerman?

Simon and Garfunkle’s Bridge Over Troubled Water?

Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow?

Gabrieli, Beethoven, Hindemith, and Nielsen?

Doing what were you those youthful years all?

Laugh if you must, but so essential those times were.

Forget did you fundamental humility and 

rules for honor and dignity there are?

On Earth, live the time of your life;

the life of your time; life without fear.

You work. You play. You live truly.

Condemn evil, be kind and gentle.

Speak of goodness, do charity.

Become fire. Become that lover, red hot.

From: Addendum

A work in progress

Retrospective Of A Boomer (Part One)

I had a notion to write about growing up

50s-60s style, post-war baby boomer, 

starting with the assassination of John F. Kennedy

and the repetitive broadcast of the Zapruder film;

Vietnam trauma, disruptions swept under 

the ticky-tacky sameness of mediocrity,

and I wondered how many thought about what the cost

to heart and soul would be to enter the fray,

exhibited by throwing rocks, screaming, marching for

racial equality, taking over university offices, 

flipping off corporate America, anti-war protests,

playing/living the music, seeking a new sentimentality,

sexual liberation, relevance in an upside-down

ripped up social fabric, pulled in opposite directions

by selfish forces, by blurry images of supposed goals,

by stepping stones to a new life that went nowhere

until later and it was too late to change course

having become members of a status quo, as if we

(the generic we) climbed that ladder of success

only to find it leaned against the wrong wall, 

compiled all things lived into a palpable fantasy that, 

in the end, today, has left us alienated of connections, 

lost in the pursuit of...Wait. What were we pursuing? 

A post-adolescent understanding of love and peace?

We paid plenty of (too young) lip service to that. 

We did the Sixties and it wasn’t all that good 

(except the music), certainly not good enough to re-enact.

I dream that one day I will awaken into an understanding 

that won’t leave me wrestling with the era, but at least 

I might find in its chaotic landscape my lost innocence.

From: A Rambly Search for Innocence, Time, and Love

Unpub. MS p. 2