Sunday, January 4, 2015

Old Hippies Never Die

In The Nursing Home
(or Old Hippies Never Die)

You said, "it's my turn"
and then you dedicated
all your sweet resolve
to shine like some new
reason to shelter my soul
and review my nooks
and crooks by design.

Once there was revolution
brewing and I'd sing
about that, hoping
we would win the streets this time,
a fallow belief.

Now I'm hung to dry
like a pair of worn levis
on green vinyl line.

‎January ‎4, ‎2015 4:13 PM


Backyard photo posted as a writing prompt by Tess for Magpie Tales
Wordle by Brenda Warren as a writing challenge on her Sunday Whirl

11 comments:

  1. I know that hung-out-to-dry feeling well! May 2015 be kind to you!

    Whirling in the New Year

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  2. Oh! I love this one. Good job, tugging at my heart strings. Once we thought we could change the world.

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  3. I like your poem, but it's never to late to get off the clothesline and hit the streets. The ACLU is available as well as moveon.org and a myriad of social causes, I'm sure, right in your backyard.

    They still make posterboard to hold up signs. Have a little fun. Randy

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  4. Wow. Interesting repiies. I love writing. I imagine that novelists get the same sort of thing. It is really the easiest interpretation that a poet and his poem are actually the same in some deep sense. I guress that is true. And it is true that in those days I was hooked up with a broad movement that had many facets. Some of them were political. Others were lifestyle. Others were educational. Part of the antimilitary or antiwar was political and part was personal. I was in a personal knot that forced me into exile from 67-69. So I was not even here in the states during the key years. By the time I got back things were desperately political and we took to the streets in 71, aiming at Nixon and the War. All of that is true. My thing was music and dope. I considerred the dealing I did a political act in two ways. I supplied dope to the activists and other students for one and for two since all I was doing was subsisting, I was staying off the grid and my nonexistant taxes were not going to support the war. Otherwise I was barely political. I was trying to get a degree. I finally got it, but not til 1981. At the end I was nearly popped for dealing and scooted up the road from San Jose to Mountain View and started working graveyard in a 7-11. I let college go, having edged into my fourth year, a semi-senior. That was when I met my lady. We went to Oregon. She got her MSW. I got a trainee engineering design position and in two years had started a lifelong career in mechanical design.

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  5. sweet resolve in youthful energy. I feel this poem

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  6. It's true--old hippies never die, my brother's one of them, still goin' strong.

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  7. I've no idea whether my comments are publishing or not....

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    Replies
    1. When you comment on old posts, which I welcome, it is de rigeur for Blogger to hold them back for comment moderation because the back archive is a target for robotic spamming. It has always been true on my blog and I suppose it is true on others too. I have never found a way to stop it but I am fine because "Anonymous" does keep spamming me with crap to offer me links I don't want.

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The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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