Hornswoggled

Hmmm. Yesterday I posted from the River Styx. In this poem I am up a tree, arguably trying to piss up a rope, a little green man to boot. This is of course the very next poem, written just a half hour later than the poem calling for someone to kill me now. So I guess I was in an odd mood in mid February.

I am reading the recent bio of John Lennon, that huge 800 page book. I ran into something wonderful that I never knew before. It changes my history. In Liverpool there is a street called Lime Street. There was a famous prostitute called Maggie May and she worked Lime Street. Uh oh. It turns out that Maggie figured in a popular English folk ballad.

I once fell for a lady named Katy. This was back in 1970. In 1970 I was fresh back from East Pakistan (Bangladesh). I was a student part time at San Jose State, later named Cal State U at San Jose, worked a little and sold dope to stay alive and keep myself in dope. I lived with my dealer, a smuggler and student, in a dope house south of the campus, on South 12th St. The Dooby Brothers lived up the street at the time. Oddly, there were two roommates with us who didn't do much dope, and a lady who lived upstairs in a separate apartment in the house who was clean too. It was just that way in those days, with people mingling and not worried about it.

Katy came into my life looking to buy some pot. She walked into my room, me never having met her before, I was in my underwear, boxers. I didn't care and apparently neither did she. She slayed me just like that. I was hers, if she wanted me. This is all a really complex story and of course it didn't work over the long haul. She was married and trying to leave her husband who was substantially younger than she was. They had intended to be a rock and roll band. That didn't work, and neither did their marriage, but he was really in love with her. I was a year younger than her too, but of course several years older than him. So when Rod Stewart came out with his hit Maggie May, I sang it to her along with the radio. "The sun in your face really shows your age, but that don't matter, to me you're everything." Amen. She got really angry. She did not take jokes like that very well.

Now Maggie May turns into a famous Liverpudlian prostitute. Wow. I had no idea. I guarantee you that Rod Stewart did though. Now I wonder how many people here in the states got that thing at the time. That was a really big song here. If it was as big in England, I am sure it was big in a different way because of the folk song.

This thing with Katy was a big thing for me, and in a curious way anchored the part where I was going to move to Oregon if I could. That's a whole other story. Maggie May is a big song for me because of Katy.

Hornswoggled

I'm trapped here again,
hornswoggled little green man,
hung by the hemp rope
treed and upended.
You claim I'm upright looking
at it with God's eyes
but blood rushing down
reddens my admitted bad eyes
and I still feel down.

February 15, 2009 11:36 AM