Out Of Place

Free will being what it is, you can go places maybe you would not care to be if you knew a little more. I certainly had a checkered youth. Some of it came at my own hand and much of it not. I had a chance to rub shoulders with people in the San Francisco music scene before it was a scene. I traveled completely around the world with a stop along the way in a country rarely visited by white Americans, Bangladesh. East Pakistan then.

I started my entry into young adulthood by receiving an appointment to West Point but knew immediately I must get the hell out of there. That was just before Viet Nam and young lieutenants all went there to kick start military careers. Of course, many died. I fulfilled four years of my six year commitment in the active Army Reserve and then went to Bangladesh as a civilian. My military clock ran out as I was on the return journey back to the states. That was a legal way to fulfill a military obligation in those days, to be outside the country and too far from any military installation. Later they plugged that hole and made time spent that way dead time with the obligation waiting for you. In those days the clock kept running if you left town.

I have a college degree but it took from 1963 to 1981 to finish it. I became a dope dealer and smuggler in 1969 and never got caught. It came close though. I retired in 1971 after six years as an outlaw but only a couple as a full blown dealer. I never made much money. I just kept my dope really cheap and plentiful. I started straight life in a hotel working the night shift and there met the day front desk clerk. I moved in with her and never moved out for the next 23 years. '71-'94. In '73 we moved to Oregon and I haven't left Oregon since. I got my career in mechanical design in that move and I retired in 2009. In the mid nineties wife and I could no longer continue and I started my bachelorhood.

I have had two lovers since divorcing but not for a long time now. Now I mess around with poems. give good scratches to the cat and dog, and try not to spend much money because I have only a little. One of my former lovers looks after me and we are very fond of each other. She lives upstairs and I live in the basement. A young man studying to be a professional in opera also lives upstairs and a sequence of short term renters fills the third bedroom. I know what it feels like to be out of place but this time in my life is not like that.

What happens next, son?
What comes around the corner?

Goddam! I gotta
flinch again at threats
intended or not by him
and his dark minions.

The fallen angel
sings off key at his pleasure,
finding us far out
beyond the safe zone,
wandering as is beyond
the backside of God.

‎December ‎26, ‎2010 11:16 PM