1970’s Marin, imagined as a come-on
Oh ropy scent of burning marijuana,
carved jade in Caucasian chest skin
made leathery, top down along the coastal road
from fog to forever, will you take me to marinate
in your redwood hot tub under totem Mt. Tam,
its spirit gong bronzing all day past the industrial
fairy-arches of the Golden Gate beckoning to Asia
with open shipping lanes & suicide in a whisper?
Be my raw sugar daddy, lay your dollar
on my dollar. We can deal our children
face down, we can fold em,
oo I like that adrenaline buzz. For you
my hair is blonde; make love to me lavishly,
like we learned in the seminars, take me
on a mantra-powered ride down my chakras
to the volcanic core. Read me
the runes through your rabbi-eyes.
All my greatest bands are dead,
so hold my bone-handled bread knife
& slice again: I want to be as whole
as that loaf & I want to be cut open
& spread with something
sunny, something Morocco
& peasant & five stars all at once.
Yes fuck me like we’ve escaped Hollywood
& we’re coming to take it back.
Fuck me like Hendrix covering Dylan,
like the Stones covering Hendrix, like Dylan
covered in whiteface on the Rolling Thunder tour.
Cover me with thunder. I have sat
lotused in the Zendo long enough.
Take me to the flea market, we’re almost
free: tie dies, god’s eyes, sand candles,
nothing on under my Andes poncho.
Now that all we have left
is our flesh, it’s time to carve into it.
Ode to growing up ten years too late
Buckskin vest on a bare chest
the blonde-maned impresario hippie
rides believe it or not a white
horse! across the aftermath where others
also unshirted pick through trash
for the burning. Half a million
young have by now dragged their come
down bodies into mini-buses
to struggle down a long mountain
of disappointment. I have seen. I get
my records in the dollar bin. The star
spangled feedback has died away
& the left hand that plied it.
It has dawned on me that there will be
no more Beatles albums no more
that the near past has already
been the moment we were
waiting for. Now we are waiting
it out in reverse. At one of my mother’s
seminars under the baffled lights I was
instructed to make in the sky
behind closed eyes a peace
room where duly I set sun-colored
fish to swim in a glass floor.
But never fed them.
Oh spirit of acid,
you have become something
in the rain. Somewhere in Queens
to a very fast count of four a man
who has reinvented his last name
begins to sing
I wanna be sedated.
