SUMMER OF LOVE (poem)

SUMMER OF LOVE

During the Summer of Love, drug experimentation

blossomed in kalidaescopic exponentials.

My mother checked out Ken Kesey's acid tests.

People sleep in doorways, in the Haight

crash pads with bare mattresses

and sinks-fill with rotting garbage

Crazy people get crazier.

We ran from one end

of the San Geronimo Valley to the other 

searching for dope and rock stars.

An abandoned van parked at Dead Man's Curve

in Lagunitas was a crash pad for lovers without a bed.

Parties on The Charles Van Dam

an old steam boat stuck in the Sausalito mud-flats.

Varda's geometric blue and red paintings

nailed to the wall, defied horizon and plumb-line logic 

but the colors were neon exponentials.

Big Brother and the Holding Company took over the barracks 

at Barbano's summer camp on Arroyo Road. 

Mrs. Barbano's daughter was killed by a car in Mexico— 

Mr. B. shot himself in the head. 

Walking home -from school, I see him all white and red 

as if asleep in the ambulance.

When the shadows grew long and settled into the gulch, 

the hills reverberated with screaming electric guitars. 

My friend Micaela quit coming home, 

dropped in and dropped out at Barbano's, and I felt betrayed.

Kerouac On the Road. Cassidy at the wheel.

Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Dass floated into town.

The names rolled off the tongue

like a Who's Who of the counter culture.

No time for recording history.

The search for dope was more important than scoring.

After a bad acid trip, mirrors 

and checkered tile floors were a drag.

Like Pinnocchio, my nose grew

every time I looked into the mirror.

It takes me years before I can look into a mirror,

touch grass, or alcohol without hallucinating.

I don't know whether I've passed or failed 

the Electric Koolaid Acid Test.

We tried everything at least once.

Spirits of the land came forth into air like patterned fog. 

Time slowed down enough to swallow another dimension. 

Rocking in a legless wicker chair, my arms were Shiva's. 

Crack in the world.

A friend brought news of a friend stuck in a Mexican jail

said the border police tore tore apart their van

they even removed the tires from the rims. 

Moulton's store burned down in Forest Knolls. 

There wasn't much left to downtown 

except the Valley Tavern and the post office. 

The same was true about Lagunitas. 

Some say the boy who set his own house on fire,

killing two younger brothers, torched that building too. 

When the Hell's Angels rode into town,

Old Man Bevans stuck a rake handle through one Angel's tire spokes.     

There wasn't much left to hospitalize. 

Everyone started selling out. Land was subdivided. Dairies went under. 

One could feel the change in the wind.

Morning glory seeds coated with poison.      

Heavenly Blues turned deadly.

A friend in the slammer for dealing.

Another turned up in an oil barrel in the San Rafael canal

Hendrix dead. Janis. Bobby dead.

The vets. All those dead coming home in boxes.

Someone out there was playing for keeps.

And the strung-out freaks were alwayslooking for action.

In art class we listened to Ravi Shankar on KPFA.

"Everybody's" made Time Magazine

as the first health food store in the US.

Life magazine ran glossy photos of the Vietnam War.

Etched in my mind like shadows of Hiroshima.

On Bolinas Mesa, the writers colony discovered Turtle Island. 

Gary Snyder talked about my home as if he owned it.

I said I could write like him. What's the big deal? 

So I began my apprenticeship with the coyote.

My mother checked in and out of mental wards.

Handed me her bible, One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest

so I could understand shock therapy. As if I wanted to.

I waited in green hospital wards for her

to come shuffling in paper slippers and a blue gown

across yellowed and green tiled floors with curved corners.

The medication they gave her made her worse. 

Alice and The White Rabbit were institutionalized.

I'm working with the crazies at Napa State Hospital

They have poems memorized. l can't remember any of my poems. 

I meet a friend of my mother's, an inmate, 

Sally Lacy, who raises an eyebrow, 

and wants to know what I'm doing in a place like this.

 I meet a high school classmate. So, this is where they wound up. 

Do I tell them poets are the must often institutionalized?

Maybe it's those locked up who are closer to poetry. 

The nuthouses are breeding poets. 

The trickster Coyote has holes in his pockets.

Little did Lew Welch know when he wrote

"The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings"

that there was nowhere else left for us to go.

It was no longer a question of need.

Houses desecrate the sides of the goddess, Mt. Tam-Fujisan.

When a friend tried to leave the Sufis,

they stopped him at the airport,

placing a hand on his shoulder and said he'd die for it.

His shoulder burned, an x-ray imprint of a hand,

and later, cancer.

Vietnam is our mantra. At People's Park

Governor Reagan brought out the National Guard.

Brothers and sisters fell.  

We shielded our faces from FBI telephoto lenses 

aimed from the top of the Zim's Drive-in tower 

with Zim Boy waving and grinning down at us.

We were confused by the sudden violence.

People moved to the country and joined communes

to Morning Star Ranch or moved to the Eel Eiver.

Raised families. Most lost their land to taxes, or CAMP.   

Got tired of it eventually. Cut off their hair.

Bought suits. Joined the rat race.

Now it's hard to remember what it was like.

Jerry Rubin. Yuppies. Baby boon,baby carrots and raduccio.

Bitter vets returned home like aliens from another planet.

John Lennon gunned down in New York by some crazy wanting fame

and 20 years later, we like to think a revolution is brewing.

The children conceived during that Summer of Love

have come of age in an era of violence and apathy.

6/1987

I didn't find a file, or clean final hard copy of this poem so this is a faxsimile. added 6/17