What Then...

[thisnewday]

It's early for me to be sitting here. Most days, I work the evening maintenance shift at the hotel. (They call it "engineering" because they like to think it's a fancy hotel.) That gets me home sometime after midnight which is when I usually sit down with a beer, look up friends on LiveJournal, check out the bay area Craigslist and occasionally write.

Actually, I've worked these kinds of jobs most of my life. I taught school for a while after college, but felt too restricted by the expectations a community has of its teachers. (It didn't help that the time was the late 'sixties and even on the East Coast it felt like the center of American culture had suddenly shifted to Haight-Ashbury.)

So it was a choice I made to get myself free, to figure out my own expectations, to finally live somewhere beyond the reach of the stifling norms and conventions I'd grown up with. And, for a while at least, it played out like Ozzie and Harriet visit the Hog Farm, ride the blue bus, "fly Jefferson Airplane..."

"Free your mind and your ass will follow," the saying went. In retrospect, I'm not sure if it was my head or my ass that was doing the leading. But over the years I learned and worked at various trades to keep the two together--in whatever order.

And always the intention was to work at things that kept the mind and spirit free to pursue the important things. And the most important of those things was to learn the crafting of words, to be a poet.

It's never been my goal to publish on the internet. and that's not what this is about, although I may, from time to time, include a piece that seems appropriate. My purpose here is to perhaps make contact with those of a similar mind, to share thoughts, discuss strategies, share visions and hopes.

So i'd like to close this first entry with a poem for one who's been brave enough to share in that way and in fact made it possible for me to be here. Thanks, Amanda.


What Then

So, my friend,
shall we now plant
this seed and
see what
comes of it?

And if, by some
unlikely chance, it
comes to more
than seeds thrown down on
black, asphaltic wastes
which, in this life,
surround us,

what then,
my friend,
what then...

LPK
LiveJournal
10.29.2003