Here's something you might be interested in.
Sipping his Miller Lite
poured tall and foaming
into a chilled champagne fute
watching the wind blow the palm trees
swaying high above the trolley tracks
overlooking Mission Bay,
I'm reminded of my younger years
drinking Miller from clear bottles
laced with formaldehyde
with the hockey team
out in a corn stalk stubbed field
on a frigid northeastern November night
without the usual bonfire that might have drawn
undesired attention from the raiding,
interloping squadrons of small town police.
*
His place is pristine
in its tasteful
bachelor-esque
orderly dusted decor,
and I ponder the Chicano
Rights activist he was while I
was a shivering kid in my suede saddle shoes,
straight legged Levi's and Dean sweater
dodging the municipal under-aged beer bash busting militia,
and who I might have become
had I not shied away from a first kiss
delivered later that year in my mother's backyard
under the vernal moon. Through how many crossroads
had he maneuvered before landing here,
in his glass faced, china silk lined perch
overseeing the life he'd built himself.
*
There is no telling, no looking ahead and no going back.
Just the constancy of onward motion
towards undeterminable destinies
continually altered by selectivity. Just
the linkages the mind makes
furling the unbid past forth
with derailing velocity.
Just aged wisdom
acknowledging the absence of time
and the fleetness of life.
Sipping his Miller Lite
poured tall and foaming
into a chilled champagne fute
watching the wind blow the palm trees
swaying high above the trolley tracks
overlooking Mission Bay,
I'm reminded of my younger years
drinking Miller from clear bottles
laced with formaldehyde
with the hockey team
out in a corn stalk stubbed field
on a frigid northeastern November night
without the usual bonfire that might have drawn
undesired attention from the raiding,
interloping squadrons of small town police.
*
His place is pristine
in its tasteful
bachelor-esque
orderly dusted decor,
and I ponder the Chicano
Rights activist he was while I
was a shivering kid in my suede saddle shoes,
straight legged Levi's and Dean sweater
dodging the municipal under-aged beer bash busting militia,
and who I might have become
had I not shied away from a first kiss
delivered later that year in my mother's backyard
under the vernal moon. Through how many crossroads
had he maneuvered before landing here,
in his glass faced, china silk lined perch
overseeing the life he'd built himself.
*
There is no telling, no looking ahead and no going back.
Just the constancy of onward motion
towards undeterminable destinies
continually altered by selectivity. Just
the linkages the mind makes
furling the unbid past forth
with derailing velocity.
Just aged wisdom
acknowledging the absence of time
and the fleetness of life.