mainly after reading about a particularly mad episode
in Amiri Baraka's life and thinking "Yes! Yes!"
but I wasn't there, those weren't my times
I think about a road trip across western America
with my first wife and our first child
from the sanity of Seattle to the horrors of Houston
where two oil field cowboys leapt from their trucks
and shot each other dead over two hundred dollars damage
to their pickups combined, where the folks at NASA
celebrated the murder of Martin Luther King Junior
where we felt the need to pack what we owned into a truck
and sneak out of the city before dawn to drive and drive
and drive across Texas to the relative shelter and sanity
of Las Cruces, New Mexico, from the madness of Houston
to the madness of graduate school after a paying job
from the hopelessness of Houston to the bewilderment
of how the hell are we going to make it while I learn
whatever I'm going to learn here and we, bless us,
wind up with three kids trusting us to be adults
a fate neither of us wanted nor tried much to achieve
yes, maybe those were the times, the trip, Houston,
the escape, and the lunacy of graduate school
and raising three kids while as absent as I could be
how did those kids grow up so well? and they did!
how did we find so much to party about? and we did!
maybe it was just the relief from Houston
or that and my gratitude for being back in school
where I could pretend the world made sense
and where I began to understand poetry and write it
having no idea what a life full of it would bring
having no idea what a journey I had begun
how strangely twisted the path would be
the brambles I would have to unwrap to find a beach
how many loops a life can make following the moon
and how quiet a noisy city can become
when looking back on "those were the times"
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