by Bruce Boston and Marge Simon
High tripping in '67,
our passage intense and sensual,
we talk art and poetry,
watch them form and reform
with the protean force
of some protoplasmic dream.
We breathe the colors of air,
exhale a spate of heavy words,
spacing out with Huxley and Bester
and the spacious vanishing points
of future horizons as yet unseen.
We vow to meet on Mars in '95.
We came of age, accelerating
like Elton's "Rocket Man,"
chemically induced heroes
hoisting hand-lettered placards
and shaking our minds in protests:
free speech, Vietnam,
civil rights, women's liberation,
LBJ, corporate greed.
I thumbed to Woodstock,
rode home stoned with a band
whose name I can't remember,
all of us high on Hendrix's
star-spangled irreverence.
Marie left for Bangladesh
with a swamified hirsute commune.
She overdosed on meditation.
Weston penned crazed lyric odes
to Kerouac, Leary, and P. K. Dick,
his story ending in hallucination.
Josh went full zombie on us,
vanished in the deserts of Kansas
and was never heard from again.
Back in Berkeley that fall
those who had survived
watched the needs of the day
consume their beatitude wholesale.
We learned to be another way
in the changing face of years
and live by other schemes.
When we offered our outrage
for tomorrow's coming of age
the takers were avid yet slim
for such iconoclastic jaunts,
the sixties' kinesis in retro.
It was no longer chic to be hip.
By '95 some claimed that
Ted Kennedy's face was on Mars.
They had NASA photos to prove it.
But none crossed its coral sands
to confirm that rockbound image.
The stars continued to recede past
horizons whose vanishing points
were finite and dimly perceived.
Bester shipwrecked on urban shores.
P. K. Dick a cinema nightmare
bowdlerized by high-tech scenes.
And even Ginsberg no longer shining
with the intensity of our dreams.
Now there are only two of us,
our reunion a reality years late,
together on a world as strange
and unpredictable as Mars
to our incendiary imaginations,
must once have seemed.
Though the wine is better
we drink less than before.
We fire a pipe and compare
notes on life's trajectories
and the millennial fade.
This far above the street
the neon shines in colors
primary yet indistinct.
We talk art and poetry,
watch them form and reform
with the protean force
of a protoplasmic past
framed as a yesteryear,
fertile as a grave
we have yet to leave.
Appeared in Dreams and Nightmares
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