Where Have All The Flower Children Gone?

I'm on my way to pick up my traveling bard of a son

who had jumped into a rental van full of nouveau hippies

that had thoughtfully mused to prefer being called

pirates and gypsies from "New" Texas

each with guitar and ukulele

and voices like the angels that attend

to Tom Waits Woodie Guthrie and Sam Cooke

Blaise

I had named him after a friend not

knowing St Blaise was the patron saint of the voice

St Blaise and my boy may well be Orpheus reborn

from the days of Jason and the Argonauts

Sweet Orpheus, whose voice did calm the fiercest dragon...

Me- I’m the Mom the kids do want around

during free spirit artful lodgers in barter mind

He is a big boy

smart enough to outsmart enough

the force is with him I know but I still worry

These charming poet travelers all of them from Brooklyn

on their way to Burning Man dressed in paisley and headbands

who call their medical marijuana magic beans

they remind me of my summers spent in Oakland as a kid

Pass the beans, I heard them say at my place

where we sang and passed the talking stick

of which was passed from one to the other

the bearer of the stick made to stand by the conga

sprout a poem talk story or channel - whatever

all were clever and so full of art, so full of human nature

evolved from the righteous consciousness, the Apples fallen

from the trees of the '60's seeds across this land

who morphed like in the Land of Oz into

the new beautiful in the Stand for Cause

when illustrated rightly depicted

engulfed in flowers and grapevine

reminiscent of that historic love

that was spread around the world by the

San Francisco Flower Children Generation One

Yeah You go Berkeley

Blaise and the New Texans begged me & Bianca to come

We must do Burning Man together! they flattered

but Bianca, still young at older is in

an important place of transition and I

having been born into a been there done that

am still the same

and as always pretty much

intolerant

The last time I saw San Francisco

Harvey Milk was celebrating on Chito's Castro

granted it was via HBO and the magic of Sean f-kin' Penn

who really tripped me out for days afterward

thinkin' Is he really that great

or is he really that gay?

It's 4:50 am and I've got the backseat

flossin in satin pillows

stars out the back window

seemingly stationed behind

little light clouds going by

and I try not to hear obligated conversation

from shotgun whose job it is to keep a driver

stimulated for the next 6 hours or we all die

while I dream of flowers and larger

clouds I can name the shapes of

a rabbit a hand an iris a midget with a bong shaped like a dragon

This trip to 'Frisco reminds me of the '60's

me and Dennis in the back of Mommy's station wagon

when every summer we'd drive up to Oakland

and whenever my brother would see a long haired teen

we'd crane to get a glimpse of them there

that new kind of youth

I knew it was something big

even though they just looked kinda crazy really

The 'hippie' movement

a once romantic sentiment

I had felt for the lovely Flower Children of 'Frisco

a sentiment that changed after Kent State

and me at 10 years old dissecting

the Women's Right to Vote and

Freedom of Speech

and applying it to myself and

my military Father whose rule was that we speak

only when spoken to

The Flower Children became Alphonse Mucha meets Berkley

Harvard and Jackson State

the children a little wirey eyed

bare feet a little muddy

naked was always beautiful and

eventually the paisely panthered ate the orange sunshine

and purple microdot a way too many times becoming perma-fried

which is sort of like a champion boxer getting punch drunk

a tragedy indeed

I smell garlic while marveling at the millions of stars

that refuse to be seen from the heart of my L.A.

and the driver puts on some wannabe gangtsah rap

asking, do I like HIP HOP?

I'm spending quality time with my head

I load a little bowl and let the galaxy

inspire the cannabis within to

strangely recall the tale of Pol Pot

so the millions of lights in the night sky

become the gold and silver crowns from teeth

within the skulls of the Killing Fields

Once Zenith now Samsung and all the

corporate fellow yellows

bent on power like the wilting western world

from Chevy to this Subaru and Westinghouse

and G. E. to Mitsubishi Sony Toshiba

HDTV what does it matter how flat the thing is

when it still causes schizophrenia?

The painted pictures in a history book

would have been my preference

for getting schooled

in the atrocities of

the man kind against humankind

but was not the way I caught wind.

The way it went down for me

was in an embedded memory from firsthand witness glued in terror

to a black and white Zenith that showed my older brothers

and sisters getting beat up right on the streets of San Francisco

while wearing dark bloodied broken flowers in their hair

and still singing songs of glory in an American theater of the absurd

I cried and cried and cried while my parents shouted

we'll put on the cartoons! it's okay Yvonne!

this the reason why today I loathe the T.V.

I hate yes HATE T.V.

except for that show called Weeds

Everything else is media sexploitation and

chewable orange flavored propaganda

swear to god the slick just get slicker

Ii was too young to realize the Vietnam War was the beginning

of a string of bad ideas for America land of the free

Free... and the change that was 'a comin'

or the free love and the consciousness

of the youth back then strumming

drumming beautifully

from an orchestra pit called rebellion

which took form

in colorful freedom & dancing in the streets

Love ins long hair LSD peyote and rock'n roll immortalization-ism

that very youth

the Einsteins discovering the formula

by gazing into flowers came to the final answer and

the awareness that really

seriously...

love is all you need give peace a chance

And I visualize Blaise singing

the birds in the tall trees completely silent in his audience

birds recalling that 60's flower child

beaten or killed by the man

before they could bask

in the new light they gave us next

Imagine...

Janis, and Jimmy the sky bound Lucy

in historically beveled diamonds

and the sharpness of our calling for change

counteracted by a flooding of tar into the inner cities to

stabilize the uprising and our right to bear arms

chagrins about the needle and the damage done

The Lizard King foretold it Jim Morrison still shouts it

from Paris or wherever

The Seychelles,

"WAKE UP!!!"

Fck Oliver Stone: The Doors

of Perception

faded into the celluloid mists

of whisky guzzling leather pants

wreaking of semen and cocaine

Wake the fck up

Jim was a poet with the magnetic

truths embedded within his still revered legacy

of spoken words to the heads that operated

the body of blissfully obese '50's man

Jim's wisdom wailing in biblical rock prophecy

and eventually his own ability to finally

break on through to the other side

now the Good ol' Boys hide and

the slickness goes undetected

our love in and peacetime

soon to be ejected

And in a Hollywood bungalow I packed for

Golden Gate Park and that warm Bay Beach

where my boy is barefoot and

singing like Angel Orpheus.

He's a big boy I know but I still worry even though

he's no gangbanger but a poet and a bard who sings songs

about Love and about "shackles on his wrists",

and

"NO! they can't take the MAN OUT OF ME!"

written of the time he got beat up by the CHP because

his girlfriend was driving drunk and crashed into

Bollywood that Indian restaurant on Cahuenga

and that's what the CHP does to accident victims.

They beat them in front of their Mother on

the day before Thanksgiving just a reminder

that there's still some shit going on. oh no

don't be blinded by "Hope".

And they smashed his face

into the concrete with their boot in front of his sister

who froze in horror unaware that she was throwing up

as she watched and we pleaded for them to

please stop

his lip is cut wide open and his cheek is split and...

the blood covered my angel voiced Flower Child's face

his eyes blinking back blood he couldn't wipe away

for the shackles were being yanked up

while boots of the 2nd Patrolman ground into his back

his chest down, his shackled limbs

being pulled up by his powerless hands,

his loving sister disbelieving and

mama lion helpless, crying, pacing,

our pleadings fallen to ignored utterances,

Please! please ...Sir? Please stop. . .

and from the backseat of a Subaru

spending quality time with my head

I watched the stars and named the clouds

I whispered

manifest destiny

visualizing Blaise laughing

and from my America

gazing upward & onward

I knew I had always believed

in the warriors of The Good Fight

since the paisly 'Frisco camo'd

beautiful in dandelion

crowns

flowers in their hair

love in their eyes

peace in their hearts