Poetry Friday: Uncle Ted says, Wango-Tango!

I was just a kid in the hippie-love, free-love, love the one you’re with days. Dammit. Days before AIDS and HPV, when a little shot of penicillin would cure that nasty itch ya got down there, Cletus. I romanticize it, of course, as I only saw this in movies and newspapers…my parents and extended family were decidedly NOT like that (au contrare, mon frere, and yes, my French sucks), but still…I like the fantasy of Free Love and dancing in the park with hippie fringe and beads, like in “Hair” (with Treat Williams, who yes, I still crush on). Sitting with a hooka pipe listening to Ravi Shankar, eating handsful of whole grains, sleeping naked on a park bench to show ‘one with nature’…I could eat that up with one of those giant wooden spoons my mom used to display on the dining room wall.

Here my mind wanders, and what was the point of this post?

Oh yeah…it’s Poetry Friday, and there is no WORD for today upon which to expound. So I leave y’all to your dirty pretty nasty devices to come up with your own word, and hopefully I’ll get my proverbial shit together next week to offer one up (I have a few ideas from some o’ y’all’s posts already).

I’m at work all too early this morning, having to make up some time from this doctor appointment and that one, and trying like hell to avoid the night computer operator guy, who does a fantastic job but is a bit (understatement) lonely and just wants to talk to SOMEONE, and who’s the only one here? ME. So I’ll post this now, and post something else later.


No One Ever Writes Songs About Dawn

The traffic lights all blink yellow at 5:30 a.m. They, too, are tired, and really, what’s the point of the green/amber/red circuit if there’s no one there to watch?

It makes for a lovely drive. The sky not yet purple-pink with the rising sun, the air still damp with dew forming, the quiet deafening inside your ears. It’s like swimming in a gigantic cave, one of those in Mexico where the fresh water meets the salty, and you’re aware that other people must, somewhere, exist, but they’re never as lucky as you, paddling slowly in the quivering light with the dark water swirling in patterns underneath your flippers.

I hate getting up early. I sleep fitfully, and the last thing I need is to interrupt beautiful REM by the buzz of a 5 a.m. alarm clock. The only saving grace, besides no wait for the bathroom, is the drive in.

You know who’s driving at that hour? Infrastructure. Yeah, okay, there may be one or two still-drunk college guys maneuvering the streets coming back from a tryst with that girl they met at Woody’s party, or a girl returning home from boning that hot guy at the bar, or perhaps a thief finishing a good night’s work. But I don’t see them. Instead, I see the guy in the blue truck, who very politely let me take my turn at the amber-blinking stop light, and I watch him in rear-view pull into the power station. There’s the red van, a woman with a scarf around her hair, who pulls into Ye Olde Donut Shoppe (“time to make the….”). Two cars following me turn into the medical plaza. Streetsweeper, moves patiently along the curb. A cop in Big Parking Lot sits drinking coffee, his radar detector nowhere to be found. A car here, a van, a Bud Light delivery truck, moving somewhere, doing something, on their way to or from a warm bed.

We are, at that moment, Kings and Queens. Rulers of the streets. We go. We do. We look forward to cups of coffee and heavy sighs. We own the dawn.