a
death in missouri . . .
a poem for a dead man in a dead dream,
land
i
just returned from Missouri ... my step father who was never my biggest fan died
a week ago. he said i'd be sleeping in the gutter with my camera ... well that's
good, met some nice gutter punks there along the way, saw America, saw the world
...
years ago, age
21 or so, I sent him a photo of a riot at a Grateful Dead Show, when two weeks
later Jerry Garcia was dead ...
the
old man tore it up, threw it in the fire ... never told my mother
now
... in this new millenium of technology ... when communication is no less harder
he
was something like 80. i drove through 500 hundred miles of icy roads passing
semi truck flipped over. ice ¬turned the trees into chandeliers under the
cold moon light.
spent
some time with an ex-con out in Missouri ... a friend of my mother's. we talked
about junkies and prisons and hustlers. we spoke of America ... where the Dream
is now gone ... like Indian summer on the last sunny day, December, before the
ice storm came.
we
spoke of the 60s and the electric koolaid acid test. Timothy Leary and when the
hippy days became a drag ... getting out of the drug trade he did
mystery
star-lighting on the soul, criminals climbing into happy universes of sad rich
people on the take.
i
met a woman, near 60, she drives a truck ... we talked about the Goethe book Faust.
we spoke of Mark Twain ... Twain was from Missouri in a lost America
we
drank cheap working class beer ...
I
... read Walt Whitman, “O'Captain, My Captain ...
in
ten degree cold, old farm house, downstairs, looking through the things of a dead
man
whom once I
despised, and who despised me too, but now I must pity ... because the living
do not mourn the dead they mourn themselves ... this we know,
turns
out he was something of a photography collector ...
so
now I've inherited a cache of photos from the 1890s thru the 30s ... some of them
are of Cairo, Illinois ... some pics my step dad picked up. he had a lot of stuff.
a
photo of a 1920s race car in a town and time now gone, a man on a motorcycle ...
1930
see you there
in some other life time of oil wells now pumped dry and family fortunes long squandered
by children who hated their parents ...
the
town or Cairo is now dead ... like old 80 year old men, on the last day of summer
... wind blowing, icy messages ... from the shiny snowy memory of a place that
once was but is no longer and people who have come and gone
so
what do we have from all these dreams?
the
wind, my friend, we have the wind
water,
my friend, we have water ... for voyages, in bloody finite mortality and for laughter
until tears create an infinity of memories
we
take, and the money is gone, the things are in decay ... as I look around ...
the blue sky surrounds me
and
my family, what I have, and some friends I've just made
the
moon wilts across timescapes and through other dimensions into souls connected
in ways now less understood than before in enigmatic expressions of chance
Jeremy
Hogan
December
8, 2006 - Indiana
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Hogan
