“The ‘Seventies”

Remembrances of anything are secondhand –
sanded down and shredded into bits of simulacra:
icons seen through cheesecloth. Colors may seep
through but it is up to me to flesh the contours out
in all that blurry red and blue – according to whatever

current constructs I’ve got stalking, squawking,
routing from, into my stubborn point-of-view. I will paint
the picture that I need to see. I genuinely wonder 
what it has to do with me. Today “the ‘Seventies”
erupted in their semi-recollected oddity – chopped up

into crazy-salad memory. They marked, as far as
I could see, my first exposure to the harrowing fascistic
hedonistic notion of the “free.” To look not terribly
unlike a Bee-Gee and to party-party-party so that
simply, by the law of averages – which in “the ‘Seventies”

pertained to baby-boomers blooming in unprecedented
numbers of unprecedented sexualities – you’d
probably get stoned and laid – and paid with pubic lice
and gonorrhea. It was strange to think when
you were twenty-three that you had had to be

a paragon of sexual ferocity. And yet and yet and yet:
I cannot bet that the peculiar disco creature who
just came to me is more than the effusion of some
serendipity. What happened then? How do I know?
It may well all be re-runs of a Bee-Gees show.




 
.