Pretty black & white, hand-size, City Lights
paperbacks I love to
hold and look at!
I picked one up at COAS used bookstore
yesterday, Ginsberg’s
“Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958-1960,” and was
transported back fifty years, Chicago,
just a teen-ager walking with pal Tony
to the Uptown, hoping to pick up some girls
after the show, though how we’d
carry them if we actually “picked them up,”
having no car, wasn’t clear.
Poor in means but footloose on the street with
hands in pockets, talking up our lives so they’d
resemble what we had
in mind, poets even then, though not
presumptuous enough to call ourselves that,
nor so self-aware as to realize
what we were saying as we talked while
walking to the corner grill on Lawrence for
fries and cokes where the girls were
everywhere in pairs or bunches. But we
not prepared to act definitively,
in no position
to make an offer, our shyness and
bewilderment over what must have seemed
an infinite potential resulting,
once again, in inertia.