{{{{{ Archives & maybe even new stuff? }}}}}
(A Tribute To Tom Rush And Crazier, more Hope Filled Days / Daze)
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( This Is To Tom Rush /
But That’s Not A Title )
I’ve seen you reaching
to understand the feelings
of everyone around you,
like you thoughts yours didn’t matter,
you remind me
of the things I like best in people
People; we’ve known our share
(pass the wine friend)
we know that our heaviest burden
is that we care
too much for things
that never give us a second thought,
we’re soldiers in a war
to bring love to our friends
who fear it the most
have to admit it though,
we sure know how to live,
if livin is losin,
if livin is losin your soul
twenty times a day
(tied off with a crumpled bow
and tossed) at the feet of the living
whose dreams are bound to die
before their time
they’ll be back, Tom, the people
when their losing
brings them to the questions
we gave them answers for
when they were too young to ask,
when their breasts were new
and full of energy,
full of idealism
that told them
the world was theirs
they’ll drag their heals
and feel their tears
and wonder about dying,
the way we did,
before we saw them ready to fall
before we were ready
to fight all manner of gods
for their happiness,
to strain every muscle
in our hearts
to keep them from crying
pass the wine, Tom,
the waiting is on us,
empty as a corpse.
Jim Wellington (1971)
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(( I came home from work one morning, to an empty house. All my “hippy friends” and house mates had gotten up early to zoom off to New Haven to the farmers’ market.
I’d had a rough couple days, with a new friend named Richie, whose parents had kicked him out of their house- he’d scored some really bad acid and spent a couple hours puking his brains out in our reassuring bathroom.
-And a fifteen year old girl had wondered into the house, wide eyed and helpless, looking like somebody’s perfect daughter, flawless skin, beautiful eyes, thin young body wearing bell bottoms and soft suede shoes, a tight tee shirt of brown textured material with a wide cut between her hinted at breasts- the tee shirt held closed by criss crossed shoe laced leather. Long straight dark hair, innocent brown eyes. She was just barely hanging on to her sanity after some idiot had given her a first taste of Lysergic Acid Diethalimide .25 and she was calmly trying not to explode into millions of fragments that might never come back together right. I managed to let he know we believed she mattered, she was a wonderful human being with better than infinite potential. She wanted to hold my hands and look into my eyes and absorb that truth and feel really good about herself and the universe that was coming together to save her from her parents’ particular form of insanity. But that inrush of truth and beauty and hope and love threatened to explode her again. I think, somehow, I said something that had her laughing with joy and launched her bad trip into a much better field of exploration.
And I had to go to work in the midst of all this, leave Annie surrounded by friends I trusted to stand back and stand guard to make sure she was safe and happy and learning as much positive information as possible without exploding all over the place… (a poster of Jimi Hendrix turned and looked at her and said, “What are you doing? … What did I do?…” ) And Richie from Long Island finished puking his brains out and sat around for a while staring at a very frightening panorama of monstrous faces forming the air around him and later asked for a ride to the emergency room, and he survived- ((( a couple days later he was playing his guitar and teaching me licks from Pink Floyd and Jefferson Airplane… )))
-But I was freakin drained, dealing with long haul truck drivers who told me my beard looked like their girl friend’s private parts, and the clerk work at the trucking company office kept coming and never gave me a chance to sit down and catch my breath.
-So I came home to our hippy beach house and put on my newish copy of Tom Rush- the album that starts with Driving Wheel. And I cranked it a little louder than I would if anybody was sleeping upstairs or on the couch or passed out half hugging the washing machine… life was that kind of an adventure….
And I fried myself a couple brown eggs and got the toaster to work and found enough coffee left in the pot to bring it all together into one of the better breakfasts I’d tried to cook myself…
And I sat down in the living room (in the mix-matched furniture that only looked right in a rented beach house)
And the music filled the universe with magic- every note relaxed and soothed another part of me that I hadn’t realized was on fire. And Tom’s voice was the soul of compassion and I could see the old man with white hair sitting on a park bench, looking through fading eyes at a world worth loving, and I wanted to get up and dance to stuff my momma would have warned me I better not dance to, all night long. and I wanted to drop my guard and feel the pain of crazy people who had a lot more to offer than I’d ever realized.
Star Children from the other side of the universe were coming to earth and infiltrating our wild and crazy hippy get togethers and donating secret bits of love and wisdom and compassion and hope. And they were using unassuming genius folk singers to help them spread their message.
I had to sit down and write the above poem, straining to feel and find the words that fit together just right
I typed up two copies and gave one to Annie (the fifteen year old hope of my lost tribe’s wildest uncontrollable generation) She kept a crumpled up copy with her and read it read many times after being used and abused by flower children and people who hated flower children. She went to a Tom Rush concert because of that poem and loved every second of it.
And I thought I lost my last copy of that typewritten poem but found it yesterday in a stinkin mildew and mold ridden mess in a storage unit a family member had filled with stuff that my brother in law had not burned when he set his house and fire and blew his brains out, never getting over the loss of my sister to cancer….
And the original is inside a plastic page protector and this copy will be saved on five or six hard drives and on the web in at least three sites.
Yeah, life is still worth living. Even if the only wine I want is the spiritual kind that warms you to the core of our universal soul and spirit.
—–Jim, July 12, 2014 (Full moon tonight) ))
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I’ve Seen A Lot Of Green
I’ve seen a lot of green things lately
growing, trimmed to fit a grasping
need to feel our power over life
and cars still speed past my window
in a hurry to get to somewhere
they’ll probably wish they weren’t
yet their noises sometimes call me
to follow as far as your door.
Don’t ask me how I feel
I’ll tell you, whenever something touches me
or reaches for my eyes or mind
some complicated network
made of things like telephone lines
somehow pulls impressions
to a place where they’re measured and
set in line with things that have
happened
before.
Don’t ask what turns me on
the music that once filled me
echoes of small ideas and wasted energy
though I’m sick of reacting to things
I can’t control
I’m lazy and lagging
I want to start something
that makes sense
beyond all this
but I’m tired.
Don’t ask me what I want
I’m afraid to tell you
someone with soft hair
whose eyes I wouldn’t push
away from my mind, leaves
an image that won’t let me think
to the time I’ll stop my dreaming.
Don’t ask me what I’ve found
I’ll skip over the rulers of darkness
and light
and mathematical formulas
that can teach you why
the Earth moves and grass grows
and forty thousand people a year
have to die in cars;
And I’d tell you
I’ve learned that I need her
Her!
and daily look for reasons
to make her laugh
which set aside
fears that keep my hand
from reaching for hers.
Jim Wellington (4th try, August 24, 1971)
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Road Kill
A Poem Entitled “Road Kill”
Road Kill
argh)
(cows wag their tails
in time with Peter Gabriels’s
“Games Without Frontiers”
And I begin to wonder
if I’m feeling really good
or lost touch with something
like ‘consensus reality’
whatever that is…)
(I drive for a living
deliver newspapers
on a two hundred and fifty mile loop
through rural finger lakes new york
and the stereo keeps me grounded
reminds me I haven’t really
left the Earth of my childhood
behind)
There’s a woodchuck
he’s been sitting every day
for the past week
beside the body
of his friend
(or lustling?)
‘Smack dab in the middle of the road’
‘Possums die so ugly
every one of them
looks like it’d been dragged for miles
then tortured hideously for hours
but woodchucks look so peaceful
<like they’re sure they’ll be
re-united
with their splattered friends
and lovers>’
sometimes
I guess I’d rather
be a woodchuck
sitting in the road
hoping an eighteen-wheeler
does it right the first time
[ instantaneously ]
(I think there just might be a conspiracy
to cover all of new york state’s roads
in fur-
but, like most bureaucracies
‘they’ can’t agree on a time table
so by the time they add a third pelt
the first and second have blown away
Jim Wellington
June 21, 1989