Visons
of Geezer Rock
The
Woodstock Generation,
still
groping toward the light:
groves
of gray,
some
hobble now,
some
still graceful.
Not
me.
I
lurch on my walker after surgery.
I
have been to the mountain
and
seen the other side.
We
will crowd the plazas of medical buildings,
waiting
for vans to pick us up.
Our
demographic bump
will
inflate the cost of burial plots,
of
ashes to be tossed in the wind
on
beaches or mountains or at sea,
or
rocketed to the sun
or
shot, like Hunter Thompson,
from
a cannon –
fear,
loathing and laughter –
with
fireworks.
The
nursing homes will be filled
with
rock and roll,
with
art and poetry,
crystals,
pets, plants, and grow-lights,
and
maybe
on
the West Coast
some
medicinal pot.
The
healthy ones will be Gray Panthers, not AARP.
They’ll
lead political marches with wheelchair contingents.
We
will try to remember that love is all you need,
but
we will fail.
We
will settle for a little help from our friends,
bridges
over troubled waters,
and
brokedown palaces.
We
will settle for drifting away
on
old-time rock and roll
to
a nirvanic platonic
ideal
of which Woodstock
was
the pale and twisted shadow.
Denise
Thompson-Slaughter grew up in Maryland, worked her way through the
University of Maryland and Rutgers as a secretary and editorial assistant, then
worked for eleven years as an academic editor at Princeton University. She still does freelance editing on the
side, and is currently living near the University of Notre Dame in South Bend,
Indiana, with her husband and two adopted special needs children. In 2000, Denise won the Poetry Society
of Virginia’s J. Franklin Dew Award.
Her poems have been published in California
Quarterly, Karamu, The Rambler, and other journals and anthologies.