Visons of Geezer Rock

Denise Thompson-Slaughter

 

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.  

 

 

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