poem after listening to Leonard Cohen, the Byrds and Beatles and Buffalo Springfield on "You Tube"

I’m up late, hunkered down in the soft brown
armchair listening to the glorious music
of the ‘60’s on my laptop,

everything is warm and almost silent somehow
in spite of these beautiful old songs of rousing
protest and kaleidoscopic dreams of becoming
a rock and roll star coursing through little curved
headphones,

I am taken back to my twentieth year : Vietnam,
Civil Rights, Kent State, pot and blotter acid,
Existential philosophy, VW buses with blown
head gaskets, all-nighters, too many dinners
of Polish dogs and rotgut Red Mountain wine,

then after the student health center's test results
living with Sandi, my first real girlfriend pregnant a
a year before Roe v. Wade, terrified and bewildered,

we were trapped together thrust onto a crumbling
razor thin ledge of real adulthood where we curled

up that long summer of the first manned moon
landing, survived those hot months of red worry
and fraudulent foodstamps with our ragged rascal
puppy ‘Chinook’ and his looping curved white tail

like a surrealist’s paintbrush until the County adoption
went through and we went on somehow like nothing
big had happened.

Then and tonight Leonard Cohen sings in his dark
thickly masculine voice prayers of longing and
dancing to the end of love in Chelsea Hotels where

quick blowjobs on unmade beds were apparently
common, freely given while shiny black limos and

yellow cabs idled curbside downstairs under a
shimmering cover of light snow....

….it all keeps drifting
earthwards
at dusk.