Poetry of Issue 7 Page I
The Best Years of Our Lives
Their parents must have been flower children.
The kind of New Age hippies who renounced
all worldly goods, embraced the earth and created
a commune from found objects: discarded furniture,
broken appliances, and dead fall.
Shared everything equally: husbands and wives.
Especially the wives. Despite all the rhetoric
otherwise, peace, love and harmony, the husbands
always ruled.
The women had sunflower tattoos on
their backs, roses on their ankles, hearts and
flowers on their inner thighs. And the men had
peace symbols embossed on tops of their
feet. Wisely, all could be hidden by straight life
clothes, thinking that, in the short run, they might
have to take temporary jobs in the world.
Never considered the temp work would
become permanent careers in stock broking
and bond trading, accounting and high finance.
Totally selling out the life styles they had
valued above all else until the harsh winter,
short food supplies, lack of indoor plumbing,
made back to the earth just another nice sounding,
drug infused, high ideal. None of them looked back
from where they were now with fondness, pretending
youthful indiscretions were best forgotten despite
indelible reminders otherwise. More than one
long weekend, on the road accounts executive,
was amazed to find under straight-laced, hard driving
ice queen’s stern demeanor, hid a wild woman whose
knowledge of the carnal arts rivaled those of women
found on South East Asian sex tours.
None of the Trustafarian, wasted youths, suspected
their parents had been anything other than what they
seemed despite odd body art they had devised a
cover story for. Not that their perpetually stoned,
less than zero, children cared one way or the other,
about potential wild times, high crimes and misdemeanors,
in their mamas and their papas summers of love.
As long as their plastic problem remained solved,
life was good. Who cared about sordid truths,
potential inherited biological time bombs,
their questionable parentage? None one really knew
where they came from, right?