Hippie Highway

Haight Ashbury 1979

Iron grill doors.
Tourists wear nose rings and tie-dyes.
Chalk in the sidewalk:
    Love Heals
    (Always)
On a sunny day you can sit on a porch step.
    Tourists
    take your picture.
There’s a woman in a window brushing her hair.   
    She stands up.
    She is naked.
    She steps out of sight.
    Tourist snaps
    the empty frame.
Desperate dude is selling a watch :
    “Brand new,
    see it works fine,
    just four dollars.”
Men wear robes and look like Jesus on heroin.
    Maybe Jesus was a carpenter,
    but these guys couldn’t
    hit a nail.
Women wear T shirts,
    floppy breasted
    pudgy bellied
    honestly lovely.
We are all unnaturally natural
    and we like it.

A/N: a dozen years after the Summer of Love, it was like this. The tourists were more colorful than the natives. The men were mostly desperate, the women mostly comfortable with themselves.