Survival was tricky. Will I be cut off food stamps?
Will we sell enough copies of Vortex
to buy spaghetti?
Not-so-nefarious schemes,
mitigated by the pre-dawn drive to the pork-and-bean factory at the edge of town,
where ideals slid off my dirty ripped army jacket
onto the frozen catwalk in Kansas winter,
pushing, swearing, sweating,
and singing show tunes I learned
waiting tables
in my father’s Greenwich Village bar.
In the Augustness of Kansas,
we build a raft
and head down the Kaw River.
We think it might be time to keep going.
We row and push the raft,
in search of the ever-elusive channel.
We stay on sandbars;
naked, dirty, alive
with the power of sand and river.
The unmuffled sounds of Sheriff Rex Johnson’s squad car follow us along the bank of the river.
He thinks we will harvest hemp
and carry it back
in the severely lame canoe hitched to the raft.
Slicing a watermelon,
Cazzie slices open his thumb.
In three days, the trip is over.
We make it to Eudora, a few miles up the river.
Paddling back into Lawrence,
I think idealism and realism
intersect in the most unusual places,
revealing strange secrets about our lives.