jack and joe and john's poems (borrowed from another one of my blogs)

i was a Penn State poet in the late sixties and early seventies, hanging with Jack MacMannis and trying to get Joe Grucci to publish me. At least Jack was trying to get Joe to publish me. I was the last of the beatniks in a world moving into free love, free clothes, and free the Chicago Seven. It was the year before the Kent State Massacre. I had a bushy head and a scraggly beard and a scraggly head and a bushy beard and once went without a moustache for almost a month.There was Sartre and Beckett and Pynchon and yeah, there was Kerouac and Gary Snyder, and always, always, Hemingway and Pound. There was Zen and eventually, a Polish Pope, and my son was born and we had some very good dogs and I had some very good women in my life and some not and I was never the charm they thought I'd be. One loved Tolkien and Steeleye Span and another just liked to toke her way through her day. I smoked a briar pipe and Balkan Sobranie tobacco bought at Hall's Salvage for a dime.