Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

I don't know what happened to me when
I was fifteen, but that is when a voice
entered my head, not like it was
another voice, but it was my voice
that was telling me something
that prepared me for coming
psychedelic days, I realized
that what I would be learning
would not be from the education system
in other words I understood that I was
to take a different path, a strange road
I had this weird feeling that something
was really wrong, it was that moment
just as the late sixties was kicking in
that intense transition moment
just before the psychedelic wave crashed
when I turned seventeen those two years
when eternal summer of love came on
it was like I was floating in Bob Dylan lyrics
and a Jimi Hendrix song, it was like time
stood still, or I was returning to the LSD trip
as a time traveler, it was like I wrote a poetic
novel somewhere between 67'and 69' in my mind
and that a year later I would be reading and
writing poetry, and in another two years
I would know that someday I would write a novel
but in order to do this I would have to write a lot
of poetry, and have at least one poem published

looking back at all this now I feel that my fate
was cast on that day when I was fifteen and
I heard my inner voice,when I saw what was
happening to America, I knew I would never fit in
but somehow poetry was in my voice for the future

can totally relate..................finding that inner voice that didn't mesh with the massive voice of the masses........mine came at a wee bit earlier in Catholic school when they refused to answer my questions about God.....when they were dismissive of my inquiries into Catechism words that didn't sit right in my soul.....but oh yeah....Axis Bold As Love certainly had a profound impact on me, and was in fact another step into deeper meanings of life...

and the Beat goes on

The same thing happened to me when I was getting Catechism, when I was about thirteen, I got in trouble with the teacher for stating in class that I thought there were people on other worlds. I always thought it was very strange that I was being raised as a catholic but nobody seemed to know anything about God other then they had just been raised catholic.So I began reading sci fi novels, and thought of myself as a beatnik. Something was wrong, my parents and grandparents that come from Wisconsin on my mother's side were nice to me, but nobody seemed to know anything, or they did not want to talk about politics and religion. I wonder if it is some kind of trauma that gets passed down from generations. My family and relatives were good people but there seemed to be a lack of critical thinking. I seemed to be at the far end of something. In the fifties we had leave it to beaver, but we also had sci fi movies.Sometimes I wish my dad had not moved to California, and that I had relatives that were not just the mindless masses. I also wish that I had not been swept up in the psychedelic wave the way I was, but there was nothing else happening in my young life. And then I found poetry. What a strange life, at least in the late sixties there was some hope we could change the world. And then they tried to draft me, and I was like, hell no I won't go.