Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

about the time i decided I was a poet
i had the draft hanging over me
does anybody even remember
the Vietnam war
so many of us in those days
were against the war
nobody knows what we were there for

back then there was a real voice
that the people had to say no
the only people that want these wars
are the ones that get rich from them
we knew that then and we know it now
but they just drag on, and now nobody
marches in the streets to protest them

I finally got out of the draft
and the poet had to be crazy
I would drink a lot of coffee
and read a lot of Rimbaud
before I went to see the shrink
crazy poets don't belong in uniform
because they can't make me want to kill
but by the time they diagnosed me
and by the time they decided I was not fit
I would never fit into normal society, again

so I am another casualty of that war in a sense
but who knows about the crazy poets that drank
lot of coffee and read Rimbaud before
spilling out their brains to the psychiatrist
so I would not be another cannon fodder unit
and nobody knows what we were in Vietnam for
except some suits in a fancy air conditioned office

a perfect expression of that time....it blows my mind that there is so little protesting going on....in many important ways here in the US there has been a steady decline since the 70's...and I avoided the draft by enlisting in the Navy....which worked out for me....never went to Nam, but many friends did....many didn't come home alive....just saw some old footage of Tom Hayden, and it was impressive what hippies and college students were able to accomplish....and people may forget that these protests weren't just at little old Kent State, but Harvard, and Stanford, and Yale....and these ragtag protesters ended the war....Nice reflections here rabbit......

Thanks for the comment, I did not have any friends that were actually killed in Vietnam, one of my friends was a clerk so he did not have to be in combat, but after he came back from that, he changed somehow. I guess a lot of people I knew lucked out with high numbers. I was not so lucky, I ended up getting arrested for draft evasion.I remember that some friends were going to go down and join the Navy but they changed their minds the next day.I was too much of a hippie to want to be in any uniform. I went to a psychologist that was sympathetic
to people like me, he gave me a letter that said that I could not tolerate authority. I already had a little history of seeing a psychologist when I was a teenager. In any case I knew I did not want to be trained to kill people.I did look into being a conscientious objector but it seemed to complicated to me at the time. The poem is about what I had to go through to stay out of being drafted, and how the affected my whole life. So I became a poet.