National Poetry Month: John Roche

Before May Day

(John Roche)

Two wks in tent city

West Potomac Park

demos everyday

building towards May Third

Bring the War Home!

If the Government won't stop the War

we'll stop the Government.

We give visiting Massachusetts Congressman a pipe

when he visits our affinity group's tent; he pits it to

his lips but doesn't inhale; a coupla wks earlier, on

school trip to DC, I'd smoked dope with John Kerry's

vets on the Mall, the day after they threw their medals

over the White House fence.

Chill April night

vats of hot marijuana tea

courtesy of the Hog Farm

I partake but skip the soup & brown rice line

to crowd onto the dilapidated bus

(Gray like the police bus I'll ride soon enow)

to Seatrain concert

at elegant old theater

(Free tickets for the ragged Freak Brigade)

Balcony seat, but with the tea's effects I prefer floor

staring up

watch rococo ceiling fresco jump

to the fiddle's anarchic

orders

John Roche lives in the Genesee River / Western Finger Lakes region of Western New York. "Before May Day" is part of his online feature, Road Ghosts, at Michael Rothenberg's Big Bridge magazine. The poet's full length print collections include On Consensus (2005) and Topicalities (2008). Both are available from Foothills Publishing.