The pictures are from today (with my cell phone), March 1, 2014

The Poem is from March 2, 1992

Looking through an old notebook I found something I wrote on March 2, 1992.  I don’t remember specifically that day; and the photo du jour doesn't help… a timed exposure of me typing on my IBM Selectric typewriter, which I thought at the time was just about as good as technology gets. At that time I already had one of those early Apple computers, but the Internet was still only a far-off-in-the-future dream. The Internet was actually cut loose for commercial use a couple of years later.  It took almost another decade before social networking technology changed everything.  

Here’s what I wrote, probably late at night after a long day interacting with mostly affluent people who could afford to pay for “the best of everything.”  

YOU TAKE THE ORCHIDS

One life for each of us.

That’s how it works.

I’ve got mine, and you’ve got yours.

God damn, how I love turnips,

mustard greens, and black-eyed peas, 

anything that smells and tastes of earth.

Choose, if you want to, refined pleasures

smooth and bland, elegant on the plate.

Let me have some straight talk, blunt,

about the way the world really is.

You take the one from the university

who has nothing more to learn.

I’ll have a small bunch of those marigolds.

You take the orchids.