Touch Is Sushi On a Breadless Night - Poems

“Camerado, I give you my hand! I give you my love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me? Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?” - Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road” from his book “Leaves of Grass” 1856. America, your doors are closed. You live in gated garrisons where love is a dying rose which once bloomed on Ellis Island but hasn’t been seen since armies of salvation marched in Europe. When foreign tongues were welcome from Brooklyn to New Orleans with Russian émigrés gathered in tea houses. And in 1920 suffragettes held a triumphant parade down Seventh Avenue in Manhattan the day after women finally got the right to wield the ballot in a mighty wave of feminine influence in a rebellion that shook the foundations of patriarchy. Yet like her daguerreotype portrait, the ghost of Harriet Beecher Stowe and the long shadow of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” still haunted libraries. But in the future, a woman bathed to wash away the blues of a long day. While Janis Joplin played on the phonograph like an old friend who knew her heart inside and out and all around. And she thought of America as the last Garbo movie but with a grunge rock soundtrack. Nostalgia and nihilism were going nowhere fast. But America was no longer a silent movie, nor was it in black and white. And the voices and colors of diversity had their eyes on the prize that they would win. – John Hindle