Whore or Scope
Naughty children mistaken for Buddha
run in the streets, play in the night.
Purple prairie clover covering even
song of the country’s uneven plight.
We walk down the streets pretending the cracks
don’t wear down our souls, lessening light.
So much to fix to make it move better,
knowing we could means that we might.
And if not, well the darkness gets darker
slowing the going, beckoning blight.
— Smith, 1.29.2014
Well that’s poem 121 written and posted in 121 days. Don’t know how long this can continue as I stumblebum on, but I’m grateful for the fun. A lot of so-so poems in the batch, but some amazing ones as well.
original Yesterday and Today Beatles album cover, 1966
The foto above is my original cover of the Beatles’ 1966 Yesterday and Today album. They printed 750,000 copies of the butcher meat cover and reaction was so negative they recalled them and destroyed most of them, but to save money, tens of thousands had an innocuous white trunk cover (foto below) slapped over the offending cover and were shipped back out.
I was near the end of my first year at the Naval Academy and shoplifted the trunk cover album from the Midshipman’s store. I tired of it and traded it away, then a year later traded it back. One night drunk in my room I noticed the dark blotch of Ringo’s head semi-showing through the white so moistened my finger and started rubbing the cover cover off. Eventually I cut it down to fit my collaged Pockets journal, which lessens the value but if I hadn’t, I would have lost it along the way after I was kicked out in 1968 for smoking grass and moved to Baltimore then Michigan, Arizona, Ohio, England, Netherlands, Poland, Croatia, France, Spain, Morocco, Mexico, and finally back to Cleveland Ohio over the next 41 years..
Here’s a Wikipedia article on the brouhaha – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yesterday_and_Today.
second cover covering above cover