POEM: Hippie Hippie Array!

I am
A bohemian, man
Razing consciousness wherever
Or whatever
I happen to wander about
Are you
Brushed off by my long hair
While you suck it up
All the err
Straining awe of your shabby tension
In the face
Of my frayed clothes
And your painstakingly frayed whirled view
Like nothing writing off my poetry
As holy gratuitous
And under raiding my intellect as well
Eschewing upon awe but straight up homo genus
Making plain your redundant homogenous specious
As if
Once in for all
You might as well
Be at least
One finger shy
Of won’s iconic sign of peace

This poem plays with the trite but true notion that we often make an avalanche of judgments about other people based on our first glance at them. Gender. Class. Age. Race. Attractiveness. In this poem, in my case, it’s about looking like a hippie. The superficial array of features that we display to the world is a gift to the lazy and the uncurious. I consider my outward appearance a powerful screening tool to weed out those unprepared to delve into my provocative inner beauty and intriguing eccentricities. When stereotypers and skeptics make it through this screening process, I must admit, I get a special thrill out of witnessing people amending an initial underrating and/or misconstrual of me. Yep, I like to mess with people — for the very reason that people are messy. The last lines of this poem is an example of this. When demonstrating for peace on a street corner — a totally hippie thing to do — occasionally, a passing motorist will share a singular upright finger to signal their notion of victory. I am known to note to my friendly demonstrators the valiant efforts of another one-fingered veteran trying to make the peace sign, aka victory sign. We don’t know what we don’t know. And most of us know very little about most people we encounter. I am a person leavened with hope. May we find hope in one another as we ardently explore each other’s breathtaking lives and singular place in this world.