Just One of the Hippies
He was just one of the hippies who lived in the haze of the nineteen sixties when Dylan and Baez sang songs of despair.
With tangled hair, scruffy attire, and a musty aroma, he wandered the streets with his friends in a state of “heightened awareness,” handed flowers to passersby, and spoke of love and peace.
He frolicked with the young maidens in Golden Gate Park each day and enticed them to join the love fest each night in his communal pad on the corner of Haight and Ashbury.
And although the times changed, and his friends and young maidens dwindled in numbers, he clung to his adventure, contemptuous of war, the social order, his parents, and anyone over thirty.
He panhandled in Union Square and hustled in the Tenderloin to sustain himself and feed his habit, but one morning when filled with angst, he overdosed and died alone on a long ride to County General.
No one knew his name, claimed his body, or said a prayer. He was just one of the hippies who lived in the haze of the nineteen sixties when Dylan and Baez sang songs of despair.
Copyright © 2007 Frank Zahn. Published in Meat for Tea: The Valley Review,
Volume 8 Issue 4 English Breakfast December 2014, p. 48 - http://www.meatfortea.com/pdfs/meatforteav8i4.pdf; Perceptions: Prose and Other
Poetry, Grove 49 eBooks (Kindle Edition) 2016; Alive!: Short Prose and Poetry,
Vancouver Books (Kindle Edition) 2019.