Where is Jimi?
A poem by Scott Williams –Where is Jimi?
1. Summer Nineteen Sixty-nine.
May PhDs in Mathematics and womanizing
preludes summer of highs and concerts.
June while concerting on the Chesapeake Bay
my Baltimore flat is robbed.
Damn! A pound of weed I understand
but Miles, Coltrane and Hendrix albums?
July bank says all my saved summer
teaching salary has been stolen.
2. August The Beauties phone me, The Beast Nerd.
Why, in nineteen sixty-nine, besides sex
do four hot white college girls invite
twenty-six year old crashing Black Math nerd
two weeks in their classy Brookline Mass flat?
Dull ambient light, grey dust smell, distant sirens
grace my whistling meditation
three hours at 3am solo walking
in Boston yields mystery and reward.
3. Like the Furry Freak Brothers would say:
Guy with car and no ticket is better
than three girls with tickets and no car.
Three misses and me ridin’ my blue Beetle
from Boston Mass to Woodstock NY.
No Doctor John, No Beatles but Jimi, and Sly and Family
Stone, Havens, Janis Joplin and The Band.
4am dark four lane highways become two.
At dawn, two lane roads become four slow one way.
7am arrival, no tickets needed – it’s free now
zombies follow zombies to grass bowl field.
4. Zen monk and Ravi Shankar are distracting.
I ask, “When is Jimi”?
Pound of Michoacán, 10 THC pills
ounce and a half hash, 11 acid blots.
Hippies trapped in American drug dream –
nirvana is created from outside.
Moving to Richie Havens three hours
high and midnight mud sex then Joan Baez.
One hundred thousand sleeping bags, for
five hundred thousand horny heads.
Saturday morning pee relief and Beetle sex.
Need water, food, money from mud cured pockets.
5. To the baby born we scream Happy Birthing,
I ask, “Where is Jimi?”
Santana, I came to your guitar strain,
High Dead, acid gone, not ridin’ that train
“Calling doctor Scott Williams to the medical”
what? I’m a slumming PhD, no MD
California Maryellen found
one she knows for loving in VW.
Caught by the others we return midnight
for Creedence, Janis and Sly’s Stone.
6. Sunday evening three want Boston return,
but I ask, “Where is Jimi?”
Hungry cuties hitch. Maryellen and I get
The Band, Johnny Winter and no food.
In the field, we fall asleep to God Bless
the Child (that’s Blood, Sweat and Tears)
In the field, we are awakened by
The Duke of Earl (Sha-Na-Na playing)
Monday dawn brings Jimi Hendrix making
Woodstock worth more than I might have paid.
7. For more Jimi, I would’ve given up the Penn State job.
But he died a year later.
All became true to our drug faked freedom
All became true to immortal disguises.
Scott W. Williams November 1975
SUNY at Buffalo Professor Emeritus Dr. Scott W. Williams is a poet and author of short stories. His poems appeared in “Sunday Review”, “Coffeehouse Writings From the Web”, “Juniper”, “Peach Mag”, “Ground & Sky”, “Scryptic Magazine”, “Le Mot Juste”, “Punch Drunk Press”, “Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.” The most recent of his books are “Bonvibre Haiku” (CWP Press-2017) and “Natural Shrinkage” (Destitute Press-2018). Scott edits the syfy poetry & flash-fiction anthology series, “A Flash of Dark” (Writers Den-2018) and “A Flash of Dark vol 2” (Writers Den-2018). Williams hosts workshops of the poetic forms Ghazal and Haiku and co-hosts the series Second Stage Writers (with Dr. Max Stephen in Buffalo, NY) and Poets Soup (with Victoria Hunter in Canandaigua, NY).