Mimicking Freedom

Mimicking Freedom
by Don Cavin

I moved out from the dangers of the South:
the heat, conservatives, and my childhood.
I was told Oregonians were
more accepting than Texans –
more accepting of being adrift
in the bigotry of their ideals
while sipping fair-trade herbal teas
and patronizing independent bookstores.
I talked too damn much
and held my failed notions outside
like wind chimes in a tropical storm;
I may have been wrong but it was no secret.

I carried a girlfriend with high expectations
to a new life, but I spent most of a year high
in a house I was told was a hundred years old.
It must have been older;
I spent nearly that long siphoning her love
and hating myself for it.

Eventually, I quit the habit of her
and rented a basement apartment
with an unshackled couple
who invited me into their bedroom;
I told them I didn’t understand sexual liberation.

I met you after you arrived from Oklahoma
with your chubby Mexican girlfriend
who anchored your passions to her bed;
she I understood.

One night, as hosts of a reading,
we acquired a case of Two Buck Chuck
and dipped into a hand full of psilocybin mushrooms.
You stripped to your red, white, and blue briefs
and danced in the rain, mimicking freedom.
We drank down the wine and your absurdity;
it all felt so poetic.

Months later, you bore away your girlfriend,
and we thumbed down the coast
with overstuffed backpacks,
camped on overcast Oregon beaches,
and ate rehydrated soup out of aluminum cans;
it was good to live again, to drift again.
I skimmed the highway home
and found it where I left it,
so I headed north;
I heard they’re different there.