Camelot (kc)

(Yeah, I admit I liked the Monkees--so sue me. They were fun. In honor of Davy's passing, I am moving this up from the archives. At a concert he once mentioned Camelot, so this is for him. Of course, he probably coulda written it more betta).

I sit here in my easy chair

Thinking about yesteryears

When we were growing together—

Sharing laughter or sharing tears

            Remember back to the time

            We rafted the river

            The mountains we had to climb

            Just because they were there?

Nothing ever fazed us—

We rode clear to Woodstock

On that old Greyhound bus.

(Talk about culture shock!).

            Ole Tim Leary was our hero;

            We tripped and listened to great rock

            Blasting out of the stereo,

            While Otis was down on the dock!

Bob Dylan was our conscience,

Then, during Viet Nam;

And to protest injustice

He sang of Birmingham.

            Judy sang to save the whales,

            Cohen wrote his poems,

            Johnny Cash lived in jails,

            Seeger, in “Boxy” homes.

We did sit-ins with anyone—

The protesting was exciting.

It didn’t matter if we won—

The fun, truly, was the fighting.

            We gained shelves of knowledge

            In those halcyon days.

            Not all of it from college,

            Not in our parents’ ways.

You called me Lancelot,

And you were Guinevere.

We lived in Camelot

‘til that black November.

              A lot of our dreams were shaken

             When Oswald shot the president;

             Soon after, Bobby was taken

             And then in sixty-eight—King went.

The world was in tatters,

But, still we went onward.

You told me all that matters

To keep moving forward.

            You said it’s in the past,

            And past doesn’t exist.

            Tightly, you held me fast,

            And said: “we must persist”.

I think it was that fateful night

When this liberal, bleeding heart

Strayed from left, moving toward the right;

Once again, I felt your support.

            Not taking time to look back

            We cut our hair—I shaved!

            To get ourselves in the black

            We went to work and saved.

We purchased a tract home—

Pete’s “ticky-tacky” box.

Waited for the kids to come,

And paid our income tax.

            We were white bread suburbanites,

            Driving a tan, two-tone wagon.

            Kids in school, bridge on Friday nights,

            And on Sunday: A two-hour sermon.

We quit baking our own bread—

We didn’t have the time.

Not bad, we said, we just had
diff’rent mountains to climb.

             Did this climb seem harder

             than mountains scaled before?

             If it wasn’t higher,

             Why did it tire us more?

We tried to live in Mainstream

American Society’

But found the American Dream

Stagnant, lacking intensity.

            It seemed this trip was dying—

            We’d given it a shot;

            We’d become tired of trying

            To be what we were not.

Once again, we chose change

( We couldn’t stay the same )!

Looked around for a range

Of mountains with our name.

            Sold our house, our station wagon;

            Submitted a change of address:

            “Somewhere in Seattle”—and then

           Quit work without giving notice.

There was sadness in friend’s eyes;

A catch was in their voices.

Not understanding our whys

That led to these choices.

            How can you tell your friends

            Their lives seem passionless?

            That means without an ends

            Were seen as meaningless?

We may be getting old and gray,

But being old don’t mean a damn,

As long as there is light of day’

We’ll be marching to Birmingham!

            In our hearts is JFK,

            And Bobby’s with us, too;

            King marches with us, today

            To help us see it through.

You call me Lancelot—

I call you Guinevere.

We’re back in Camelot

And we’ll be buried here.

(What is the past but a recounting of memories validated by agreement of both participants and/or observers. If one shies away from the collective, cannot the past be changed? Especially when the past deviates from the future one knew he was meant to live? There is no way the past can be recreated, nor can it be revisited, except through one’s memory. My experience with committees—the group participants in my past could be construed as a committee—does little to make me a believer in their ability in perceptual-coherence and reaching consensus. With that in mind, I take liberties with my past and continually re-constructing myself—predicated upon the permeable nature of that past—Into the person I both wanted to be and should have been, as opposed to the person so many have come to know through the vagaries of chance and circumstance.)