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Tom Barlow

When the Music's Over the first time a young person yields hir seat on the bus to me I will throw down / my target dressed in bell bottoms and tie-dyes / head band and peace sign / following me like I was holding a joint behind my ear / on my way to The Lizard King's grave / past the ghosts of American flags we flew upside down in front of the White House / back in the day when we loathed ourselves for all the faces our people trampled as we scrambled to hold the high ground / but the shame did not outlast the costume / and our zero sum games meant that ambition had to build a bonfire of our poems and guitars / we escaped Love Street by that light / but the suckers who staked themselves to 1968 right through the heart found that their blood at retail would barely pay for the time machine that set them down here to see how the clouds carry such regret for riders on the storm. Tom Barlow is an Ohio author of poetry, short stories...

Tom Barlow

Lucy in the Sky I am enjoying an omelet at the Sunnyside Grill on a bone dry August morning and I am seventy years old in a week when the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" arrives at my table along with the coffee refill. The place is packed with fossils like me and none of them put down their forks to adjust hearing aids so they can better enjoy the song and I wonder if any of them dropped acid back in the day. I tripped to that song in 1967 when it was new, as did my America—fringed jackets, tie-dyes, headbands, bellbottoms, feathers, Lord Ganesh with his tusks of gold, anything for color to repudiate the gray suits our fathers wore, of which I now own four. Tom Barlow is an American poet and fiction writer whose work has appeared in over 100 journals and anthologies including They Said (Black Lawrence) and Best New Writing and journals including Hobart, Temenos, Forklift Ohio,  Redivider, Your Daily Poem, and th...