DOAEN 8: Good-bye Miz Pele de Lappe

You showed me photographs of Frieda Kahlo and told me how you used to lie on a bed together and draw each other naked. All your shelves were filled with books and your walls with pictures, every inch was covered with your lithographs and political cartoons, newspaper clippings, bulletin boards, and later, with the canvases of your lover, Byron Randall. You sketched characters with your tongue. Every month you traveled to San Jose and visited your son in the looney-bin. You sailed across the Atlantic in a merchant marine ship. We both loved Archy and Mehitabel written by Don Marquis about Archy, a cockroach with the soul of a poet, and Mehitabel, an alley cat who claimed she was Cleopatra in a previous life. You named one of your cats Archy, and had a garden with a stone walk-way. Decca Mitford was your lucky card. Everyone was your friend. Once you had a face-lift because you didn't want to develop a turkey neck like your mother. You had fights with a lover in prison. Your cooking pots hung from a pegboard in the kitchen. You threw parties every New Years Day where people crowded along the staircase drinking and eating your good food and snaked out the front door. You edited my copy until I became humble. Your daughter played jazz in New York City and then in Woodstock. Blue was your favorite color, translucent silk scarves tied at your neck. You choose to to be a part of history, documented time in a sketchbook, told me stories and jumped on jazz keys with a lithographer's stone.

Words:
It's not about black and to white.
It's about wrong and right.
Reverend Chicken Wing
He was sitting behind the counter of a store with the lights off
The TV's never on anymore in the locker room.
A knat on the windshield.
Music:
Joe Cocker