Big old building with small apartments.
Mine was one room, furnished,
tiny kitchen, tiny bathroom,
I inherited from a Chicago friend.

He left his posters — Che Guevara, Malcolm X,
a Picasso, and a Miles Davis album.
Soc. 101 for a hick jock.

Other students lived here,
also working girls
and quiet old men.

Black-haired girls from East Coast,
brown-haired girls from the hinterland.

The building had odors — old pizza, stale beer,
Phone-a-Feast boxes, tobacco, incense,
Mexican weed, Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint soap.

Mailboxes stuffed with magazines.
Evergreen Review, Ramparts, The Nation,
Candid Press.

We read unassigned lit —
Bukowski, Jean Genet, Vonnegut, Ginsberg.

We were revolutionaries.
We were revolting.

We joined SDS.
We were a cell, hoping for FBI surveillance.

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The working girls brought home boyfriends.
Old bedsprings metronomed amor,
lots of amor in the old building.

I was caught up in the romance.
Loved, in love, lovesick.

Things like this couldn’t last.
Gentrifiers, jealous, threatened, greedy,
demolished the place.

Buried it and drove a stake
through its heart.