FLIPPING COINS WITH BRUCE

Flipping Coins With Bruce
Age 20, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1964
-- This is one poem, in an autobiographical series of poems, I posted here at WriteSpike. Go to my stories section for others. They are in chronological order. --

It is by chance that we met, by choice that we became friends.
~ Quote from Unknown Author ~

It was the summer of serendipity -
after a chance meeting
Bruce and I became fast friends;
above the noise of the city
we spent evenings on his roof-top porch
listening to the lush sitar solos of Ravi Shankar
and the complex keyboard of Beethoven sonatas

occasionally we descended down to
the cacophony of the streets
to Elsie's Diner
with the best jukebox in town;
between bites of Reubens, we listened
to Martha and the Vandellas -
"Heat Wave," Bruce said
"is as tight as any tune by Mozart"

on a trip to New York we scoured the town
for a color organ
a jukebox that displayed dark violet for the low notes
and yellows for the high ones
- state of the art for its time;
it took four hours but
we, at last, landed our prize
at a small bar in the Village
the only place with such a one
in Manhattan

both interested in John Cage, chance
and things that came out of the blue
we drove one night to an intersection
and began a coin flip game:
tails, left; heads, right
and when three roads converged,
we flipped twice

all went well until we got caught in a circle
that looped and would not let us go -
determined to play by the rules
we kept flipping until
finally we were released

and chance put us back on the main road