Travel Poems? Yes, Travel Poems!

Stumbled on this on YouTube and, maybe I'm a cynic, but it kinda cracks me up. Poems collected from a one-time stoner's trip across north Africa, the Middle East and into Southeast Asia in 1971. It's from poet Richard Krech's 1972 book "Poems from Free World," named for his observation of pool players in sarongs in Mandalay. It's not altogether uninteresting.

Of travel

"The acquisition of a ticket enables you to travel more than geographically."


Of Libya

"I am a stranger among strangers.
Here there are no women, no drugs, no beer, no wine, no amusement
I have found companionship in the Tunisians
Who come here to work because the pay is better...
Habib and his illiterate brother
Who shares a bong with me because we both have tattoos."

Of bus ride into Afghanistan

"Drink chai, smoke, take showers.
Several hours later Linda and I asleep on the rooftop
The stars brilliant in the windy sky
The horse cart in the galloping street
The opium dreams going on forever
So real I can reach out and touch them"

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I actually tried to make an EP a few years ago called "I Like to Travel," which was largely dumb and unmelodic, and completely unfinished. My favorite song, probably, was "Fistfight at the Union of '90s Expats" which imagined expats sharing tales from the road a decade later. In Pennsylvania.

It goes:

"At the union
Of '90s expats
Held at
A swank
Philadelphia lodge
Hunter's speech
Called The Beach
As the very Dylan
Of our broken
Wayward generation
Some Keralan res
Threw off his fez
And said 'spit on this son'
That's revisionist raj'
We spray and spread in the sun
Till darkness comes
With a punch"

[enter synthesizer solo]


OK, maybe travel's best left outside verse.