City Lights 1961

Going there for the first time it was so much smaller then that crowded downstairs full of poetry racks of tattered little mags against the wall those rickety white tables where folks sat reading/writing Vesuvio's was like an adjunct office Arriving again a year later, two kids in tow Lawrence gave me a huge stack of his publications "I've got books" he said "like other people have mice" And North Beach never stopped being mysterious when I moved out here in 1968 that publishing office on Filbert & Grant was a mecca a place to meet up with my kids if we got separated during one of those innumerable demonstrations (tho Lawrence worried, told me I shd keep them out of harm's way, at home) I thought they shd learn whatever it was we were learning— Office right around the corner from the bead store where I found myself daily, picking up supplies How many late nights did we haunt the Store buying scads of new poems from all corners of the earth then head to the all-night Tower Records full of drag queens & revolutionaries, to get a few songs And dig it, City Lights still here, like some old lighthouse though all the rest is gone, the poetry's moved upstairs, the publishing office right there now too & crowds of people one third my age or less still haunt the stacks seeking out voices from all quarters of the globe