Halloween, nineteen seventy six,
My friend and I were prowling.
The holiday spirit was strong
It was powerful and howling.
We were visiting friends,
Both is and mine that night,
We saw some wondrous things
House to house that night.

One house was amazing;
A Los Feliz mansion.
It was glorious, a jewel
Both high, wide and handsome.
Inside, a silent movie ran
From foyer to the third floor.
And every room of the house
Was a delight to see and explore.

The next house was a study
Of **** smoking and chat.
We intended to stay awhile
We saw nothing wrong with that.
And, as we plowed through
The crowd ebbed and waned.
I giggle as we tried our best
To maintain the footing we gained.

Then, from the gabbing throng,
A face of a handsome guy
Came out and apparently he
Decided to give kissing me a try.
He pulled me close and it worked,
He planted on me a warm kiss.
He was aiming for my lips and
He aimed he scored, didn’t miss.

The thing that made it memorable
Was that it was a perfect kiss.
I remember thinking to myself
“It’s been years since a kiss like this.”
In a night of traditional revelry
And simulated comic danger
I got the best Halloween kiss ever
And it came from a total stranger.

I never saw him again or since
As he melted back into the crowd.
They were all talking and shouting
So no good shouting out loud.
I just had to accept this hot gift
And go on with my holiday journey.
But that was a most wonderful kiss
And it lives today in my memory.

I’m sure it has happened
To many other people before.
There comes a moment
A feeling one cannot ignore.
A want, a drive, an impulse
To have, to hold, to own
Something, someone or
A moment that is yours alone.

At a party, a face appeared
And our two eyes connected.
It seemed we were talking;
A dialogue was being erected.
A relationship of mere moments,
It seemed powerfully right.
And at just that one moment
Nothing could be more right.

We left the party immediately
And went to my place to see
If followers through with feeling
What just the right thing to be.
It was all a wonderful adventure.
I am sure we had no kind of fear.
It was an accident of timing,
One I would suffer for years.

Twice more and we were broken,
Never to be together again.
No thoughts about if ever
Not a question about when.
And after the last evening
I knew things had moved on.
When I looked into my wallet.
All of my money was gone.

All because of impatience
And not wanting to be alone
I let myself fall into a kind of
Rock and roll Twilight Zone.
Why didn’t I ask more questions?
Because in that single moment
I wanted a fantasy romance.
Nothing was more important.

It was months later I discovered
In a routine visit to my doctor
That I had contracted a disease
That would ruin my life forever.
They didn’t know what to call it
In those days before the name.
Those were the days before AIDS
And it’s horrific kind of sick fame.

And they had no way to treat it
So, most of us just quickly died.
We had no ability to resist it.
We had no resistance inside.
We lost all our friends and lovers
Because for one single moment
That one evening with a stranger,
Nothing was more important.

I fell into a frenzy of not caring,
Drugs and drink and debauchery.
I felt I had lost all hope in life
And lost all my chance at dignity.
Of course that made me sicker
My resistance went down further.
I no longer wanted to live like that
I was sick of my life altogether.

I am writing this to you, today
So you can share it with others.
Tell people that getting laid
Is not the same as a lover.
Point to me and advise them
We may have just one moment
For valuing ourselves as a person
Nothing must be more important.


(This is dedicated to many of my friends over the decades that suffered from *** and AIDS related issues.)

Little Lolly LOL is not too bright
She types LOL day and night
She seems to think that abbreviation is
To replace things like parenthesis,
Or hahaha, hello or goodbye.
She uses it constantly, don’t know why.
The way she uses it is a blight.
As I have said, she’s not too bright.

We never met, Little Lolly and I
But it’s almost as if I can hear it;
Her ending every single sentence
With LOL as if it were a period.
She can be chatting about ******
Disease or crooked officials
But she manages to end it with
Those silly, mirthful initials.

Little Lolly LOL I am sure totally fails
To understand what she has said.
I even tried a few times to get
The idea into her fluttery head.
But to her, she is being ‘with it’,
To her it’s just like saying ‘whatever’.
And that it means laughing out loud?
She never quite puts that all together.

With Little Lolly LOL, that is the price
One has to pay for her friendship.
To be sure, she’s not being funny.
LOL is punctuation, not a valid quip.
She saw and somebody explained it
So, she grabbed it and she uses it.
It never occurred to her addled brain
That there was any way to abuse it.