Poetica Obscura: Hawaiian Shirts and Psychedelic Rock
These poems are from a series inspired by reading Atlas Obscura stories while listening to a music genre randomly selected from my list. I hope you enjoy these. If so, it means everything if you’d support my work (unlike Medium, ahem).
The Not-So-Chill History of Hawai‘i’s Breeziest Shirt
(article here: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-aloha-hawaiian-shirt)
Psychedelic
The Not-So-Chill History of Hawai‘i’s Breeziest Shirt
psychedelic
Now because God is a groovy guy or gal
we’ve got these bodies that are love made real
and made for real love
but some snake got in a garden and told everybody what to do
like put on some clothes
but then this groovy God says go on
and drape yourself with love
God is groovy and tricky: he or she made the sacramental robe,
the only cloth to surpass the birthday suit,
but its origins were scattered far and wide.
Like it took the good white folks putting buttons
on boxy t shirts and it took these old sensei tailors
cutting up old kimonos, like why would you cut up
a blazing old kimono unless you knew you were onto something?
And the Chinese tailors were all like “whoa, dig that Puerto Rican style”
and now “aloha” means a lot of words like it also means the whole world
got together to make the one thing you can wear that makes
everybody happy. Oh man, the shirts have all these big flowers
and pineapples, and Elvis wore one so he could be as cool
as the rest of us just chilling on aloha Fridays
but God that groovy cat knows
every day is aloha Friday.
You can find me at http://www.erinlyndalmartin.com or on Twitter at @erinlyndal.
WRITTEN BY
Writer, painter. Atlas Obscura, Spiritualist erotica, bees, magic. http://erinlyndal martin.com. Twitter@erinlyndal. Tip jar http://paypal.me/ErinLyndalMartin
