Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome poet Allan Lake, based in Melbourne, with his memoir poem “My Hippie Life.” Remembering hitchhiking across Canada as a teenager newly graduated from high school, Allan creates nostalgia for a time when life was simpler and full of malleable possibility. “We were fearless, felt fate/ had future in tow. No illness/ fatal, no attack lethal, no luggage,/ no ticket.” Alliteration, assonance and repetition dance in memory of youth setting out on life’s journey, the imagery fresh, sensory and eager.
Allan has made many moves in his life, living in Canada, Spain, and Australia, but there is nothing quite like that first experience of travel, the lightness of the fledgling human being. As we age we form bonds with other people and make choices that gradually, alongside our natural, physical limitations, erode our capacity and appetite for possibility. We begin to settle somewhere, a necessary and inevitable reality for most of us, yet we miss the thrill of simple things–a sunrise outdoors or a meal cooked at a campfire. Need and hunger shape us in a way prosperity cannot. Allan reminds us how good these simple things are and that we still have time for wonder. He also acknowledges the process of living, of individuating. There is no way back to our childhood home or to our younger self. “You might have returned home but/ could never really return home/ except to set it on fire and dance/ around flames like a savage/ who spoke a different language.
Read “My Hippie Life” in Synkroniciti’s “Identity” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Allan Lake is a migrant poet from Allover, Canada who now lives in Allover, Australia. Coincidence.
He has published poems in 20 countries, in such journals as The Hong Kong Review, Quadrant Magazine, The American Writers Review, Tokyo Poetry Journal, The Antigonish Review, New Philosopher and The Fabians Review. His latest chapbook of poems, entitled My Photos of Sicily, was published by Ginninderra Press. It contains no photos, only poems.