Remembering Tib
Joseph Tiberino dies on 2-19-2016 at the age of 77
If I went to your funeral
that would be my last memory of you-NO!
let me remember you holding court at Bacchanal
1320 South Street Arts Bar
Art, Booze, Music, Poetry
loose women and looser men
It was the 1980’s and to paraphrase Grace Slick
If you could remember more than half of it
you really weren’t there.
I was really, really there.
2) You gave me my first Poetry Organizing Gig
Poets and Prophets started there
I’m up to cataloging the 1987 tapes
and may get them all done
while still upright
while still upright
there were many nights going home alone
and many others
and, oh yeah, some great Poets read there
From Baraka to Steptoe
From Jim Cory to Etheridge Knight
From Tommi Avicolli to Wil Perkins
and all the Wordsmiths at the Open Reading
ending some nights at mid
Joe walking around Bacchanal
like some son of Bacchus
like Bacchus himself
3) Tib, the Emperor of Powelton
striding around the Compound
like a Roman Emperor you were
wearing painters clothes
holding wine glass, holding brush
Ellen, regal and beautiful
silent, at least compared to Joe
First couple of Philadelphia Art
First Couple of Powelton
The Queen and King
Pierre and the Roea C. Wallace,
Hugh Wattles, River and Gail
Pat Hinchey, Lamont, me
sometimes, like when the three
of us, me Pat and Lamont
(That’s my story and I’m sticking to it)
sat on a Powelton roof drinking beers and declaiming
dragging Pat back when he got too near the edge
That was Pat then, on the edge
Slept on someone’s couch some nights
lost in the memory place
when I could still delete,
with intention
3) Years later
sometime in the 1990’s
while walking soberly on S. Broad St
A suited man called you
summoned me from the west side
running across Broad St
halfway between Sansom and Walnut
(an earlier edition of me could do that)
It was Joe Tib in all his fullness
We discussed the recent closing of Bacchanal
saying “it was your fault, Bob
’cause you stopped drinking”
4) Don’t know exactly the last time
I saw you
(my memory now deletes on it’s own
and I can’t seem to reboot)
but, to me, you are best remembered alive
as Etheridge and Jerome and so many others
whose lives must live on in memory
From starting on 2-29
robertthesmall 