Wednesday, August 5, 2015


GREGORY FOSTER August 1969

Her afro was so big and mini-skirt so short it was like watching Sandro Botticelli's Venus walk up and down Telegraph Avenue dripping wet draped in a single sea shell while selling Little Red Books

So you watched
Power to the peep-hole sister

Power to the people brother
Where the broom does not sweep
The dust will not vanish of its own accord
Buy a red book and come to the meeting

Will you be there

Right On

Then right on then

And before you knew you
Were an agent of change
Right on right on right now

But she was a demi-goddess
Bound to a petite demagogue
Who espoused Power to the People
But whose soul believed the masses
Were unredeemably benighted asses
Argued  true power should rest
In hands of intellectually best
Small select politically correct central committee of  three
Then promptly appointed himself the group's Leading Cadre

He loved her knot, she had been very deeply envolved in the fray
Been there seen Bunchy Carter gunned down on campus UCLA
Anti-Nixon anti-war Black Panthers Pink Panthers Brown Beret
For her and me it was philosophy and support for common cause
Hippies  Blippies street people blight and all anti-capitalist laws
For him had been sheer power he'd sung
Dialectically and historically  I stand
Following the anti-imperial capitalist plan
Of Lenin  Joe Stalin and  Mao Tse Tung

His vision for second American Revolution dashed
By lapse of time and lame lip excuses
For freshly disclosed Red Guard abuses
Dogmatic and adventuous strategies that clashed
With my own and more importantly too many others
Who were also forward thinking sisters and brothers
Black Student Unions  SDS   United Front  CORE
Freedom Riders  SNIC  and  Veterans Against the War
No way!   It was an iron on patch too foreign to hatch
Even in babylonian Berkeley

But back to her or was it me
At whom she flaunted sexuality
Answering the door in thin neglige
Without bra nor pantie down under
Repeatedly toying taunting enticing
Me to make a political blunder
Hind her glasses  followed the eyes
poised with anti-chauvinist thunder

It seems the sexual gratification revolution delayed
Although revolutionary musical bed  later played

Shortly after the glass jawed movement
Hit the brick wall in seventy-two
She'd had enough to tell him after
Two dogs and two babies we're through
To tell the whole truth he had forced her hand
Had taken a solid steel pipe and killed a man

For all legal fees and her loved one's life
She vowed to become the barrister's wife
Divorced her husband, married his attorney
And thus did end her revolutionary journey

Occasionally seen haunting the East Bay
Poor chap quite delusional to this day
He recognized and confronted me to say
I alone revolutionary remain
Was it the truth or is he insane

Was so long ago a distant Shangri La it seems
Those hopes now most dust lost utopian dreams
Chance at  true social revolution  never so real
As the cold hard pipe used by angry hands to kill

No comments:

Post a Comment