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
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