sharon olds -- i go back to 1937

'I go back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips black in the May air, they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don't do it - she's the wrong woman, he's the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do, you are going to do bad things to children, you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of, you are going to want to die. I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty blank face turning to me, her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me, his pitiful beautiful untouched body, but I don't do it. I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips like chips of flint as if to strike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it. -- Sharon Olds

**yes, this IS a repost... but "i go back" remains one of my favorite poems in the world. :)**

Gazpacho-- Michelle Tea

Gazpacho-- Michelle Tea

1:30 am gazpacho in my room
red and green and tasting
like tucson like too much
parsley and cocktails on
the porch, mezcal, tastes
like tequila someone played
a trick on we bought it cheap
in mexico two bottles per gringo
over the border gazpacho and
burritos enough to feed the
neighborhood and i did because
the neighborhood was crashing
at my house showing up at sunset
to eat at my cinderblock table but
it was cool i could afford it could
afford to pay rent buy groceries buy
jugs of red wine to get them all drunk
bongs of pot to keep them stoned and
gas tank full of road trips i
was making lots of cash and we were all
cool liberal fuck liberal we were
radical, anarchist cookbook beside
the moosewood cookbook on our bookshelf we
knew all about things like the
distribution of wealth and like i said i
was making tons of money and they weren't
making any they were unemployed because
finding work is hard or they were students or

in the emergency stage of the sexual abuse thing or
some other piece of doctored up as
politics you know capitalism blah blah blah so
i was supporting an ever-changing band of lethargic
sunbathing potheads because i was making so much
money and yeah i was making it by leaving my body
so that strange men could fill it like a kind of
demon spirit but fuck it was my choice no gun
to my head no linda lovelace scene here and
i was really into communal living and we were all
such free spirits, crossing the country we were
nomads and artists and no one ever stopped
to think about how the one working class housemate
was whoring to support a gang of upper middle class
deadheads with trust fund safety nets and connecticut
childhoods, everyone was too busy processing their
isms to deal with non-issues like class
and besides,
you don't think rich families have problems
you don't think rich families have secret rapes and
alcoholic dads and feed their kids bad food with
sugar and preservatives i mean when you
get right down to it we're all just humans,
all on the same path to destruction because
our mother earth is being raped (is it ok
if we borrow that term from your
oppression, it's really powerful) anyway
that class is just divide and conquer,
blood money is just a redundant phrase and all work
is prostituion, right? and it's so cool
how none of them have hang-ups about
sex work they're all real
open-minded real
revolutionary you know
the legal definition of pimp is
one who lives off the earnings of
a prostitute, one or five or
eight and i'd love to stay and
eat some of the stir fry i've been cooking
for ya'll but i've got to go fuck
this guy so we can all get stoned and
go for smoothies tomorrow, save me
some rice, ok?