Shot Up in the Sexual Revolution (The True Adventures
of Suzy Creamcheese), Part 2

2.
So you move in with the guy: an old farmhouse
with a couch on the porch, half a dozen cars in the yard.
Days come and go; people come and go.
Soon wearing those handmade in Guatemala cotton dresses
that ravel at the hem and bunch up around your waist.
I slid back in history, canning tomatoes and stirring
the lentil soup my ancestors spurned two hundred years ago
when they sailed for America and a better life.

Cast me back in time, tents and wood fires,
teepees and yurts, and squatting by a bush to pee.
Passing infections, hepatitis and crabs,
not getting hung up on jealousy or possession.
Old lady, old man, welfare babies named Sky and Isis:
("hippies treat their women like squaws.")

Smoking homegrown weed, drying Mexican mushrooms:
those were the brown years, a study in earth tones,
granola, brown rice, nuts and seeds,
brown bread and brown acid, hash brownies,
grass brownies, carob cake and macrame.
The more work anything took the more authentic it seemed,
while we listened to industrial rock and roll
and roamed the highways in German microbuses
carrying our pink plastic dial packs of state of the art
contraceptives. No latex, no calendar, never miss a day.

And I hate to say it but the men were regressing
at warp speed into permanent adolescence of air guitar
and arcane secrets of how to roll a joint so tight
it would burn forever, and letting their brain cells
simmer, or maybe they just weren't getting enough protein
or fresh air, inhaling incense and wood smoke between tokes.

But who would return
to the ranch house on the green mowed cul-de-sac,
those comfortable concentration camps
furnished with harvest gold appliances and shag carpeting?
And the people left behind, wage slaves
stoned on barbiturates and television,
all sleeping with the neighbors anyway
and wearing those drip-dry perma press shirts
with the little pockets? It seemed there was no way back
and the world was alight with new dangers,
so surely this was not the end of the adventure...