Shot Up in the Sexual Revolution (The True Adventures
of Suzy Creamcheese), Part 5

7.
I tell you, I ran away once and I'm still running.
The collective, the commune, the family, the movement...
The rundown farmhouse with sixteen scraggly hippies
and strangers sleeping over was not, for me, a hearth to defend.
Remember the bathtub with everybody's hair in the drain.
Stir the soybeans, or fuck it, let them burn. Get up
off the dusty floor cushion of your anarchist manifesto
and the Book of the Dead, and let a single brain cell survive
long enough to complete a sentence, or at least
bring in the mail. Strum on your guitar, but don't talk to me
about world justice. There's work to be done, and when I
raise your consciousness this time, something's gonna catch fire.

Oh, I admit you were beautiful to me, each dog-faced man-child,
steaming with revolution, and the absolute confidence
of sexual privilege, each of you who opened my jeans
with a smile of having arrived at your inheritance, having
touched land in the new world, nothing in your way,
and all that fruit for the taking.

Yes, and wasn't it all tight pink flesh,
your cock standing up so hard it nudged your navel;
my breasts pointing upward with a little smile:
not a sag or a fold or a sad daddy's greying nest
of chest hair could touch us. We were smooth,
we could have been comrades. bending it together,
those years when I wore an army jacket
and you had your hair in a braid.

Now I'm choked on analysis, bored to respectable.
I'm too old for the drugs, my body can't take it,
though I'll never really get clean. I've got more
prescriptions than Elvis. I'm hallucinating
on hormones, zoned out on Xanax; I get dizzy
when the blood thinners kick in. And I'd like to say
I still have my memories, but my memories are disintegrating
faster than tissue paper in a wet drain. I'm too proud

to go hunting for rock and roll on the classics band
and as for sex, well, that should still be a possibility
though I am pretty pissed off and hope is fading, yet
the feeling keeps coming back--it doesn't ever go away.
It's still warm and sweet down there, that cunt
framed with damp and curly hair, and I think maybe
it could go on forever: rebel without a pause,
the hormone years, It could be possible

if anything were possible
that didn't make me feel caught in a time warp,
with that little girl gaze and pale hope everlasting,
knowing how sex is in me forever, its electric connections
fused on the body's own currents, and I keep going down
to that place where thought stops and the power rises,
that old outlaw in me singing, "Desperado"
in the dark with gravel in my voice, still wanting more.


8.
Adam, the serpent gave me the apple and I did eat.
You took it from my hand, my dear. We stand here naked,
forsaken; the wind blows through the leaves.
There's nobody else around. Rise,

make me shy again, soft as a feathered thing,
glad to raise my mouth to your mouth, to open
my lips to your lips. Try it once more,
till we get it right. Try it twice. I never was counting.
We were beautiful. Nothing is forgiven.
Do you like it this way, then? Take me down.
Touch me there. Yes. Hold me, kiss me.
Kick out the jams, motherfuckers.
There's something happening here.
We are stardust, we are golden.
Ooh, Baby, Baby...