half life

More than half my life ago,

-now- one Mayday in LA,

we carried red flags and banners,

and marched down Wilshire Boulevard.

Proud, and scared -we didn’t have a permit-

and a three-deep wall of riot-geared LAPD

spanned the street. They charged

and clubbed the marchers to the ground.

Half life -uranium decays to lead

not gold, but I thought that I might

have found the elusive stone,

the philosopher's magic key

hidden in Mao's little red book

while half a world away

his freshly embalmed corpse

rested in a crystal coffin.

And we clamored in disgust

that the revolution was betrayed

that China was headed down

the road to capitalism,

but that didn't seem to matter

to the Guatemalan steel worker

who sheltered us in his house

or his wife who fed us some 

of the white beans and pork chops

she cooked right on the burner

of the stove. She wrapped them up

in foil and packed it all in his lunch box

for his graveyard shift at US Steel.

The book meant nothing to the

bandana'ed Filipinas lined up outside

the garment district sweatshops,

or the red-eyed men waiting

in the unemployment office in Watts,

they said: we've got some

guns at home, let's rise up today.

And we said no, brother, the conditions

aren’t ripe, first we need to study Mao,

to prepare the way for the revolution…

They looked at us and shrugged,

said -don't go selling wolf tickets

'round here then son, you understand?

when you get serious, we're down.

we're serious as death, you dig?

And we said, come down to MacArthur Park,

on May 1st, we're gonna march, we're gonna

show the world that even here, in the belly

of the imperialist beast, the Revolution's coming,

and it isn’t gonna be a rocket parade in Red Square,

-those Russian gangsters sold out long ago.

We're for real, check out our newspaper, see?

They just looked at us and said, yeah, we’ll see.

But the steel worker gave us a floor to sleep on

and the meat packers from El Salvador

fed us fried bologna sandwiches on wonder bread.

They took care of us. We fed them red flag dreams.

You can rent flowers at the entrance to Mao's tomb

and buy souvenirs of the great helmsman at the exit.

He's better as an icon than a ruler, like most of them.

If you prefer Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln

you can get a souvenir of our star-spangled heroes

at the Smithsonian. Flip it over and look down

in the corner and you'll probably see this inscription:

Made in China.