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.
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