Waist Land 3

The Switch of Gender Roles

I tell Jack what to do now.
"Clean the fucking toilet"
He does it.
I felt so inferior to him for so long
as my curls bounced in the air.
I learn that if you know how to use the right words
you can get Jack to do anything.
It must have something to do with conditioned responses.
I've forgotten how smart
I was
before his mind became so controlling...
I went to Sarah Lawrence...
I was a hippy chic
in love with trees and Eastern religion,
especially Hindu vegetarianism.
How have I become so materialistic
living between the hives of two sexes,
so cynical, so blazingly out of step?
What the hell was on my mind in part 1 of this poem?

"my new boy love
with his blonde curls and sensitive
blue eyes,
sketches of the summer skies,
purple dyes
flung wildly into summer."

A black surge of power,
the dark turnstile of the libido,
such thoughts,
serpentine patterns perpetrate

"Why are you doing this to me?
What have I done?"

(his fascist eye has disappeared,
nothing to fear,
no reason to be moral)

"I love you. Just do as I say.
It's liberation...
you're sailing away
it's not the end
of your longest day...
please
please
please
stay."

He believes everything I say.
I play back to him his voice
whenever he does not keep his word.

Sweet, sweet Californian weather...
the many breasts of San Francisco
the freedom of young nude bodies at the beach
swinging away into oblivion,
sex, drugs, and rock and roll
has kept them alive,
buried the cynicism, buried the disappointment
in the banality of their lives,
banal acts of evil at parties
charged with cocained arrogance,
driving one up the airs of heaven
then down the seas of doubt,
marijuana indifference, laziness, and lovemaking,
a cake decked with mighty orgasms in which,
a secret, a trauma is screamed out
only to reveal
one's vulnerable contempt.
Bodies in the throes of ecstacy
in the groove and loving for a while,
lifting the protective veil of racism
letting go in a rave,
no more excess baggage.
It's unreal. It's a movie.