it’s the 1970’s, the version where we won,

with lacquered air and honeyed breath.

communes march as skies fall,

lifted instead into action by ecstasy,

i don’t listen to andy warhol, but 

i do listen to barbara kruger.

     (the shockwave will not spare you.)

some hippie fantasy encircles a (this) continent,

rewrites it just and better from its foundation.

unloosened from the knot of history a here,

spelled it into a kinder madness.

this is zenith to something meaningful;

this is white nirvana.

     (are you a gondolier? will you be?)

bereft, a dead floweret hung graceless and limp from the rafters,

samsara enclosing into singular hum,

yin, yang, counter all into gray fading, and

it’s the 1970’s, and everybody wanted Nixon out of office

because everybody just wants Nixon out of office.

this is what the future used to be, before it became obsolete,

a bourgeois, parochial rebellion along the arc of cataclysm,

along the arc of ever-enduring capitalism, 

before woodstock grows up, and the drugs wear off,

and we’re right back where we started from.