PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

1

My grandfather's grandfather suspected
enemies of the Revolution everywhere,
and was devoted to all things Soviet.
He copied down Lenin's speeches for Pravda.
He smoked cigars with Stalin, and sipped tea with Molotov,
while drawing up lists of people to be purged.
To be purged was execution; to be executed was murder,
and murder was commanded, commended

(even), by the Bolshevik (the so-called People's) Party,
the party of my grandfather's grandfather, dead beneath a red star.
They tell me Stalin sent more people to their deaths
then Hitler and Mussolini together.
But the inevitable Workers' Paradise,
the invincible Soviet Socialist State,
has been amputed like an infected limb.
The locomotive of Marxist History,
that once crushed so many lives beneath its wheels,
has run out of steam. No one
wants to throw any coal on that fire.
The rails are obstructed by corpses and bloodshed.

2

I love the way these jeans are designed---
"skinny" is, I think, the American description.
They look great with a button-down white shirt.
I always wear tan nylons with them.
I do not feel fully dressed without my nylons.
American girls, I think, do not very much like
the style of nylons that I wear, because of the
reinforced toes. They tell me this is forbidden
by fashion magazines. Sounds to me like
those fashion magazines are like the
Central Committee of the Communist Party
was. As for my friends and me, we
wear what we want, and what we want right now
are skinny jeans with white button-down shirts,
and tan nylons. We only wear shoes
when weather or surfaces are uncooperative.
Shoes are useful in the way that a random volume
of Lenin's Works makes for a good doorstop.
A certain kind of boy does not look at shoes.
A certain kind of boy does not grope at boobs or butts,
or crotches, or goes off by himself
with a magazine of naked pictures.
A certain kind of boy will pause---
I mean stop still in his steps like a stalled parade---
to look at my, or my friends', unshod
and tanned stockinged feet. Sometimes we
show them off intentionally, and sometimes because
we just really dislike our shoes.
That kind of boy does not make sudden gestures
or lewd suggestions that would be disgusting in private.
So we reward such boys publicly, in all sorts of places,
like the library of our school
or at tea and cookies at the same cafe
that Trotsky used to visit in his grand days
(People's Commisar of War and all that)
before they expelled him from the Party.
Trotsky dead after an ice axe split his skull . . .

3

A certain kind of boy will take a long look.
He will watch me slide my stockinged feet from my flats
(in this library, say), and assume
(correctly) that the nylon makes it easy,
even pleasurable, to come out of my shoes.
I love the feeling of surface beneath my soles
(if the surface is not pavement, or gravel, or stones),
with only the delicate nylon between it
and my flesh. I love to wiggle my toes and flex my feet,
and nylons make them look so good when I do.
A certain kind of boy will approach me gently,
and shyly stammer a long prepared greeting. The small talk
he makes will cover a larger desire,
his abiding desire for my stockinged feet:
to kiss them, to let his mouth taste them;
to cradle them in his hands and caress them.
He will be fascinated by the reinforcements,
by the way the inward edges cross right over
the cleavage of my toes, and how their contour
is traced beneath the opaque weave such that
the whole is greater than any of its five parts, times two,
and he wants to put his wet kisses there . . . right . . . there . . . .

4

A certain kind of boy will walk me through
the library's corridors and carry my books.
He will carry my shoes if I ask him to,
because I do not care to leave them behind.
(They have their uses, after all;

think of an unlevel table leg propped up
by interminable volumes of Stalin's Works.)

A certain kind of boy will do that for me.
He will not just sit at a table across from me.
He will pull his chair around the corner,
and position himself so that I can put
my stockinged feet in his lap, to keep them warm,
and to keep him warm too---that certain kind of boy.
But he will be too shy to imagine
how eager I am to tease him with my stockinged feet,
how I wear my nylons almost as much for him as for me.
He will not imagine that much for himself.
So I will have to show him.
He will be too intent on his own imaginings
to notice that I am breathing a little more rapidly,
that my cheeks are flushed, and a little bit of a shudder
courses through my body. He will not notice that.
He will not yet notice how much I like to have him
near me, how my stockinged feet invite his attention
(they would demand, if he was not attentive).
But his desire will be as sheer as my nylons,
because he is a certain kind of boy.
Nice to study with such a companion, I think.
He will not mind to stay with me until closing.
He will not mind that I like to listen to Bruckner,
much more than Tchaikovsky or Shostakovitch.
I will listen to the symphony
while my stockinged feet dance all over
the face of that kind of boy.
Now, he will wait patiently while I finish the poem I must study:
written by the American capitalist, Wallace Stevens,
(bourgeois if ever one was in the West),
this stern and rotund old capitalist man, who wrote
"So And So Reclining On Her Couch."
When the library is ready to close,
a certain kind of boy will walk me home.
He will walk me back to my apartment, a Moscow flat.
He will not mind when I put my shoes back on, my flats
(even though he will not see my nylons fully,
for two or three blocks), because he knows for sure

that I will take them right back off again, once we get there:

because I like to show off my nylons;

because I like the warm softness of nylons;

because I know how well he is pleased by my nylons---

a certain kind of boy.

Starward

[jlc]