Those old communists – the ones in the <br />triumphant revolutionary posters with <br />broad shoulders and eyes on the horizon <br />where the sun is rising on a better world, <br />Those old communists – the ones rolling <br />across the landscape in full revolutionary zeal <br />with bayonets and bullets and little red books, <br />Those old communists with thick glasses <br />and shifty eyes and fingers on the button, those <br />vodka-swilling gulag-operating identity-erasing <br />Sputnik-launching shoe-pounding <br />refusenik-persecuting Hollywood-infiltrating <br />Boris Badenoff-accented black hats, <br />who turned grown western men with microphones <br />into yammering finger-pointing cartoons <br />with word bubbles about standing tall, <br />walking tall, riding tall for our Way-Of-Life, <br />I miss them so. <br /> <br />Sitting on the sofa in our wood-paneled den in the dark <br />with the blue television glow of The Munsters, <br />eating our TV dinners on fold-out trays, <br />we could point to them as a bona fide scourge and pin <br />all our troubles, all our short-circuited dreams on them. <br /> <br />At the end of the spy novel, the mortal enemy <br />boards a bus and vanishes, leaving behind a <br />cottage industry churning out Lenin pins and <br />fur hats with hammer & sickle logos for <br />tourists in Moscow, Bucharest, Sofia, <br />leaving us in the lurch. <br />Who can we blame now - terrorists? <br />We can only blame them for explosions. <br />We could blame the commies for noises in the <br />night, fluoride in the water, Catcher In the Rye. <br />God, I miss those Godless demons.<br /><br />Michael Philips<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/no-more-communists-to-kick-around-anymore/
