COLD WAR
What if it's 1950, we weren't born yet.
There isn't a Berlin Wall.
Kennedy hasn't been shot.
The American Dream is in full slumber.
What if Rudy Valens's plane hadn't yet crashed,
no Big Bopper, no monuments to James Dean,
or Kerouac toilet papering the road.
What if we'd been around then,
going up in smoke, drag stripping
dangerous curves through the redwoods.
Perhaps our parents were thinking of marriage,
or at least sex, in the back seat of a Ford.
What if we were our parents
watching Leave it to Beaver and I Love Lucy
for the first time around, no reruns.
Everything in black and white.
The Sunday Barbecue.
Cocktails with the neighbors.
The American Dream hasn’t woken up.
No Fifth Amendment. No AIDS.
Homelessness is a third-world concept.
Howl hasn’t
been written. No Suburbacide.
No Kaddish of words for the walls we build.
Instead, we liken kisses to radar missiles
and split atoms, confusing fission with fusion.
It took a Chernobyl to thaw the Cold War.
What if we invented memory
because things seem more real in print.
Especially when they aren't true.
Stigmatas nailed down on paper.
What if this were a thalidomide poem
borne without words?
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