No More Communists To Kick Around Anymore Poem by Michael Philips

Those old communists – the ones in the
triumphant revolutionary posters with
broad shoulders and eyes on the horizon
where the sun is rising on a better world,
Those old communists – the ones rolling
across the landscape in full revolutionary zeal
with bayonets and bullets and little red books,
Those old communists with thick glasses
and shifty eyes and fingers on the button, those
vodka-swilling gulag-operating identity-erasing
Sputnik-launching shoe-pounding
refusenik-persecuting Hollywood-infiltrating
Boris Badenoff-accented black hats,
who turned grown western men with microphones
into yammering finger-pointing cartoons
with word bubbles about standing tall,
walking tall, riding tall for our Way-Of-Life,
I miss them so.

Sitting on the sofa in our wood-paneled den in the dark
with the blue television glow of The Munsters,
eating our TV dinners on fold-out trays,
we could point to them as a bona fide scourge and pin
all our troubles, all our short-circuited dreams on them.

At the end of the spy novel, the mortal enemy
boards a bus and vanishes, leaving behind a
cottage industry churning out Lenin pins and
fur hats with hammer & sickle logos for
tourists in Moscow, Bucharest, Sofia,
leaving us in the lurch.
Who can we blame now - terrorists?
We can only blame them for explosions.
We could blame the commies for noises in the
night, fluoride in the water, Catcher In the Rye.
God, I miss those Godless demons.