Autumn

it was autumn and we planned the revolution. i made the leaflets, we printed them off, but they never got stuck up because every time we said let’s go, it’s time to go out, we crawled back into bed and put on a godard and it was alright, revolution would come. 

we cut collages from old newspapers and revolutionary journals, we pieced them together like scenes from our lives. i know one is still there on your wall the one i was scared to tape on the one where you held me by the waist and said make a decision for once in your damn life how do you expect to raze the mansions to the ground. and it was so easy too, like picking a scab off a scrape or fucking up a good painting with red. 

you never read lenin and at the time i hadn’t read marx, they were old men and we were young and full of grand impossible ideas and we imagined ourselves as philosophers drinking coffee in our own cafe de flore attending opera we could barely afford in jackets smelling of cheap shitty tobacco but that was the proper way you said, only the bourgeoise drink champagne (i saw you try and order dom perignon for me when you thought i wasn’t looking, lost all bravado in the midst of suits and fur collars at the swanked-out, lit-up bar). 

next year we’ll have the revolution, we wrote when autumn was over. next autumn you’ll have read lenin, and i’d have read marx and the leaflets would be up, red and black on white.