Adrienne Rich - History lyrics
[Adrienne Rich - History lyrics]
Should I simplify my life for you?
Don't ask how I began to love men
Don't ask how I began to love women
Remember the forties songs
The slowdance numbers
The small sex-filled gas rationed Chevrolet?
Remember walking in the snow and who was gay?
Cigarette smoke of the movies
Silver-and-gray
Profiles, dreaming of dreams of he-and-she
Breathing the dissolution of the
Wisping silver plume? Dreaming that dream we
Leaned applying lipstick
By the gravestone's mirror when
We found ourselves
Playing in the cemetery in
Current Events she said
The war in Europe is over, the Allies
And she wore no lipstick have won the war
And we raced screaming out of Sixth Period
Dreaming that dream
We had to maze our way through a wood
Where lips were knives breasts
Razors and I hid
In the cage of my mind scribbling
This map stops where it all begins
Into a red-and-black notebook
Remember after the war when peace came down
As plenty for some and they
Said we were saved
In an eternal present and we
Knew the world could end?
-Remember after the war when
Peace rained down
On the winds from Hiroshima
Nagasaki Utah Nevada?
And the socialist queer Christian teacher
Jumps from the hotel window?
And LG saying I want to sleep
With you but not for sex
And the red-and-black embamelled coffee-pot
Dripped slow through the dark grounds
-appetite terror power tenderness
The long kiss in the
Stairwell the switch thrown
On two Jewish Communists married
To each other
The definitive crunch of glass at
The end of the wedding?
(When shall we learn, what should
Be clear as day
We cannot choose what we are free to love?)
Don't ask how I began to love men
Don't ask how I began to love women
Remember the forties songs
The slowdance numbers
The small sex-filled gas rationed Chevrolet?
Remember walking in the snow and who was gay?
Cigarette smoke of the movies
Silver-and-gray
Profiles, dreaming of dreams of he-and-she
Breathing the dissolution of the
Wisping silver plume? Dreaming that dream we
Leaned applying lipstick
By the gravestone's mirror when
We found ourselves
Playing in the cemetery in
Current Events she said
The war in Europe is over, the Allies
And she wore no lipstick have won the war
And we raced screaming out of Sixth Period
Dreaming that dream
We had to maze our way through a wood
Where lips were knives breasts
Razors and I hid
In the cage of my mind scribbling
This map stops where it all begins
Into a red-and-black notebook
Remember after the war when peace came down
As plenty for some and they
Said we were saved
In an eternal present and we
Knew the world could end?
-Remember after the war when
Peace rained down
On the winds from Hiroshima
Nagasaki Utah Nevada?
And the socialist queer Christian teacher
Jumps from the hotel window?
And LG saying I want to sleep
With you but not for sex
And the red-and-black embamelled coffee-pot
Dripped slow through the dark grounds
-appetite terror power tenderness
The long kiss in the
Stairwell the switch thrown
On two Jewish Communists married
To each other
The definitive crunch of glass at
The end of the wedding?
(When shall we learn, what should
Be clear as day
We cannot choose what we are free to love?)