making Heberto Padilla eat your speeches You don’t know it’s a froufrou among French intellectual magazines you glance at as vice president of Nicaragua

between wars from North Yanquis and banquets with Pork & Rum after

TV evening news—

You don’t know it

Madame Mandelstam’s thick book’s gossip, Mrs. Evgenia Ginzburg’s

grey prisoners shitting on each other in the hull of the boat

on frozen sea out of Vladivostok going with the million

Card-carrying Party members old Bolshevik friends of Lenin

to the frozen puddles and hungry banks of Kolyma

where skeletons hit each other to keep alive you don’t know it

And they don’t know it, Aksionov Skvorecky Romain Rolland Ehrenburg Fedorenko Markov Yevtushenko—

don’t know midnight Death Squad clubs on cobblestone no

the ears cut off, heads chopped open in Salvador don’t know the million

Guatemala Indians in Model Villages—

Don’t know 40,000 bellies ripped open by the d’Aubuisson hit-men for Born Again neoconservative Texans,

don’t know Yanquis taking tea & 1916 money from the Douane, ex

change for Chinese opium

trading bananas to Europe for Tax Control in Managua & Shanghai—

don’t know the holocaust in Salvador 25 years ago 30,000 shot one week for thinking Left-Pink-triangle yellow-red headband high on peyote

& you don’t know Imagination that leaps like a frog in Communist Monastery Ponds—

Don’t know you confess like a worm turning in a matchbox full of salt

Don’t know Solitary, Lesbian Capo ordering Movie Star Princess to expose her ———

and her delicate pink ——— and her firm round ——— to the false dogs of Ideology Fart Yowp with big pricks Whip Blip Blip Blip—

Bugger it up in Dynamite Don’t know the Marines in your mother’s toilet

No you don’t know it we don’t know it only stupid American minstrels know intolerant gasbags ascending

with millions of Readers’ Digest copies

and photo enlargements of a thumbnail translation of the Moravian Bible

Put in my shirt-pocket in a sweat eyes closing as the enemy approaches

to fall asleep & snore Don’t I know it

January 25, 1986, 2:00–2:12 A.M.

Managua

On the Conduct of the World Seeking Beauty Against Government

Is that the only way we can become like Indians, like Rhinoceri,

like Quartz Crystals, like organic farmers, live what we imagine

Adam & Eve to’ve been, caressing each other with trembling limbs

before the Snake of Revolutionary Sex wrapped itself round

the Tree of Knowledge? What would Roque Dalton joke about lately

teeth chattering like a machine gun as he debated mass tactics

with his Companeros? Necessary to kill the Yanquis with big bomb

Yes but don’t do it by yourself, better consult your mother

to get the Correct Line of Thought, if not consult Rimbaud once he got his leg cut off

or Lenin after his second stroke sending a message thru Mrs. Krupskaya to the rude Georgian, & just before his deathly fit when the

Cheka aides outside

his door looked in coldly assuring him his affairs were in good hands

no need to move—What sickness at the pit of his stomach moved up to his brain?

What thought Khlebnikov on the hungry train exposing his stomach to the sun?

Or Mayakovsky before the bullet hit his brain, what sharp propaganda for action

on the Bureaucratic Battlefield in the Ministry of Collective Agriculture in Ukraine?

What Slogan for Futurist architects or epic hymn for masses of Communist Party Card holders in Futurity

on the conduct of the world seeking beauty against Government?

January 27, 1986

Hard Labor

After midnite, Second Avenue horseradish Beef

at Kiev’s wood tables—

The Kasha Mushrooms tastes good

as Byelorussia usta when my momma

ran away from Cossacks 1905

Did the 5 year plan work? How bad Stalin?

Am I a Stalinist? A Capitalist? A

Bourgeois Stinker? A rotten Red?

No I’m a fairy with purple wings and white halo

translucent as an onion ring in

the transsexual fluorescent light of Kiev

Restaurant after a hard day’s work

February 17, 1986, 12:35 A.M.

Velocity of Money

For Lee Berton

I’m delighted by the velocity of money as it whistles through windows of Lower East Side

Delighted skyscrapers rise grungy apartments fall on 84th Street’s pavement

Delighted this year inflation drives me out on the street

with double digit interest rates in Capitalist worlds

I always was a communist, now we’ll win

as usury makes walls thinner, books thicker & dumber

Usury makes my poetry more valuable

Manuscripts worth their weight in useless gold—

The velocity’s what counts as the National Debt gets trillions higher

Everybody running after the rising dollar

Crowds of joggers down Broadway past City Hall on the way to the Fed

Nobody reads Dostoyevsky books anymore so they’ll have to give passing ear

to my fragmented ravings in between President’s speeches

Nothing’s happening but the collapse of the Economy

so I can go back to sleep till the landlord wins his eviction suit in court

February 18, 1986, 10:00 A.M.

Sphincter

I hope my good old asshole holds out

60 years it’s been mostly OK

Tho in Bolivia a fissure operation

survived the altiplano hospital—

a little blood, no polyps, occasionally

a small hemorrhoid

active, eager, receptive to phallus

coke bottle, candle, carrot

banana & fingers—

Now AIDS makes it shy, but still

eager to serve—

out with the dumps, in with the condom’d

orgasmic friend—