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By Epifanio San Juan Jr.
From the prehistoric furnace of Neanderthal zoos
you, Vladimir, rose from the gun’s snout—
Death’s aqueduct pumped quicksilver into your
head weighing 1,700 grams in the pantheon of the State Institute for
the Study of the Brain where they hoped to revolutionize the psyche
by the non-stop whistling bullet of Dialectical Materialism—
Your torso rocketed beyond the Eiffel Tower
Now your lobster-red tongue spits Pentecostal
vodka agitprops and burns all the ace of spades in Paris
London Tokyo Calvary New York
Gas-masked Rothschilds who exiled burlesque
queens to Tibet dismantled your tough aqualung, your cranium archive
humming like an Early Bird satellite
But neon x-rays from your submarine catacombs
kicked them in the loins—
Your flywheels, your robot chassis crushed
the bedbug millionaires of your era with the savage hurricane
of words—
Your WORDS sizzling with dynamite fuse blasted
Broadway skyscrapers to nuclear stratospheres!
Words shockcircuiting the wires so that
intercoms telegraphs radars could deliver only the news of your
resurrection from the fiery canyons of the Indies—
You unsynchronized the clocks and deified
the Spirit of Changes who ambushed a whore with a golden wig—
while B-52 pterodactyls zoom in from
Vietnam horizons—
ZOOM——
ZOOOOM—
ZOOOOOOOM—-
to unload their leprous century eggs on
Victor Charlie’s washlines
You muse of the belly-dancer’s marathon
performance buried in today’s headlines
On the dockyards of San Francisco Boston New
Orleans etcetera etcetera the tractors bear the bodies of
purgatory bloodhounds from the Kremlin Peking White House for the
Easter Circus in Rome Stockbrokers hoarded broken chips Kama Sutra
Zen Libido LSD for profit tomorrow they will board a Gemini
spaceship to distribute smallpox throughout the galaxies!
Nude beatnik women pin on Lollobrigida
breasts
Playboy tails and stabile maidenheads as
they swarm the Basilica: sexy amazons of the Bikini miracle bursting
Wall Street….
The stripteaser in Hiroshima peels off her
aluminum girdle with the hairy forceps of your drooling eyes—
You who rode the Roaring Twenties with your
jet-powered backbone flute spat wrath’s grapes on Moscow bosses—
What a period of waiting at the end of a
moonstruck leash—
While in Singapore the hunchbacked philistine
with fly unbuttoned committed suicide—what a scandal!
Sirens and high-heeled Valkyries emerged from
proletarian motels and howled orgies of Messianic doom in Manhattan
while
Reverend Malthus entered a massage clinic in
Chinatown and exited a Buddha in grey-flanneled suit— he castrated
all hostesses, Saturn’s denizens, to adjust the geometrical
ratio of copulation versus subsistence….
Cocktails in London produced visions of a
sequoia amid a Sahara of bulldozers tractors shooting galleries
totempoles flashing
SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS SOS
When would ambrosia and ichor ooze from the
pores of prostitutes?
The sexjokes of the world exuded ammonia in
Hilton hotels
Charred porkchops met sagging chins of Spanish
debutantes mixing chamberpots of Bloody Mary Ennui
ennui hissing from a black frying pan chokes the
autumnal cocoon of chandeliers until the Aurora Borealis of your
gunshot switches the moon’s brakes and explodes our glorious
civilization 1967 A.D. hurtling toward the sewers of the crystal
Andes!
And then, midnight, bat semaphores burned behind
manned barricades— comets collided in lavatories—
The Madonna clutched a telegram and you read
cuneiforms sinewy hieroglyphs cut by your shoulderblade razor:
Icarus Grounded But Nature Abhors The Womb’s
Vacuum
And the gang of procurators in the Cold War
tumbled from the pneumatic Rolls Royce of dreams and ordered
the arsenals mobilized because Vladimir the enfant terrible will
guzzle down the Bomb in his python gullet—
For exploiters love Narcissus and all
bureaucrats would rather swallow napalms than switch on the
geraniums of Negro blues before the morgues where whores converged
in the crisis
But too late too late—
the rebellion’s on!
Scimitars nail down the cosmonaut’s
platform for the eclipsed clown Gorki maneuvers unicorn derricks
with his fists to excavate your tomb from underground urinals your
cast-iron stomach augured an Alaskan solstice
Rockdrills Olympic blowtorches alembic
hooks will pry open the airport of your death to release the
charged embassies of love into ozone: the incarnate parakeet of your
sex
Uranium fission from your mouth tattoos
with seatchlights the smile of the sphinx
How many Savior’s agents
Pharisees with trademarks of a thousand
zeros fouled up the traffic in Shanghai and zoomed to Mars—
Sulphurous flames prophesied by Heine
roared from kissing warheads from bellies pleading OK OK OK
The death of Karma has disarmed the United
Nations—
But your body could nowhere be found!
Keynes and his dunces have spirited it
away in sealed freezers in balloons and flying saucers a
sacrifice to the legend of nebulaes
Your arrival puzzled Columbus
He never knew the dialectic of the crab—
He never knew this athlete of idylls
troubador Vladimir prophet by TKO whose ghost will parachute from
the stratosphere his heart impaled on a phallus
All the spires of Chartres would pierce
the lugubrious Sphinx only to know where you are now
But the newspapers quarantined the day of
your coming the annunciation of love the apocalypse of the
Word
Only the bongo drums—rock’n it
rock’n it and rolling—displayed the omens and made sense
of the rot these happenings while your darlings— Maria
Tatiana Lily
(You pushed their marrow with butcher’s
nails) exorcised their navels at Brooklyn Bridge pouring daiquiri on
their erotic scalp as token of your interrogations in their
volcanic beehives
In Manila bars the pimps and matrons
groped for entelechy in the gizzards of a castrated boar after
cursillos and novenas with moth-eaten pendulums swinging above
But your spies knocked on every hollow rib
sounding the scarecrow wires and the rhizome of this wobbling
edifice
And then while the miracle workers of Hollywood
wept butterflies with cybernetic wings sprang toward Antartica
You dropped quietly your Valentine
greetings from the nude Maja’s umbilical cord with the burnt cork
of your spite
You sneaked down the iron firescape
austere le poete maudit ready to grind the meat of your females
in the vise of your coalburnt thighs—
The Control scratched the Sistine plaster with
SOS OK SOS OK SOS OK
The Ziegfield Follies blushed and ripped leeches
from their loins and ordered Molotov cocktails to celebrate
your coming—
The rainbow’s percentage boomed in
Chicago’s pit
Panic!
Comrade bureaucrats began to smuggle the
Arabian Nights through airport eunuchs and syphilitic Magi in the
International Fair signed X on a Big Top ferris wheel while
Brahma’s bulldozer in Pier 7 awaiting Customs clearance dreamed of
Torquemada’s concubine torpedoed orbiting around the thighs
of Genghis Khan and Brancusi swaddled in tinfoil crucified
with vestal mosaic
Plato’s Ideal Forms on a curved space until
the Absolute puked at African voodoos carved by Riemann….
Panic!
The power-saw exhibiting its pushbutton sex to
bankers and financiers from the East witnessed how the ghost
of Marilyn Monroe suffered remorse until she was canonized on
pyramids of Intercontinental ballistic missiles
Your eyes Vladimir are embalmed gas jets
tied to the radiator of your solar plexus roasting the bourgeoisie
and making them vomit disjecta membra from their system—
Smash the wheels of your wrist-watch into
splinters!
Mantle the sundial with the placenta of
the Euphrates!
From mosques spires temples cupolas from
time capsules for sale in supermarkets from test tubes septic tanks
saints with hydraulic portfolios came to pump the flood out of the
Quiapo underpass where the black Nazarene submerged himself
during the 1966 Summit Conference
But the camera fails to register these
happenings
Dice of electrons run amok in your
brain’s reservoir
Vladimir and uproot oases until the
panting deer
Christ-Self’s surrogate is devoured by
gnomes and ourang-outangs from the extreme unction of your
epic verses
Blasting the aquariums of this world
your iron voice
Vladimir will release the turbulent
Atlantic with this deluge and give our love the winged Leviathan of
your death!
[Cambridge, Mass., USA 1965—Diliman, Quezon
City, Philippines, 1967]
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