I have a dream of the US embassy of San Juan Puerto Rico

going the way of the Cruz of San Juan,

To smithereens, caught in desert trees,

so as not to taint the sky

or the sea that swells in the sky

 

(for not one leg must be broken

off the starfish that combs a Spanish prostitute’s medusa hair)

 

 

I have a dream of young and old on the Isla de los Monos swimming naked in the sea in the belly-sky,

in kiss of light, all who look up see their bodies, genitals in the greatness of sun-wheel

beauty of their miscegenation                                               behold skyfuls of people who bled myths and legends

from their wounds and anus-holes

 

the Voudu version     of   Michelangelo’s Chapel

Medusa is distracted by the golden spectacle,

freed, the masses choose not human sacrifice as placebo

and move crab-like towards more freedom, criminal wonders without salvator-fish redemptions.

 

I dream an ailing dream

of all dissidents in cubic Cuban walls of sea, freed

the Catholic sages, the innocent castratos under Castro’s iron bicycle of demagoguery, down with the last bearded demagogue

who quotes Spanish poetry

 

Say,

DOWN

WITH THE LAST BEARDED DEMAGOGUE

WHO QUOTES SPANISH POETRY

 

There are worse walls than one

Oppressing by ballad or well-intentioned inefficiency

 

Get lost,

Resurrect good old gangsters like Noriega

Run to the other end of island

Leap,

over saltwater brooks, sleeping sea-monsters—

through  a window see the Muslims in Guantanamo

maybe there are a few Nasruddins and Jews among the jihadis,

bearded and bleeding in the long dark absences of love—

Gog & Magog without demagogues—

***

Arturo Desimone, Arubian-Argentinian writer and visual artist, was born in 1984 on the island Aruba which he inhabited until the age of 22, when he emigrated to the Netherlands. He relocated to Argentina while working on a long fiction project about childhoods, diasporas, islands and religion. Desimone’s articles, poetry and fiction pieces have previously appeared in CounterPunch, Círculo de Poesía (Spanish) Acentos Review, New Orleans Review, in the Latin American views section of OpenDemocracy and he writes a blog about Latin American poetry  for the Drunken Boat poetry review.