I landed in Berlin with a bag of furry mushrooms
and a tube of Russian haemorrhoid cream.
You said, “My uncle Frank, he needs a bit of company,
a comradely ear as his life floats downstream.”
And there he flopped, bald head over paintbrush beard
over hairy nipples over a boulder of flesh
over bruised legs over brandy and milk bottles, plates,
punk records and crutches in an ash-coated mesh.
I waved at him through the gas-chamber air
as he beamed, “Optipessmus, mein Freund! Man muss immer
Optipessmus haben!” and the multiple sclerosis
chained him like a wall had once chained the aging sinner
when he slumped on a slop-bucket in the three-barred light
and the hammer-compassed robot with the sugary grin
sneered, “Good morning, young upstart, my angry but sick beauty!
Spy for us and you can have your insulin.”
He’d smashed his little Wurlitzer while barking through its squeals
about the Schweinehund state, the Maschinenrepublik,
with some hoodlums named “die Firma”, that is to say, “die Stasi”,
who made the punks behind the curtain bounce and thrash and shriek.
When fantasy-dead workers and Soviet incompetence
blew that snaky garden-fence and history to bits,
Mitterrand said, “Frank, come and pogo in my palace,
come, decorate our portraits of King Louis in spit.”
Erika, my dear, you last-droplet-of-a-culture,
with your lollipop memories of a sudden-ending tramline,
your uncle took his final bow, his comrades defected
to the flame-hurling, dildo-waving metal sailors Rammstein,
and there he wilted, telling me his heart was red and star-shaped
but the red star was a flower which had never ever bloomed.
Though God was a cartoon that he would never kill or die for,
God rest him, Socialism, Punk, and all else who are doomed.
