Trotsky in Mexico

      "Pure squares of Mexican sky ease my exile;
      reviewing my post-dated Pravda like a parishioner
      fallen from St. Peter's gilded grace, the dome of Rome
      and NVD network that kept my clockwork ideologies
5     alert and au courant, I watch my clear marguerita evaporate
      in its harsh dawn of salt. My eyes feel blooded
      in their stark haloes of grey hair. I grow old, I grow old,
      the Party moults me in the general slough.... I'm sent
      here among the cacti for my pasturage, 
10    a missionary without a church or holy relic beneath my skirt!
      Lenin's parboiled skull would make a nice knick-knack;
      thumbing my wry digits between his teeth for a tongue,
      I'd make him say: suffering is salvation, for the mass...
      I stagger from my white beachchair sober and appalled,
15    Stalin with his ice-cream suit and dictatorial lunge
      scattering the pieces...! I read in bad prose
      of how he'll mechanize the Worker's Paradise,
      assembly-lining cool cubes of sweatless swimming pools,
      rototilling sweet compassion under, the hard clasped hand,---
20    Communism's true gen. The horizon's sere
      with unswallowed bile, baked brown. I falter;
      at my turned back a brother communist, Juan Love,
      undoes my brain with a pick or shovel."

 

From the collection "Contemporaries"

Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]

More information available on gregglory.com.