Bananas from Rome once grew menacingly
Behind the Berlin Wall,
The year nineteen eighty something,
Jungles of concrete and steel and panic,
Men were wolves or monks for one another, surrounded
By bananas
On an island encircled
By sparkling red water,
Ich bin ein Berliner,
But in fact, I'm an American Czech who...
Post-Marxism still evolutionist reproduced
Black bananas made of rubber
For post-
Stalinists, the grandsons of dervishes, to beat
Our people with (end of quotation),
Bananaland stuffed with fried sweet potatoes,
The potato is still food, underground sustenance
Sown on the museum fields of Mauthausen, Treblinka.
With potatoes we make chips, with the other hand
In the dark we caress
The tepid belly of the television set, full of Coca Cola,
Chips, not potatoes, are related to bananas,
Chips and bananas and the Coca Cola, too,
All related by marriage
And dowry to Madonna
And first gave birth to dead
Bananas from Rome
Now manufactured together
In the same clump
With black rubber cudgels.

(2002)