The Painted Prince

“Natural freedom is the only object of the polity of the savages; with this freedom do nature and climate rule alone amongst them.”
—Jean Jacques Rousseau

Pardon my moving your dislocated bones
marked by a mossy stone hidden in some
foggy white sepulcher. This is blasphemy,
disturbing your repose would arouse
the anger of our ancestors, our god Bathala
would send me seven plagues for seven generations,
including seven evenings of pirated poetry.
But I heard your scream echoed in swirling clouds
of purple, blue and incarnadine among the whores
on 7th Avenue, asking for this summoning of your soul,
lost in the edgeless hole, for this singing to recall
your history tucked in shelves among accounts and tomes
on the Wonderful Sights in the Orange Days.
Here, of the Bold Grimace Spaniard, who as a child
was said to have been snatched and nursed
by a beast and could shape his mouth as a bird’s beak,
or his eyes, like an owl’s, and lick his nose with his tongue,
like a cow. There, of the boy from Brazil
with a face so long like a serpent and with which
he feeds himself as an elephant does with its trunk.
Of the Suffolk lad, whose body is covered
all over with bristles like a hedgehog.
Of the Fairy Child, toothless, but was the most
voracious and hungry creature in all of England.
And of your journey, told in a handbill, today’s junk mail,
where off the coast of Mindanao, your boat sank
near the Spice Islands, and the chief of a rival kingdom,
forced your sister to be his concubine
and how you and your mother were sold as slaves
to the buccaneer, William Dampier.
Yours is a tale much more like the storyline
of a Mexican soap called tele-novella in Manila
which makes housewives curse the villains
walking the corridors of power,
who snatch the food meant for children,
and bend the law like a contortionist in a freak show.
It is the pamphleteer’s genius, of course,
at work here, he, the master of the packaged phrase,
the copy charmer who was himself charmed by you,
Prince Giolo, as he branded you in his text
that said your imperial highness is impervious to bites of snakes,

because of the tattoo that covered your body,
the brown archive of your tropic days
which he made an atlas of his imagination,
“where the arctick and antartick merge on your neck,”
and a continent of darkness as you speak “no English.”
John Savage, in his print, also showed you in a pose
reminiscent of the Belvedere Apollo having just let go
of the arrow that slew Phyton at the coast of Delphos.
If this were 1904, you will be at the St. Louis World’s Fair
I’m pretty sure among the dog-eaters.
There is a light that glowed in your torso
as he drew you now a noble salvaged
which changed your life, from the primitive
and welcomed you to their brave new world
where this raree show, this commerce
is the summum bonum of their existence,
their alpha, their omega, yes the sum of it all,
the soma, yo, some muh, and nothin’ muh.

*Title refers to a tattooed Mindanao native who was sold as a slave for the buccaneer William Dampier, and exhibited in London in the seventeenth-century.