i want to speak of unity

— i want to speak of unity that indescribable thing

we have been speaking of since ’67 when I first stepped into LA

with a cardboard box luggage piece I was distracted by you

your dances askew & somersaults the kind you see

at shopping centers

& automobile super sale events — the horns &

bayonets most of all

I wanted to pierce the density the elixirs of everything something

like Max Beckmann did in that restaurant painting of ’37 or ’38

exiled from Germany banned & blazing black jacket —

that everything

in a time of all things in collapse

that embrace that particular set of syllables of a sudden attack

or just a breath of a song

the one I would hear back in the early ’50’s

when I walked the barren earth with my mother & father

the sound

of One when Luz still lived & Felipe still parted the red lands

& no one knew we existed in the fires

the flames that consume all of us

now