Thirteen Mexicans

One

Celebrate how Europeans stepped off every wood line,

sea line, mountain ridge, and valley line and fenced

them as their own

celebrate how Los Indios waved with children in their arms

and how the captain shot them

celebrate the treaty of peace Europeans signed

only to rise at midnight and slaughter the sleeping warriors

celebrate how pioneers stripped thousand-year-old forests

to build Philadelphia and Boston

how they excluded Indios from fishing the streams

and how water flowed into slave plantations

and fields of the wealthy.

Celebrate how Columbus wondered at the clean waters

and air and fowl

and animals their hungers would feast on

celebrate the land subdivided for exclusive estates

and how millions of human beings became landless and infected

and were slaughtered

how centuries of deep coexistence with Mother Earth

was scoffed at and smudged out in the ashes and bullets and

swords of Europeans

let us celebrate the town meetings to hang Indios

let us celebrate the political decisions to exile Indios from

Turtle Island

let us celebrate Columbus’s arrival and how all the Holy

Names were changed to accommodate the thick ox

tongue of muttering English and Spanish ones

let us celebrate how all the paintings depicted Indios as

savages killing and drinking the blood of blond-haired children

celebrate the development of banks on hunting grounds

and carriages gilded and silked bearing pompous Englishmen

through crisp streets and Spanish women wearing safari jackets,

setting up their easels beside fishing streams

to paint their Georgetown mansions

celebrate how death was entertainment and

holy relics of feathers and drums and talismans became table

decor and circus spectacles

celebrate chained and guarded houses for open meadow

tepees

celebrate the beaver gloves and hats

performance stables with horses with braided manes

and Indio scalps and skin nailed to barn rafters

celebrate the unspeakable crimes of lawyers

drafting laws to rob ancestral lands

celebrate all their accountants sore-eyed at midnight

under reading lamps tirelessly counting endless stacks of criminal

money

celebrate the landscaped European gardens

God in every bush an Indio pruned

God in every glint of sterling dinnerware an Indio polished

God in every sheet an Indio washed

celebrate the spirit broken and the body abused beyond

recognition

let si señor slurp off our tongues to the patronizing bullshit

let us smile at the pitying glances

let us celebrate the rape of our women

let us be devoured by their contempt

let us saintfully give ourselves to the mob to be burned

and hanged

let us wear yokes around our necks

let us parade all the imprisoned and drive carts heaped

with all the dead

birds through Washington

let us compose elaborate symphonies and marching bands through Virginia’s tobacco fields with thousands of slaves

let us stand at the shores of every ocean and lake and stream and sing the glory of killing and murder beyond comprehension.

Come, let us celebrate the churches that accused us of

being devils

celebrate the burning of our sweat lodges and eagle and

herbal medicines

celebrate all the lies in books how we were heathens

with no songs

or culture

celebrate the empty mountains and valleys

celebrate how the once hip-high grass of the plains

is now ankle-high crusty scrub owned by millionaire cattlemen

celebrate that America has not acknowledged the terrible

crimes

of having done what we accuse it of

celebrate the pardon of white-collar thieves and murderers

by presidents,

not by society, God, or me

celebrate the devastating willful tragedy

the willfulness of racists decrying no racism

the willfulness of torturers decrying no violence

the willfulness of supporters of the Quincentennial

decrying it was all roses and blessings. . . .

Let us celebrate the frontier adventurer

marauding Mexican families and taking their homes

celebrate the courageous Daniel Boone trapper

purposely betraying and lying

celebrate the gluttons who triumphed

through treachery and murder in broad daylight, destroying all

who were different

celebrate the portrayals of God’s chosen people

as a people who never harmed an ant

celebrate in Santa Fe the pure-blood Spanish romantic idea

that they were heroes

celebrate the madness of historical oppression in San Antonio

with reigning queens and mariachi music and mayoral speeches

celebrate in Los Angeles the agony of millions

with confetti and whoopla fanfare and awards to Hispanics

with foundations giving millions to create parades in hundreds of

cities

let us celebrate our own death and oppression

let us take solemn vows that nothing bad ever happened

that Columbus brought only enlightenment and baptized us

and we became God’s innocent children

let us believe there was no sorrow

let us commemorate the hate and contempt they brought

for us

let us celebrate their scorn

let us celebrate this play written in grants and announced

in every city

how they loved us and let us live peacefully on our lands

how act after act and scene after scene

depicts them sharing their food and songs with us

how not one of us ever has encountered their vengeance

how Columbus brought in scene I flowers and love from

Europe

how scene 2 tells how his men humbled themselves in

our homes

and respected us

how scene 3 shows pure friendship and no hate or fear

portrays how they cared for us and how life was filled with joy

let us celebrate this with despair in our hearts

and blindfolds over our eyes

celebrate the denial of Indio slaves to the highest bidder

celebrate how we were leered at and spit at in every town

celebrate how we starved and how our children became

silent

celebrate our infant mortality rate and alcoholism and

drug addiction

celebrate the despair and unremitting depression of our people

celebrate how everyone agrees with everyone

celebrate how we grieve

and celebrate each sharp sword tip stained with our blood

celebrate each pencil and ink quill filled with lies

celebrate doors closed to us from fear

and celebrate the glassy blue eyes that stare at us

celebrate each dagger that plunged into trusting brothers’

and sisters’ hearts

celebrate the false piety and false modesty of investors

who thrive on our sadness and love

celebrate this long bloody genocide with bottles of

Coors beer and Gallo wines

and quench the thirsty throats of racketeers

so they may have strength to fill every American street dancing

over our bones.

Let us celebrate the Quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival

and not taste the bitterness

not recognize their insatiable appetite for more blood, more land,

more money, more power.

Let us rise in every quarter of the country on platforms

and give testimonials on how we must hate ourselves

and how we must teach our children to be ashamed of their past

let us teach ourselves to forget our drums and songs

and stand in every classroom to praise the Star-Spangled Banner

let us kiss bullets that bring peace to us

let us love our poverty and be fearful of speaking our

native language

in public

let us bear our pain in silence and bow before the perpetrators

let us call rabble-rousers those who dare to speak up

let us turn our heads from each other and try to be white

Americans

let us kill each other drunkenly and drip with blood

let us give our homes to banks and bail bondsmen

let us christen ourselves and humbly accept our rulers’ divine law

let us pray we remain cowards with no honor

let us forget this poem and walk out tonight

leaving our children without father or mother or home or history

or culture

and celebrate Columbus’s arrival.

Two

Why not erect a statue of a mestizo Chicano poet

who doesn’t deny his Spanish or Native American ancestry

but builds on both? Let there be poems

of Tonantzin, Great Mother Earth,

celebrating how they’ve nurtured us, cared for us,

loved us, and keep mothering us

with their great blessings.

Get this guy on his horse

the hell out of here,

bolt the statue down in front

of national Viagra headquarters

where the hard-on is all that counts,

or maybe he can be a mascot

for WWF,

World Wrestling Federation,

because if you want recommendations

for people who’ve honored

both Spanish and Indio spirits,

try Pablo Neruda; the villagers at Analco,

the first mestizo village;

try Jimenez, Lorca, or Hernandez.

* * *

Bring those who’ve given their hearts

to the people out in public,

instead of this conquistador

rampaging through Burque—

shortly put, my brothers and sisters,

find a hero that symbolizes

peace and compassion and unity among us

not some metal-encased power-mongering

hustler who didn’t get his way

and, pouting, started cutting off hands and feet

because the brat couldn’t always win the game.

Well, the rules have changed

for all your suited/skirted purebloods on both sides.

It’s time to get real and realize

Mother Earth and La Virgen de Guadalupe,

the sun, the moon, the mountains,

the water, the winds, the air, our elders,

our mothers and fathers, our children,

are the true explorers,

the true discoverers,

the true heroes and heroines.

Got it?

Three

Driving home last night, I thought about

the lecture from a famous poet in Utah—writing poems for language only,

splicing the hot wires of language, to reconnect them

for more wattage to run the poem. The booklet I picked up at

the desk,

written by an esteemed academic, gave praise to these poets,

set on stripping the word like a broken-down computer,

programming the poem until it was pale, bland erudite language

used only by a chosen few.

I don’t understand this type of poem,

ticker-tape verbiage celebrating one poet’s achievement

in rounding the cape of verb, claiming a new discovered land,

pillaging and ransacking the meanings,

until the victor poet rides through the university hallways.

Poetry goes much deeper than this. In the dark of the freeway,

in my beat-up Volkswagen, I think words

are important to a poor man, who has to survive in other ways

than studying from 8 A.M. to 6 P.M.

in the cozy corner of a library. Words for me rise

like the pope’s hands on Easter Sunday. They carry

importance, like the first pink rose blossom that unfolds

after the winter. Each word has a wound in it,

the nail wound of someone hammering it up

on their own cross of meaning. I try to relive the making

of the wound, relive what made the word cry out

in pain, the scene, the voice that spoke it,

and I gradually take the word back

to a place when it could make miracles happen,

and here in my small cold office, it rises from the dead

tomb of academic text, naked,

and I clothe it, as it walks out into the world

to feed the hungry

with the meaning of a small brown sparrow on a branch.

Four

So many loose ends I feel like a kitten caught in a yarn shop with all the shelves toppling and balls of yarn entangling my limbs inextricably.

About race. I have various stances on that. First, you’re talking to a homeboy who grew up in institutions most of his life. In my village there were no black folks. In the orphanage I met Allen Flood, a cool dude who tightened up as buddy with us. Later, how-ever, after the orphanage, I happened on him in the same ‘hood and he was a stone cold junkie. Didn’t matter though, we loved him. What little balogna and Rainbow bread we had we shared with him, Spam and welfare cheese blocks too. Then he went to prison and vanished from the landscape.

I went to Lincoln. The majority of the students were black, and us Chicanos and them blacks fought all the time. We were like pit bulls straining at the chains to get at each other and for no other reason than we were bored and enjoyed the clashes. They were blood rituals for poor boys growing up. Try to kill each other off, like the colonist inculcated in us. Save them custard eaters (it’s what Indios called the white man) the effort of getting off their porch rockers—we did it ourselves to each other: our ghetto-barrio teatime hour.

Undertakers, car-parts stores, drive-up liquor windows, dealers, and drive-bys dominate the barrio. Cemeteries and funeral homes languish in luxurious shade trees and gleaming limos and we all dream one day of homesteading on a grave or vacuuming gut out of corpses for the thrill of riding in a limo.

Somewhere in the chaos, roaming the streets, Quincy became my friend and he took me home. His father Otis let me live in the house. I fell in love with Quincy’s sisters, curved and sensuous, bathing in a big washtub in the living room, I left the room when they bathed. Nighttime I became the best damn chicken rustler this side of the Rio Grande.

Jail and prison fostered horrible racism. I never indulged, in fact, and on numerous occasions broke up fights because blacks and whites were my friends and I ended up doing thirty in the hole, if you dig that.

Whites wouldn’t hang with blacks and blacks kept away from whites. Taboo voodoo.

I had some gorgeous black women as girlfriends. I regret I had to move on. In South Carolina I got jumped by a bunch of axwielding crackers because I was with my babe. Other times KKK threw some ass-wipe rag of a newsletter in my yard predicting my demise. I could, however, shoot for the whites of eyes as good as any bowlegged Kentucky hick and I wasn’t too bothered by the milkjug white-liquor-toting intimidation.

I pain more at the Appalachia twang of a rusty violin string than the white-knuckled trigger click.

I grew up in the midst of socially sanctioned racism, brute, bloody, blade-dripping, barrel-smoking racism. In the twenties, wanna-be yahoo cowboys roped and strung up my people from Wyoming to Chihuahua. The dawn was pretzled with snapped necks and lifeless limbs.

While scholars and academics from prestigious universities write endless volumes about the slavery days, I wonder why they overlook the slavery prevalent today with my people. Millions of us survive in cardboard shacks in squalid camps without drinking water or even the most basic human facilities. No school. No medicine. We’re paid a buck an hour. We’re chased off the field before we get paid. We die from pesticide poisoning. We drink ourselves to death. We screech and gasp and die from sunstroke.

Babies are born with two fingers, no spine, two heads, and the growers and agricultural monsters spend millions on political games to scam as much as they can from us.

And I wonder why on the one-hour black TV shows where the pundits levy their grave opinions on the state of the nation, when they spew blustery brain-breakers, when Washington panels are chaired by only blacks, what the fuck happened to us? Why should the blacks speak just for themselves and be considered the only minority living in America? Shit, before any black stepped foot on the beach we’d been here hundreds of years.

What the fuck’s that trip about?

What’s with the black/white issue?

Why were we warehoused with the barest nod to civil rights; why weren’t we even given water for the infants; why didn’t any news reporter look around; why do personality wizards on TV accept the secondhand opinion of blacks speaking for us, when those blacks have never stepped into a Chicano’s house and broken tortilla?

Why, if I am as native to this land as the minerals in the soil, do I still not exist? Why am I invisible? Why am I looked upon as a threat? Why do people see me as lazy when I die working, when my ancestors were slaughtered and genocide was the tune of the times, why can’t I speak my language without duress from others, why must my culture be reduced to sombreros and castanets, why must I be stopped and checked for a citizenship card when I should be asking others? Why must I despair and fall prey to doomsday depression and be sucked up by drugs and whiskey and die in the gutter mumbling in my own language a prayer to Tonantzin, the earth goddess.

That’s why there are angels; they help me carry the load of such oppressive doings.

That’s why there are prayers; I pray a lot.

Seems every time a good man comes by, you hold out a biscuit-bill and that good man prances like some crystal-headed poodle on two hind legs dancing on the Jay Leno show to the applause of people who don’t give a smelly billy goat’s ass where this country goes; as long as they can turn the Wheel of Fortune, man, heaven has been attained.

I deplore racism. I don’t even know what the word means. I know what pain is, what death is, what a beating is at the hands of goon squads with lead-filled batons whacking bones, but the word racism is almost a joke these days. People wearing Gucci shoes speak about walking barefoot over glass shards and hot coals; the closest they’ve come to experiencing bowel-singed and battery-cabled testicles and split faces and broken arms is glancing at the calendar dates that commemorate Martin Luther King’s march to Selma.

That’s like the billionaire lady who gives a fruit basket once a year at Christmas to fulfill her obligation to the starving children.

I don’t know what racism is.

I know what it feels like, how it burns, how it bleeds, how it cries, how it lies sleepless night after night, how it cannot pay bills, how it cannot go to good schools, how it sleeps under project stairwells, how it sells drugs to alleviate the hopeless, how it manipulates brother against brother and sister against sister, how it burns justice with the yard weeds, how it scoffs at poverty, how it fucks the Statue of Liberty, who lifts her dress for every racist entering the country and gives it up, ass and all. I know that racism.

But not the racism these suckers chitchat over on TV Sunday morning. Not the racism that some assimilated lobotomized puppets mimic in newspaper columns but the racism that steals life and breath from children, that bludgeons the man stooping in row fields, that rapes the mother’s dream and breeds nightmare maggots in the virgin’s womb.

Racism ferments in the fat man who lives on Mommy’s money, in the fat man who desires to destroy all who disagree with him, in the fat man who backslaps and guffaws at a table with black folks and then later brags to others how he so thoroughly and sincerely understands the plight of the disadvantaged. In the fat man whose money is the ticket for his entry into people’s graces, racism ferments in his gully gut like tadpoles in a stale pool of drainage water and infects our digestive tracts.

Where racism thrives you will find no men, none who have lived life, who have earned their money, who sleep well. Racism is nourished on fear, wrapped in unassuming good-natured birthday bow-tie philanthropy, creased with jowly good-fella smiles. It cools our rage at our cancerous failures like a bleak nuclear wind; it appears at the courthouse, the jail, the counselor’s office, and the teacher’s room cloaked in Samaritan goodwill, exhaling its toxic evil into our nostrils.

We succumb to it, turn on our own and accept, appeal to the racists, and get that nice juicy kissable paycheck that not only pays bills but doubles as a weapon against those who are not racists.

Conversion is business as usual. Get one spoiled apple in a barrel and in time others get the rot, blemish, bruise; the pulp of character oozes venomous sap that WASPS find savory.

I have a lot of fine white people I love; I know browns and blacks and Indians who preach virulent racism. Racism is about privilege, undeserved and unearned authority, tyrannical power, wealth amassed corruptly, sniveling lace-handkerchief judges smacking their parched lips, impatiently clocking the minutes before they can leave for the country-club cocktail hour.

Five

Wind chill factor 11 below. All night

wind has been fighting bare-chested trees

like a West Texas tent evangelist

hissing sin . . . sin . . . sin . . .

fist-cuffing nail-loose

tin

that intercoms between gates clanking

in the courtyard

and horses neighing in a field.

Storm-wrecked black ships

of clouds drift in

from the South

and crush their hulls on rooftops.

Tonight the atmosphere is thick with dread.

Tonight our fact-file lives

topple like statuary fragments.

A few miles north of here,

beyond the Juarez—El Paso border

nightscopes pick up human heat

that greens the fuzz helicopter

dash panels.

A mother whispers,

“Shh, mejito, nomas poco mas alla.”

Dunes of playing dead people

jackrabbit under strobe lights

and the cutting whack/blades,

“Shh, mejito” to her child

staggering in blinding dust

and gnashing wind.

Those who are not caught

will scratch sand up

and sleep against the warm

underbellies

of roots and stones.

There is a fog that rolls over,

obscuring the easy path to take.

I am on a pathless course—

my thoughts, feelings, dreams,

at any given time

are glass chimes in the wind.

How I hate border towns!

Cloaked men in doorways

raffle off children to bidders

from Los Angeles and Miami:

the smells of sewage and tropical mildew,

the cries of fruit-cart vendors,

the traffic shrieks.

There is a building where refugees sleep.

Three-story structure, fronted with decaying columns

and fluted mold. Hundreds of refugees

peek out from blankets, suspicious. I step over

rolled-up sleeping men, coughing children,

women nursing babes. Room after room

is filled with sickly, thin people. I think

of wounded soldiers back from the front. The people

catch stagnant water dripping from ceiling pipes

in their mouths. The children pick and eat

chipped stucco from walls, their fingers scabbed

from scratching off their meals. Coyotes

come to lead groups across the border. Others

wait their turn, building a fire from street scraps.

In the flame’s fringe, their faces are gray and ashen.

They weave tales of horror

in Guatemala

Dominican Republic

Uruguay

Brazil

Puerto Rico

Argentina

America

and Mexico.

Their language is filled

with words of

Intelligence Center

Customs Service

Death Squads

Immigration and Naturalization

Courts

Prisons.

At suppertime

my daughter and wife

bring them pots

of cabbage and beans.

I hear their stories and we are no different.

They tell of clumps of snow on field posts,

how ice furs the rumps of horses,

how they themselves once exhaled

the vigorous icy air of mountains, long ago,

in another world, when the full moon rose

above pine trees and lit their faces,

as the flames do now.

Six

I know little about the ferocious fire

and ocean heft of steel and molten red masses

that blisters and ashens the air

calluses the hands and burns one’s cheeks

and I know even less

how steel is molded and prefabbed

cools and hardens

or how it is transported

by sixteen-wheel Macks

hoisted by cranes and bolted down

to create cities

bridges

buildings

streetlights.

All of this is a mystery—

but there is something very human

and suffused with the splendor

of the human soul

when I think how delicate

tiny screws and wheels for watch workings

and tonnage of tank armor

and how so much of the world is clad in steel

from computer fibers

to satellites orbiting the earth.

But what I want to say—

trying to get at the miracle

of a steelworker’s heart—

is how days have been so hard

that his tears have fallen

like molten steel-bead shavings from a welder’s torch,

how he’s carried his family through rough times

like a bridge kept intact during an earthquake,

how there’s something that smells and tastes like steel

in his heart,

this connection

to earth matter

to mined minerals

is the ancient occupation

practiced thousands of years ago

by those who hammered plowshares and swords,

horseshoes and coins,

taming the metal

silvering our bodies with ornaments

to the stature of gods

with steel that endures freezing and fire,

wrenched from ice and granite

and processed into a pickup or fork—

and few occupations can claim

engagement with such a mythical mineral

that we might thrive

in the seasons of a lifetime.

Seven

The ticket was paid

to the life I enjoy

by the many relations who came before me:

sheepherders, miners, steelworkers, field-workers,

carpenters, ranchers, janitors, maids—

commonsense folks,

devout Catholics,

dressed and washed and working at sunrise

quitting when they could no longer see their hands

around the shovel handle, each

with a dream nourished

with laughter, raked soil soft around the roots,

until the next generation cut a branch

and made a bow and arrow,

the next made shoes and baskets of its bark,

chiseled and scraped saplings to fiber for rope,

made canoes, knives, kept the fire lit,

shared songs and stories,

ignored calluses, aches, wounds,

believed in light as a god, spring as a woman,

rarely had money,

kept food on the woodstove simmering for hungry visitors,

kept their word,

kept their clothes mended and wore them

until blue cloth turned white and shiny buttons glossed dull,

tool handles grooved with grip:

Mexicans and Native Americans,

every day carrying their lunch box to work,

ensured one day I’d have a book to read,

I’d be free to walk down a street

without police harassment,

without being prosecuted for the color of my skin

or my culture,

not be mocked or ridiculed,

all paid for by my relations

before me,

riding pickup beds to the fields,

sweating with a short hoe in the rows,

dreaming one day their children’s children,

the ones who did not die prematurely at birth

or from slave work,

would have freedom to express their beauty.

Eight

When Father’s ring

was passed down to me, I slipped it over my finger—

turquoise stone bordered by silver.

I was now conscious of my hand. At stoplights,

or waiting for a friend in a café, or off writing by

myself, I studied the landscape of the ring:

The center of the stone ridged with an arroyo,

and white waving lines as if autumn geese

flew in the blue stone.

I thought of the turquoise mines near Magdalena,

and the squat bronzed-face Apache Mejicano miner

who picked the stone. And the mountain that had formed

the stone into a blue raindrop

during the rains of universal beginning,

when all things were given faces and voices,

shaping the ring

into an epic:

clanks of iron cars’ wheels, picks and shovels

clanged against rocks, I heard

hidden within the stone

passed down generation

to generation.

Nine

Maria’s husband

vanished from the face of the earth.

How would you feel

if you woke up and your family was gone,

never a letter, a call,

and no matter who you asked, they would blush with timidity,

frightened,

that a human being

can vanish

into nothing.

Where are the graves?

Or do they employ

body-shredding machines, and toss mashed bone and flesh

into the sea?

Outside your house now

snow and ice break branches

that dangle from electric lines.

If the line broke,

if the city disappeared,

if all people were gone

from the face of the earth

when you woke up,

how would you feel?

How does it feel for a man

to be alone

inside a torture chamber,

knowing within hours he will die and never

say goodbye to wife and children?

These are people who speak the same language I do,

who have children I have,

who work the earth as I do,

who enjoy the pleasure of making love

and biting into an apple.

No books to explain such cruelty,

no words to speak the unspeakable

silence that fills me with

horror.

I feel a cold from all the unexplained deaths,

all the Disappeared.

Their silence grows and grows

as the stack of bones buried in secret graves

bullets worm.

Here each mother’s womb

is a rock carried beneath the belly,

and each man’s eye a damp cellar

where thieves sleep.

Each tongue is a bleeding stub.

Each finger on a trigger

is a coffin nail,

as the black hearse of grief

drives into each breast.

Ten

Having a family changes things.

Years ago in Taos, Andre from Transylvania

via New Orleans

boasted he could outdrink me

and we bought a quart of vodka for him,

mescal for me; then we went to the local

radio station for an interview:

halfway through on air

he drooled saliva and bubbled on the mike,

whispering could I score some weed

or something to sober him up—

and in Chicano slang

so our host could not understand

I announced if anyone listening had weed

coke or buttons

to meet us in the parking lot;

afterward

poetry lovers greeted us

offering booze and drugs, and

with an impromptu tailgate and on Chevy hoods

we partied

clinked bottles, swigged, and chugged

until someone shouldered Andre away

limp as an empty gunnysack

and I saluted his courage by toasting

from his half-finished bottle

my victory.

Having a family changed all that—

I can’t party like I used to.

I take Marisol to her Little League games, the batting cage

where she smacks over a hundred pitches,

take my daily vitamins

blend fruits for a smoothie,

garlic and fiber every meal,

I run five miles a day, swim, bicycle, and shoot pool,

pay auto insurance and mortgage—

but while I run

I wooze into reveries

when during Mother’s Day in Santa Fe

I was invited to read

and the old ones to the left were chattering away,

middle-aged men in the center of the square

discussing racehorses, and the young to my right

were flirting and giggling and applying mascara,

when all of a sudden I cried out Muthafuckas!

and every able-bodied man in the crowd

came after me. I whispered to Laura,

Get the car and pull it around in back, quick!

and just before they leaped onstage

to pummel us with tortilla rollers, Victorio and I

leaped through the Volvo windows and sped away;

cans and rocks and sticks flying at our car,

we escaped to recite another poem.

But having a family changes things:

you risk less and spontaneity is replaced

with planning.

No longer does all my money go on a single poker hand

in a Dallas hotel room—

and to sweeten the deal I toss in the truck title—

nor do I stay up as I did for weeks with friends

drinking Chinaco tequila and sotol

with bandits and outlaws on the run from ATS and FBI,

nor do I puke in the mayor’s lap when he’s talking about how he

understands poetry,

nor whiz the cylinder on a .45,

click the trigger back playing who’s chicken,

Having a family changes all that.

I enjoy waking early to greet the sun and recite my prayers

and give thanks for being alive.

I drive my older girl to Sandia Peak

for an all-day grueling 16.5-mile race up the mountain and back down

cheerleading her

absolutely ecstatic when she places fourth among three hundred competitors,

sweaty, exhausted, mud-grogged, almost passing out

she wavers across the finish-line banner,

where I bear-hug her, pat her back, and head to the grill

for burgers and lemonade:

such family joys high-water

foamy white-caps my journey

with island tides of innocence,

filling the trail of father’s footprints in moist sand

with wild lashings of wave-laughters and tears

pains and joys of being the man they follow

not to get lost

as I got lost,

tempted by bad-boy wanderlust.

I smuggled guns across the border and sold them to bandits,

hijacked tractor-trailers loaded with freshly auctioned tobacco le

and sold it in Georgia,

or sitting around King Louie’s round table,

days into weeks we snorted, smoked, and drank

our dreams, turning into a moldy and dreary roadside carcass kill

we carried on our backs,

scoffing at professors with their departmental sheaves

of bemused mouse droppings of poems.

Because we gypsies of the night didn’t hold back,

we cried out poems,

gave birthing groans and spilled blood and wept and

roared with all the glory and fire of volcanoes

erupting and destroying villages,

leaving our own bones as fossils in the ash;

we grinned with contempt at literary corpses in cultural suits

whose domestic poems were tame as Halloween masks,

whose hands begged for attention

from soul-throttling English departments,

but around the table if such a poem dared be spoken

we’d drive the fraud out

as Jesus did the moneylenders from the temple;

we despised those who stole from others

calling it their own, trumped swollen frogs in the toxic pond

of their ambition,

they cackadoodle-do’d poems we knew were stolen

from street-corner poets or poets who had lent them

their manuscripts to read,

and paraded themselves with all the peacock fluff and pomp

of asses braying out the wrong end

after eating too many beans.

But having a family

rounds the sharp edge of your opinion

and we listened to the stolen poetry

and read the interviews acclaiming them

the “greatest” or “masters” or “cultural godfather”

and the rest of the cliché’d cud-spit,

slimy alfalfa wads that drooled the pages

of Sunday art sections.

Having a family changes your temperament.

You become more tolerant

of bad poems and poetry thieves and self-proclaimed “masters,”

conscious more of bills

than academic bile,

more attentive to stool worms in dog shit

than the book editor’s parochial crap

spoiling your first cup of morning coffee

with his politically correct views,

so pure and saintly

it doesn’t smell

and you all know—

when you’ve changed enough diapers

you learn—

certain laws of nature just don’t change.

But having a family changes things.

I couldn’t just pluck out of a hat

what direction I’d take or what I might do,

I had to be there for the crying and screaming and kisses and hugs

revving poems on the page that could take the turns

I was taking;

no more bouncing on off-road trails across the prairie

for a shortcut to a place I was already days late in getting to;

no more lunches in avant-garde cafés in the Village

with a hundred different versions of lattes;

instead I spun spaghetti in the pot

so it wouldn’t stick, and spooned

in sauce, and ladled out steaming heaps on plates.

Proud of small accomplishments,

like throwing a ball or swimming with my child,

achievements that have no rival

and need no plaque, banquet, or medal—

having a family safe and healthy

lets me sleep good at night,

dream deep

about new dishes I want to cook

sure to keep salt and pepper shakers full

have ample sugar and cereal.

You learn the joys of gardening,

smile when you enter the bathroom

and see a book about magic tricks

lying on the floor by the toilet,

and while sitting in the Ferris-wheel chair,

telling your daughter not to swing it,

you see why you couldn’t win a bear

looking down at the basketball goal—

it’s oval—and decide to try

the booth with the BB gun and paper red star—

softballs tossed into the wicker fruit baskets wouldn’t stay.

These things matter when you have a family.

Eleven

So many times have I encouraged death into the arena of my day

to confront it proudly,

when my Harley veered in the rain at 80 miles an hour

and in front of me a stalled car welcomed my death,

when pistols were put to my head because I refused

to obey the policeman,

when thugs in Dallas armed with sawed-off shotguns

blasted away at me,

these were but minor skirmishes

compared to the day-to-day trials I face

as a father, as a man committing myself to friends,

sometimes wallowing in self-pity,

sometimes fearful of getting out of bed,

sometimes looking out on the world I feel such despair,

I thank You for allowing me to survive those moments

I think will never end.

And I go on to praise the woman who continues

her struggle to love life despite its horrid headlines,

I praise the man who would be a racist and is not,

the one who could cheat and decides to be fair,

the one who opens his arms to you at the door

and welcomes you in for a hot meal.

The open hearts of this miraculous land.

they are the true poets and the true warriors,

they are the ones whose hearts and souls

keep this world safe from all innocence being destroyed,

and to all of you, there is a little boy

in my soul who has never given up dreaming for a better world,

and to you from his soft lips,

from his heart so entrenched in the eagle’s flight

how he commemorates your common lives

with so much depth that all the violins in the world

tune themselves and all who own them

exit doors and can’t you see them

in Italian cobblestone squares,

in New York lofts, Albuquerque barrios, and Oklahoma tribes,

in Idaho fields,

in Mexican villages, each note a beautiful voice, soft as Vermont maple syrup,

sweet as Whitney Houston’s

singing, Blessed are you, blessed are you

who continue to believe in peace, in forgiveness, in hope,

blessed are your hands that offer help to the helpless,

your eyes that refuse to turn away from injustice,

your voices that continue to refuse to sell your heart,

your bodies that rise with aches and pains and exhaustion

to face yet another day on the journey that defines us as human

beings.

Blessed are all of you:

blessed is your path sprinkled with children’s laughter

and the elderly’s whispers,

even while your feet blister and your hands numb from work,

your daily lives sing softly of illustrious joys.

Twelve

I walked through the garden this morning,

pleased that the roses were so bountiful, then spring,

in awe of the lilacs

climbing over the wall,

toward the sunlight, shivering

with freedom on the open road of light.

I don’t remember my dreams.

I keep a journal next to my bed with empty pages

and an ink pen I haven’t used yet.

This year dear friends of mine have died,

acquaintances I’ve admired

fellow poets I’ve honored as heroes and heroines,

who spent their heart’s last sigh

their heels dug into the dirt against retreat,

their voices quiet comets of brilliant subversion

in the dark.

I’ve spent my days

listening to the stark cries in the bone marrow of urban streets—

and I don’t, as some poets do, slap their ass and grin

a toothy smile

flirting with the audience to lure their appeal

with politically correct bullshit—

I’m telling you,

if you’re going to read a poem about a kid getting

his head blown off,

if you’re going to raw-jaw your sugar tongue

to gain favor and win the approval

of those who, unlike you, have never been

down on the streets, who have spent

their Sunday morning gleaning city papers

for topics to write about,

preach what you don’t follow

who only visit the barrio and reservation

like tourists with concerned faces oohing and aahing

faked anguish over our misery.

You should know

that poetry deserves more than a hee-hawing mule

bowing its head onstage to the roaring applause

of an audience mad about appearance

and ignoring the substance.

Whining what the crowd wants to hear,

recruit allies who succumb to your sheepish

poor-me poor-me victim maiden-in-distress,

look-what-they’ve-done suffering martyr in the burning pyre,

sit back and fuel the spectacle of mawkish compassion

from brittle-tempered, hollow-hearted New Age activists,

who fall at your feet on their knees and groan

with livid rage

how the world has done you wrong.

I’m telling you,

the real world

is where handouts don’t come

in the form of a thousand-dollar check

from sympathetic patrons

and airline tickets and classy hotels,

but bread to the starving hand,

freedom taken away for fifty years from a young man

or clubs beating down a Chicano kid in the street

of which the only thing you’ve ever been taught

or know about

is that we

can’t be trusted,

are thieves,

drunks,

addicts

and illegal aliens—

Man, I am so tired of hearing this from frigid hearts

and castrated minds

who have never engaged in life

with their bodies and hands and blood and souls,

that all I can ask you is

Why do you get in the way when we got all this work to do?

Step aside, let us do the real work

with our people,

and you can have that soapbox on a corner

and talk all you want.

Just stay out of our way;

we have work to do, step aside, please step aside.

It takes so much effort to go around you,

as we follow tribal drumming god-beat boom

into the places where people die, suffer, hurt, are desperate,

diseased, hungry, cold, shelterless.

We have work to do.

Thirteen

There is a place not far from here

I walk to on weekends: by myself sometimes,

sometimes taking my oldest daughter with me.

I point to the blueberry tree in the distance,

its two-hundred-year-old branches

clouding the sky green.

The long stand-thickets of grass loom over her head,

around my waist.

How the sun glows through the greed blades

like sunlight at dawn glows through my living room curtains.

Our boots sluck in the swampy ground.

Blue and red wildflowers

star the air.

Insects light as dandelion fluff glide over black standing pools.

In areas the cattails tower higher than my head.

No one ever comes here.

This place has been left alone for years,

settled like a raw jewel

at the foot of dormant volcanoes

the Isletas hold sacred.

I grip a handful of mud beneath the water

and bring it up. The earth is still forming,

I tell my daughter. We came from here, thousands of years ago,

this was known as the land of the Cranes,

and you and I are children of the Cranes.

We pause in silence listening to the humid whir

of grass leaning in wind,

cattails and tall grass softly crushing into each other.

I think back a moment to a time a few years ago,

when I was fishing at a pond in North Carolina.

Out of nowhere, on a standing dead tree overhanging the pond,

a crane swooped over the forest pines and landed on a branch.

It sat there staring at me,

white-feathered, long beak, still, like a small white cloud over the pond.

It seemed to say, Go back to your roots, now is the time.

Now . . . kneeling in the tall lush swamp greens,

I smell my birth here

and feel the fragments of who I am graft together

into this lean sharp wild grass,

and my soul bends with the wind

that rushes down the black mesa volcanoes,

into the grass.

Fourteen

Francisco has always worked the apple orchards

and melon fields,

he is what others call illegal alien,

or undocumented.

His father’s fathers

crossed the borders

centuries before Columbus was born,

when borders were mythical lands

of different animals and plants,

when cold water in storm channels

was a water god, fins flashing.

Francisco smells the air

and knows when to head north. God calls.

He will sleep with his clothes on

so his children

can sleep under warm blankets.

Like a blazing meteorite

that rages into earth’s atmosphere,

he passes la frontera;

vaporizing pride and language,

he becomes a dark mineral that cools down

in the Rio Grande.

By El Paso, children and teenagers

jump a culvert,

go through a hole in the cyclone fence,

tiptoe over beer cans, bedsprings, tires,

and drink the green water

bubbling chemicals out

of an industrial outpouring pipe.

They swim in the polluted foam.

And as Francisco’s fingers numb

picking apples, he remembers

how he too drank from a spout once

and became sick. How he worked away

weeks of sickness

by sweating, working harder and sweating

until he had sweated it out.

It was the cure for everything. Work.

Fifteen

Now here in Colorado Springs, on this snowy Sunday morning, people enter churches in a town that is the national headquarters for more than thirty reborn frenzy-eyed religious battalions, armed with the moral conviction that they and only they are divinely blessed by God to dole out the rights and wrongs of human behavior.

Something happened to me when I could no longer support my family, when the bills continued at faster and faster pace to accumulate, when the rest of the world awoke on a Sunday morning like this and went to church in nice new clothes, when they later met at restaurants brimming with chattering successful types,

something happened to me when I was forced to raid cornfields only two weeks before I was offered this endowed chair, when my boys and I filled our paper grocery bags with corn and we ate corn for days, when I had to avoid the phone because collection agencies were hounding me every hour on the hour, when they cut off the lights and gas,

something happened to me when I walked into the Colorado State Prison and realized that nothing had changed in fifteen years; when I was in Phoenix to read and the news announced a man in prison was going to be fried in the chair

and meanwhile, something happened when the great poet and playwright Dancer died in a hospital after being raped in prison, living in the streets, and being addicted, when a Chicano named JB from Denver just the other day was pulled from his Denver public school bus by police and kicked and beat with flashlights and clubs and sixty children watched from the bus windows, the same JB who had the honor of going through the Sun Dance ritual and who was considered the bravest of all the participants, his flesh torn and body grueled by the intense agony of his prayers,

something happened when I was asked by America to write poetry that pleased the most selfish and arrogantly wealthy, and when I recited poetry roaring with contemptuous spite upon those who purchased justice and apathetic leisure, I was shunned by the academics and scratched off the foundation lists as someone who would receive no money from them,

because I spat in disgust at their Italian shoes and flicked my hand at their pretentious Armani suits, their flesh and bones no more human than the face and hands of an ordinary bedroom alarm clock,

something happened when their money meant nothing to me, when good clean young men and women out of unbearable despair and suffocating anxiety became addicts, when mothers were afraid to leave the county jail because life was better inside, when doctors and lawyers and school administrators refused medical care and quality education and justice because a person had no money, the ultimate foul and toxic rationale that contaminates our society and degrades all human beings who stand for what is decent and right,

something happened when I walked into a school in my barrio and the kids were reading history books about how one day we would land on the moon, and there was not a single computer for the whole school while uptown high schools had dozens, because of money,

something happened to me when for my entire life newscasts reported the news of ongoing wars between blacks and whites, Jews and Arabs, when Furhmans and Mansons and Nixons and Bushes and LAPDs and New Mexico police hit squads keep killing and maiming and beating and bludgeoning and raping and hating,

something happened to me when good water turned to poison from industrial toxic waste, when children were born retarded and deformed by corporate pollutants, when the most heinous of crimes by white-collar executives and companies were dealt with by a gentleman’s handshake and a small fine equal to a lunch-counter charge,

something happened to me when my friend Emiliano, a gay priest, was so afraid of admitting it that he swam out to sea in San Francisco and never returned, when I walked with little black children in Camden, New Jersey, past block after block infested with boarded-up houses and street curbs buzzing with crack dealers, when the school was surrounded with barbwire and cameras and security patrols, when I visited the Camden prison and men of all colors wept and embraced when they realized what they had done to their lives and how they had let opportunity slip by, when they realized how terrible and sad their lives were,

something happened to me when thieves plundered Pablo Neruda’s house after his death, when the great Chicano educational activist Cheyenne Segoya was assassinated for teaching George Jackson in the San Quentin barbershop about subversion and organization, when the Malcolm X movie dismissed the importance of the Puerto Ricans in prison who, being so religious themselves, threw their power and allied with the Muslims against the whites, allowing them to meet on the yard and teach men about spirituality and create Malcolm Xes,

something happened to me when poets who have nothing to write about are being published trumpeting a new movement when it’s simply another mask to obscure their spiritual and emotional poverty,

something happened to me when Cisneros and Peña from the Clinton Administration went to South Central and groomed themselves for sound bites and photo sessions by appearing in the rubble and promising to help, while three days later in the park nearby thousands of RAZA families still had not been given emergency rations, not so much as a glass of water, when a black congresswoman from South Central rallied congressional support and international sympathy for blacks in the south central district, rejecting thousands of Latinos in the districts as foreigners and excusing the brutal atrocities against them, black vigilante gangs clubbing and beating innocent families and warehousing thousands of others without so much as an apology,

something happened to me, so don’t ever ask why I do what I do and write what I write—

I just do it.

Something happened to me going through Bernalillo, a snowy frigid night, when after teaching writing and reading to Navajo kids in Farmington I stopped to refuel. I inched my window down and told this scraggly white kid to fill it up. After inserting the gas nozzle in the tank he kept staring and tapped my window. “Ain’t you Mr. Baca?” I said yes and he continued. “You know, my girlfriend and I are fighting a lot and I keep this journal and I write in it every day, and if it wasn’t for my journal, I don’t know what I’d do, probably kill myself.” I looked puzzled. “Don’t you remember me? You came to my elementary class and taught us how to keep journals! Write poetry!” He smiled, a poor man’s smile full of rich heart. I turned to my wife. “See, it works, poetry works, that’s how it’s supposed to work, not kept secluded like a pampered hermit in academia halls but out in the world, alive and working and pertinent to people and their lives!”

Another time at Kinko’s I went in to copy a novel and the kid didn’t charge me a cent: “You write good poems, there’s no charge,”

and something happened to me when I went into the supermarket and old women came up to me and patted my shoulder saying I was doing a good job and the sackers, young sixteen-year-old bucks in high school with brown eyes and black hair, insisting that they carry my groceries out to the car, saying to me, “That movie you did is bad, really bad, and I went and bought your poetry after that—and man, I love poetry; I read it to my mom and sister and they like your stuff too,”

and it happened in alternative school where Joker had dropped out of school after fighting a few kids and stabbing two, and when I came to read, he was in the middle of a gang-banging drive-by turf war, crew-cut, tattooed, lean, wearing saggy bags and NBA Jordan tank top and Nikes, eighteen years old, and after I read the kids crowded me and yelled, “Yeah, Joker says you’re his uncle, he’s a low-life lying dog, says you his tio,” and I looked at Joker standing three back in the crowd, his eyes large and wide as full moons, something in them wanting me to say yes, wanting someone in this world to claim him, wanting someone like me whose movie he saw and loved to claim him as family, and I reached my arms out and pulled him to me and hugged him, both of us crying, and me telling the class, “I am his uncle, I am,” and me feeling Joker’s fingers clawing deep into my bones and flesh, holding on me,

and something happened to me twenty years ago when I started the first homeless kids writing class in the barracks behind St. Ann’s church and all my professional colleagues from the University of New Mexico mocked me as naive and romantic, saying what I was doing was dumb and I was wasting my time, but I got them to put their knives away and write poetry for a year and perform a play, and after twenty years it is still going,

and I can multiply these stories a hundred times in as many varieties, and I am still at it, while academic gossips on e-mail scrawl absurd little assumptions about me, that I am a rough tough guy, and wonder on the Net how my poetry ever got published and claim it is not poetry, and fill their profound PhD and master of English minds with ridiculous mongering rumors, and immerse their hearts in the trough chatter peddling tasteless hearsay while the rest of us—

just do it.

Something happened to me when most of my friends opted to die an early death,

when the best of our poets wash their hands of society’s meowish morals and barking prattle,

when they take up residence on the outskirts of the city and choose to be poor and unpopular rather than have their time wasted on critics,

because they are writing poetry, busy with the business of living up to standards that compel them to search the shadows of their souls for light, to grace the abused child’s hand with a caring hand, offering hope to the hopeless in prison shattering the academic rooms of mirroring lies with simple truths, following the traditions of true poets as a reporter follows sirens to the scene of the accident, to where people are in need of poetry, where people are hurt and need help,

poets stalking beauty as a jaguar stalks a quetzal, its eyes seeing better in the dark than in the daylight, scenting the air with their tongues, picking up the slightest vibrations to learn where the clumsy and arrogant intruder steps, out to kill it with a rifle,

something happened to me to make me the way I am, and how I live and what I say offers no excuse or apology—

I just do it.

Something happened to me when I saw the gorilla’s eyes, the eagle’s constrained effort to spread its wings and fly, the panther laying up in its corner, and the horde of visitors to the zoo,

not that it is bad, but once in prison myself I felt for them, knew their hearts cracked like the pads of a sick dog dying thirstily for water and having none,

I felt the black hair of the gorilla cover my skin and its brooding eyes become mine, its black hands my own scratching at the concrete and knuckling away behind a rock to hide from the public gawkers because I did the same in prison; when visitors came by to view us, I turned my back on them,

and now as people exit churches and talk business deals over Sunday breakfast and ask about the kids and what schools they attend and how they are doing, now that athletic stores fill with bicyclists and weight lifters and health buffs, and stockers fill the vitamin shelves and others are thinking of buying treadmills and step climbers and ointments and creams for sore muscles, fishing gear, and bullets and camouflage for deer season,

poets walk at dawn to praise the sun and study the behavior of birds in the park and watch kids play soccer and basketball, and while church bells toll in the distance for the devout, poets pick leaves from the ground to place in the pages of their favorite books and wonder how to make a poem as beautiful and terrifying as reality is—poetry does not depend on the accouterments of convenience, it depends on the soul spinning like a leaf in the wind, a leaf with its underside red and its side facing the sun gold, a leaf unafraid of dying every year, unafraid of being torn from its roots, unafraid of turning brown and gray and pulverizing into tiny motes of dust to be scattered among the dung heaps of livestock to ferment and give nutrients to seedlings that will flourish with spring flowers and thorny evergreens.

We just do it.

Sixteen

Thirteen Mexicans,

each having paid from two fifty to five hundred

to the coyote to smuggle them in the United States to work,

crashed into the back end of a sixteen-wheeler

and died last night—

the youngest thirteen.

They died wanting to work,

would have done anything for you—

washed your dirty clothes, dishes, scrubbed toilets—

yet this morning no one thinks about them,

no one cares who they were, what songs they had in their hearts,

what their dreams were, who their parents were,

just a bunch of wetbacks—

their blood, freezing on the highway pavement,

reflects your indifference,

marinates your food,

their disfigured, unrecognizable corpses,

scattered heads and limbs and torsos

are remembered in the white-knuckle clenched fist I raise

to you

who need your crops cut, fields hoed,

houses cleaned, yards landscaped,

children cared for—

thirteen of them last night,

thousands more in growers’ fields,

restaurants,

all-night gas stations

and construction companies,

offered no medical care, no education, no sanitary living quarters;

dogs, cats, birds, and rats are treated kinder,

and no Georgia mule ever worked harder

than my Mexican brothers and sisters,

lacking citizenship papers but with heart, soul, and mind

full of dreams,

worked and not paid, greeted when needed

but, after their work is finished,

crowded into cattle cars, truck beds, vans, jail cells, livestock pens,

shot, electrocuted, beaten, exiled, robbed, jeered at, blamed,

because they believe in the American Dream

we take for granted.

Don’t tell me slavery has ended,

don’t tell me there’s no prejudice,

or that judges rule fairly—

handcuffs, pepper Mace, cells, police, and the INS

were not created for the rich corporate executives.

Imagine having worked from dawn until dusk,

then being cheated out of your pay,

and when you get back to your freezing tent,

the boss calls Immigration

to drag you away so he doesn’t have to pay?

Imagine your kids working all day in factory sweatshops,

then being herded into paddy wagons

and deposited on the border.

What hypocrisy,

what a sham your prayers are at Sunday services,

assuming you’re more entitled to live and breathe and eat

by exploiting the less fortunate.

Seventeen

These are the madrecitas we should bow before,

reverently—

they have never given up faith—

bowed and gnarled legs, swollen ankles, puffy feet

are Mayan jungle roots

that awaken in me a reunion with grace.

I feel at peace knowing they live,

prayers crumble from their mouths

with the weight of humility and piety,

hunched angels always in pain,

joints swell with burning, knuckles,

stark against the flesh, jut

like ribs of a starved one sucking in a last breath.

These madrecitas have been used too long to help others.

Their lives

sonorous cathedral bells gong great

iron -ug iron -th iron -ug.

Deserved blessing radiates from them,

whose feet have hardened stone walks to burnished glows,

puckered their wrinkled mouths to take the holy wafer,

hummingbird beaks at honeysuckle blossoms.

Their residence on earth leaves flowers where they stepped,

stooped all their lives in serving others,

and I watch them

fold their feathered hands

with impeccable grace and dignity

and flutter around the cathedral steps

gathering in the fruit of the altar,

where candle flames are tawny peaches

they hold in their hands and bite into

like doves at dawn in the orchard.

Eighteen

I went with Rosetta

to visit her newborn infant

in the hospital nursery

watching her don the maternity apron and white mask,

then tickling and caressing her baby,

and after five minutes

giving her back to the nurses

who informed her she couldn’t take her child.

I ran after Rosetta and found her outside,

sitting behind the hospital building on the dirt, weeping.

I sat with her on the dirt,

skinny, disheveled, face smudged with makeup,

her voice cringing words

pleading for her baby.

I said nothing, knowing she loved crack more.

Patients and doctors

had entered the emergency doors,

when this motherly Chicana woman, walking with her kids

to her car in the parking lot,

comes over, asking,

“What’s wrong sweetheart?”

The woman knelt down and combed Rosetta’s hair with her

fingers,

wiped her cheeks with her sleeve,

as Rosetta cried they wouldn’t let her have her baby.

“Now, now, now,” the woman comforted her,

“don’t you worry, you’ll have your baby.”

“She’s a crack addict,” I said, “and she’ll sell it for crack if she can.”

The woman looked at me, and in her eyes, that instant,

I saw the infant a man twenty years from now,

in the dark,

traveling to cities, barrios, ghettos, reservations,

groping in his canvas shoulder bag

for poetry books to give out, poems to read, maps,

as his headlights spray past

/red cliffs/,

steel road bumper guards,

and he sees in the tall grass, foraging with claws and beak

a beautiful hawk,

that inspires him to be as real

in his poetry,

to come away with truth like a field mouse

dangling from his beak.

“We’ll get her into treatment then,” the woman said,

“and in the meantime we’ll find a place for the baby.”

I jumped up and said, “Let’s go.”

Nineteen

Mother Teresa,

in the whorls of her fingertips

star-forming God’s breath ignites

light

in the pores and blood of those

she touches.

Her hands give blessings to the world

the way a lilac does its fragrance

and grass blades their green.

At Lori’s house in Wisconsin,

we peer into the foliage

weaving the north side of the wall,

pushing aside the tapestry of vine braidings

to look inside the robin’s nest for an egg,

concealed from sight.

“I’ve seen her

but she hasn’t come back in a while,” Lori says.

The mantle of mutinous leaves and stems

is a braid. Spring’s passion—

I want my heart that way, I think.

* * *

Later, back home, I toss crumbs to sparrows beneath the apple tree,

thinking of

the great concrete and iron baseball stadium in Wisconsin

how Lori and her family took me and my daughter

to see the Brewers play,

a well-gardened evening of uniform composition,

from the white-chalked lines, to umpires, to players’ uniforms,

to the broad vista of infield and outfield clipped grass,

beautiful as a bride and groom taking vows,

the scoreboard, cheers and boos of crowds,

hot-dog hawkers and beer caterers,

me imagining

Little League kids whacking that ball

skittering around bases—

game days that’ll never be forgotten

just as acrobatic marvels on the monkey bars and swing sets

or the first time upturned in a canoe in a lake:

fun times

that transcend all our adult worries,

experiences that tune our souls

to a poetry always humming hound-howling our lives

at the moon with joy.

Twenty

I’ve taken risks

starting as a kid

when I stole choir uniforms

from an Episcopalian church

so I’d have something to keep me warm that winter;

striding in six layers of robes through the streets

I looked like a biblical prophet.

* * *

When you turned up the ace you kissed the card

and when the joker scoffed at you

you were led away by authorities.

Second chances were for jive-time

nickel-diming chumps. It was beautiful,

in a way, to see us kids at seven and eight years old

standing before purple-faced authorities

screaming for us to ask forgiveness,

how irresponsible we were, how impudent and defiant, and that same night

in the dark all alone, we wept in our blankets

for someone to love—but we never asked for second chances.

Twenty-one

I am thirteen years old and waiting at the bus stop on Barcelona Road, then semirural, newly paved, the cottonwood trees’ big leaves like farmer’s hands, swung from tire ropes of wind, into yards, ditches, rooftops, and porches. I had no idea about love and I was attracted to those mid-school companion girls around the bus stop whose cheap toxic perfume gave yard hens heart attacks and burned the noses of dogs, who covered their snouts with paws and yeowed. But I loved them, and although I was too shy to talk to them and couldn’t even look at them except when they weren’t looking at me, I loved their young thighs and calves, their sparingly muscled hair and their avid eyes. These girls answered to no one; they were the ones who would get pregnant at sixteen, ditch school to roam the new mall, Coronado Center, smoke joints in the bathroom, and work at minimum-wage hamburger jobs just to get out of the house where their drunk step-dad beat on Mother. They couldn’t afford anything except love, and their hearts were warm doughnuts dipped in the hot liquid in loins of midnight cowboys. They were the girls who got fired from job after job because they stayed too long kissing boyfriends or flirting with customers. I basked in their disgust of the world, their contempt for “good boys,” and even though they looked at me with eyes full of question, wondering why I couldn’t speak, and even though I would have bitten the heads off frogs to prove my love to them, I couldn’t speak because I had been taught not to. And there were other tougher guys around, who carried switchblades and wouldn’t hesitate to throw you in front of a car if you insulted them. And the girls were theirs. These were the guys who got suspended every other week.

And there I was at the bus stop, fresh out of the orphanage and rippling away as the astounding world unfolded endlessly, and in the middle of the ripple I was a speck, a water strider riding the wave. The only reason I was going to school was to eat. Not to learn, or because I had friends, but to eat. The yellow bus signified a connection to society, a place to go and meaning in life. It was for me an arrival of the Holy Ghost because, when it arrived and I sat down, I had someplace to go. I didn’t know that beyond Barcelona and Franzen Road, the cross streets where I lived—in a house with two cousins and an aunt and uncle who had decided to take care of me—that beyond the barrio and the blackboards and black birds in the cottonwoods, beyond the sun as if in a science-fiction novel, there were people in high places planning my life, how much I would make, what I would become, what my journey in life would be.

In New Mexico, until recently and with some exceptions, most judges, lawyers, school principals, and police chiefs were foreigners from other places. They treated me as if I were a mistake, a war detainee assigned a crime I didn’t understand; I was held hostage, buried alive, and my only reprieve from rules and regulations and duress was the school bus. I didn’t know I was a statistic, that a jail cell had already been built for me to fill, that most of the wrangling in courts between lawyers was not to treat me as an equal citizen but to determine how much freedom I was entitled to, not as much as the next kid, not the full freedom guaranteed by the Constitution, no, they were constantly deciding how much they thought they should allow me. I didn’t realize that forces were at work practicing cultural cleansing, or that biological warfare imbued with benign rhetoric was funded in research programs at distinguished universities to prove I was inferior to others.

And looking out the bus windows I wanted to tell someone how much I loved America, how beautiful it was, how much I adored the Statue of Liberty for what little I understood her to symbolize, how I loved the dirt roads and dogs and people driving to work and others laughing on porches and others cooking breakfast, how I loved shopkeepers opening their doors and birds and ditch water and horses frosting the air with their vivacious snorts, yearning to gallop. I could never have dreamed that people were afraid of a thirteen-year-old boy they didn’t know and that from this fear they murdered people who spoke up on my behalf—Martin Luther King Jr., Che, Robert and John Kennedy, Rubén Salazar, Joaquín Murieta.

I am speaking of a little boy who danced in the dark room, overhearing the old lady next door’s radio playing a Bach concerto, and would turn in the moonlight coming in through the window and spin myself in the music. I didn’t know how to play an instrument or read music and I didn’t know anything about Bach, where he came from or what he was like, but the music cleared all that away and gave me a space in which to dance my small steps and make myself real in the dark, a phantom in my own opera. And my dance fell right in step with one of the qualities that make this country so great, its diversity. I added to its diversity, creating my own dance steps, yelping like a puppy at the notes that were like mother’s milk at my lips.

Never would I have dreamed that in the highest quarters of American government I was considered a killer, a foreigner. That in children my own age the seeds of savagery were brewing; skinheads in Idaho 1993 would burn and murder others because they were different. I looked like the victims, black hair and brown eyes and olive skin. I could have never realized that in the eighties two presidents of America would fund research programs to search out proof my genes were prone to create monsters. Nor that as I walked ditches playing with grasshoppers, those pillars of society would be devising hate crimes against me, outlawing my language, and studying apes and monkeys to synthesize my customs with theirs and thus “scientifically” prove their hate hypothesis. I was a colonized enemy before I was born, and before acquiring language skills children learned to dream my blood bath, to believe I had no right to my ancestral lands or culture. Serbians, Muslims, Croats, Armenians, Azeris, Tamils, and Sinhalese, Greeks and Turks, Irish Protestants and Catholics, Israelis and Muslims, all slaughtering each other for domination and power, and lined up behind the warriors are the intellectual political scientists. All of it is justified historically, they say, and little did I know, when I was thirteen waiting for the bus, that eventually the ride would take me into a world filled with much more hatred.

In my yellow bus I felt safe but confused. I had no superstitions to keep phantoms at bay. The terrors of the world impinged upon my world. La Llorona crept at night along ditches, snatching children and devouring them. She originates from a historical legend of an Indian woman who chose to drown her children rather than let them be taken back to Spain by the Spaniards and taught to be European. I know that when I was born my heart was no larger than a sparrow heart, the size of a clam beating in its bone shell, still hearing the primal oceans of universes roaring in me.

No numbering system (4444) to give me pertinence, no card readers or dice or priestly blessings or medicine man or healer woman cleansing, I depended on the simple natural universe like leaves budding, long-legged spiders water-walking on culvert scum, the brilliant sky with its glittering stars, the simple ranchers living in trailers, whose fearless children rode horses, got kicked, ran back and forth from corrals, full of gusto and hearty openness, the dirt roads and mountain gully washes we call arroyos; I leaned heavily on the goodness of good people, filling my plate with fried potatoes and red chile con carne and beans; hot coffee, old cars rusting in prairie fields riddled with bullet holes and broken windows, deer hoofprints in pine-needled and piñon-shelled ground; and I dreamt while riding the bus of playing basketball under a light in the dirt lot, the backboard a makeshift piece of plywood, the netless peeled rim nailed haphazardly but firm to the board, and me throwing the ball up until I was tired and slept in a cot with four other cousins in the same small room, all of us smelling like dust and prairie resins.

I was part of a history and region deep in legends, songs, poems, corridas, and danzas, and riding the yellow bus I looked at images that reflected my identity—streets, buildings—and there was nothing but the workers of the world sweating and I realized very early that their sweat would be my song, that their smells and dirty work boots and women’s laughter, all fighting in some peaceful and soothing way, patiently burning for civil liberties, for equal justice and respect, not what others were willing to give, one-quarter justice, one-half justice, but to break open the confines of all the intellectual rhetoric and give all people what was due them, equality and love and peace. And on that yellow bus in my own silence, watching the other kids throw spit wads and curse and feel girls and girls feeling up the guys and kissing and threatening others to fight, I dreamed new definitions for myself and my potential, because more than anything else I was a loving soft child, full and brimming and spilling over with sensitive romance and love and endeared to humanity, trying to reclaim a murky past filled with war and murder and betrayals, trying to see myself as what I was supposed to be.

And my heroes and heroines were those people never given their due who when I was young were getting on with the work of angels. There were barrio children my age dreaming, a thousand of them dreaming as I was, and on their journey most of them died. And the seeds in them opened such pain, such unbearable excruciating anguish, that they fell into alcohol and drugs, and the best minds of my generation put pistols to their brains and pulled triggers, hurled themselves off cliffs and slashed their wrists, pushed the heroin needle’s plunger in and knew they were overdosing; there was too much pain and hell and abuse and darkness, their hearts had broken off and nobody in life had ever met them halfway or given them an iota of respect or opportunity; filled with grief and hurt they killed themselves so early and innocent and full of love and silence, and those who lived carried the memories of those who died young, and with promises and vows and to the heroic corpses that lined the cemetery lots, the living started the Movimiento, started writing books and painting murals, formed intellectual aesthetics, went on a search for their spiritual homeland, sculptors sculpted the demons and angels in their hearts exorcising the evil in our blood, praising the sweetness in us, bursting boundaries of ourselves, crossing la frontera back into Mejico to do peyote and drink sotol, do hallucinogens and roam in Mayan ruins at night trying to communicate with their ancestors; and others marched and protested, holding up the cross in one hand and the sword in the other, dying on the front lines for their civil rights, and the seeds of self-determination were born in thousands of kids riding yellow buses to schools that didn’t give a damn about us.

And riding the yellow bus I sensed my heart beating under the hot pebbles, I sensed I was a foul sinner and an angelic saint, I began to sense that my power was as unending as all the grass blades and gravel in the world, a voice and vision in me began to erupt and niagara down in glistening growls sniffing at my roots on this land, that went down and down and down, bursting all the borders and creating bridges between me and the universe.

And when the bus stopped and started, my window was a yellow camera and the stopping and starting were shutter speeds as I shot photos of my world in the darknesss of my soul, knowing I would someday return to the darkroom and expose the photos to the universe through the blood acids of my sensibilities.

And auroras of energy whirled around common weeds, elm trees, misted off ditch water, shivered in the horseflesh quivering to get flies off, steamed from the bean pressure cookers, permeated the presence of adults who told me I was not wanted or needed, in the saliva spit bubbles I played with on my lips and tongue, in cussing and the hissing of fried potatoes, in the brown-bean-soup ditch water, in the buzzing of bus and bicycle tires whirring like angel’s wings—the energy of creativity buzzed and came from everything, of resistance and the birthing from my dirty fingertips were the prints of Aztlan, of the real America, and though the books didn’t carry the word or affirm the reality, bilingual people spoke of the barrio, and men and women tattooed their flesh in sacred calligraphy of our heritage—saints and legends and symbols and songs and names and places—and though the books at school had none of this I was schooling myself on that yellow bus, watching listening, learning calo, huelga, mestizaje, pachucon, Indio/Chicano bato, La Virgen de Guadalupe, Agila, placas, ¡La Raza y q-vo! ¡Y-que! ¡Dar le gas!

And in me the strange winds of time raged, religion and language and humanismo roared like a woman in labor in my gut, and I screamed that I wanted to be part of life! Not a splinter, not a rusty railroad spike driven down in creosote hells of society never to move or express myself; I wanted to wreak havoc and explode with love and crying and weeping in my own horrible dance of need to live and be accepted.

And on that yellow bus, with no friends and no place to live and no books, school, destinations, I created a part of the person writing this years later, gasping at the violence around me, lonely at night, reading books, wondering about my passage through time and how much time I wasted and how much more I wanted to do, how I scarcely touched the tip of my vision to make this planet and its peoples more loving and accepting and patient and enduring.

Twenty-two

I, like most people, am trying to change my life.

I want it bull-vibrant

charging full face into the sword.

I’ve had it with soap-opera

privileged literary superflies,

who enter the arena of fashionable trends

like prancing Arabian geldings.

And after the dancing is done,

pastured, bred for good stock, bloodlines and lineage

true and tested never to whinny a word against the master,

obey the trainers, canter and cavort

in soft raked sawdust arenas,

and after, to nap

in air-conditioned stalls on feather-filled comforters.

I wake up unshaven and exhausted,

grizzled with frustration over lack of money to pay bills,

watching other poets zigzag in and out of traffic in new cars,

wind in their shampooed hair,

neck and fingers dazzling with diamonds,

radio blasting Tupac Shakur,

on their way to a vegetarian café

and then off to the spa

to keep that figure pristine sixteen.

But there is another kind of poet I’ve known,

am blessed to have as a friend,

who picked me up from O’Hare airport in Chicago,

who had been through everything

unimaginable

and endured it, growing like a blueberry tree

with leafy grace in her gestures and rotund laughter

heady with mysterious gaiety in her eyes,

raped by a policeman,

as her man was murdered by the FBI in cold blood

who retreated to the mountains to care for her daughter

nourish her own soul with light, and retrieve

that crystalline innocence of the dewdrop again in her tears,

that poured many a night to douse the flames of her rage and agony.

Yes, I know that woman;

she drove me from Chicago to Milwaukee,

picking me up and

driving me three hours

late at night,

even renting a new truck for my stay

because her car was old and might break down,

working as a professor getting paid half

what her counterparts made,

working twice as long and seeing her at the table,

when her students of every race and color joined us,

seeing how they loved and respected her,

how she adored each one and lavished them with her attention

but was seldom invited to read her work;

she was a commoner of the sort who make this world

habitable, effusing it with the spirit’s splendor,

misting our darkest secrets and lonely memories

with the fog one sees close to rivers

that light burns away

to disclose a wondrous landscape

of fields and streams and mountains.

She was that for me,

living in her small apartment with her birds and plants and Christmas lights

festooned over the kitchen door archway and window frames,

rising early to make tortillas for her students,

creating lovely cards to send to friends, that hit the receiver’s hand

like corn seeds sprouting in the moist soil of a farmer’s row.

Blessed to know this woman,

blessed to have her friendship,

blessed am I to be her friend,

who says of her life, It’s a Chicago thing.

Frida Kahlo eyes,

black thick luscious hair, wonderfully full breasts,

and lips as succulent as ripe peaches,

her paintings hanging in every room of her apartment,

stations of the cross she recorded on her journey from

hell to mountain peak,

cherishing in her heart the faces of people she’s known

and loved,

painting their portraits in the flesh and womb and heart

of each painting,

I awed at her healing, her magic, her life, her heart,

her healthy deep raucous laughter bordering each day

like pine trees in the distant horizon,

releasing eagles, hawks, timid creeks,

solace to weary travelers like me.

Thank you, mil gracias mi compañera en la lucha

de tener una vida honorable y llena de amor y alma,

¡Que dios te bendiga!

Your life a Chicago Thing,

a Chicago Thing, you said,

smiling with love at me.

Twenty-three

After night school

I enrolled in the university.

In between classes of American history,

I was escorted to the hills by police,

stripped, butt-ended with rifles,

and left bloody

and unconscious in dust and cactus.

In between classes

I tried to intercede between two cops

beating a drunk at the Blue Spruce bar.

I was cuffed, clubbed, jailed,

thong-slapped on thighs and heels,

by twelve Albuquerque jail officers

I cursed and refused to cower before.

In between semester breaks,

cops beat me in their car,

drove me to the edge of town,

to a hog-slaughter holding pen,

and boot-stomped me speechless,

(two holding me while each one

took their turn).

The barrio held different classes,

with more unruly police

as lecturers.

Had to miss university classes

weeks at a time

to let my puffy eyes and

swollen lips heal.

I flunked astronomy,

a study of the dreamless cosmos.

In psychology

pain became pleasing to me

when I walked out of class,

ashamed I couldn’t answer the test.

I dignified pain with a smile,

an ancestral hand-me-down cure,

dignified it with a smile

in the last row,

in the back of class—

invincible.

My smile was the lizard

that quivered

on the classroom windowsill,

squirming close to the edge

for security.

My attendance

was low—almost always late,

embarrassed to enter mid-class,

I’d go to the campus duck pond,

sip coffee, and stare at a drunk

asleep on the bench. In the want-ad section

of the paper he slept on,

an employment agency

advertised for extras in a Redford movie

filming in northern New Mexico.

A grimy corpse. From his worn shoes

stray-dog spittle dripped,

pawing and greeting

recognizable smells of a trash can.

I was afraid of the drunk’s face,

slouched with humiliation and defeat.

He stirred from his concrete sleep,

numb weight of his body

a dark crack slowly opening,

as I offered him what was left of my coffee,

cigarette, and some pocket change.

His decrepit smile was a signature

on his execution papers in a month or two from cirrhosis of the liver.

Twenty-four

White is an attitude of arrogance

white comes in colors,

white is a state of mind

it allows attorney generals and presidents to commit crimes

white is a bat of an eye at children murdered in El Salvador

white is the Iran Contra affair

white is the deaf ear and white is press censorship

the white rain of pesticides

the white bullet in Martin Luther King’s heart

white are the contract papers to store nuclear waste at WIPP

white is a state of mind, not color

white are machetes, slicing ankle and knee tendons to cripple

those who would stand and confront

white are the handful of families who own most of the wealth

white is cocaine

white is heroin

white is factory pollution

white are the laws and marble of justice buildings in Washington

white are interrogation lights, execution papers, not people

white are the eyes of the desaparecidos in Argentina.

White is the plume of atomic smoke mushrooming in Hiroshima

and bellies of dead fish

white is an attitude isolated from all colors, exiled from the rainbow,

white are smiles of freshly barbered politicians on Capitol steps

white are the fangs of jaguars behind zoo bars

white is an attitude that disrespects any differences,

white is the blank page an illiterate cannot fill

white is the smoke from furnaces at Treblinka.

And white is the raging face full of solemn revenge

white are gravestones,

white is the place you escape to when you escape yourself,

white are steer skulls in Santa Fe shops,

white is an attitude that allows children’s ribs to protrude

from skin

white is the drooled mucus of a rabid dog foaming for blood,

white are scars on so many wrists from handcuffs.

Refusal is brown, resistance is red, courage is golden, integrity is bronze.

Twenty-Five

As a student,

after class,

I wonder

why I should be here,

and Davil in jail when he was so much smarter.

I remember in the county jail,

when I daydreamed on my bunk

of the life I have now.

I dreamed it was much more than it is.

In my other life,

seasons changed by what I heard and saw in the barrio,

not semesters and calendars.

Ax swings at dawn

were unspoken opinions of weather to come.

I unlearned what I had learned the previous day

to stay spontaneous and creative—

each filament of my spirit

my palm made a fable of—

in real life.

Now these sobering duties . . .

each book a grimed window-glass pane

effused with nebulous luster of words,

through which we try to discern life.

Before, my hands tried to dismantle

the tooth-edged wheel of life,

that splintered my youth

into a rash awakening of poverty, violence, and drugs.

The faint light of daybreak

collapsed inward

from outside pressure

and hardened my heart into

an immovable core.

I responded to

and fused to the instant of survival

in a heat-flash cry for existence

and diffused myself

like the raw material of a new star,

and the melody of my blood

cut and carved justice and values

as if they were log and stone

in deep-forest mineral compositions.

I was a mythical figure once.

Now that I have settled for security

and comfort, the pages I grade

whisper the language of emotionally dying men,

imprisoned women, with stagnant spirits . . .

who are deaf to gunshots

a mile from here,

where rookie guards target-shoot.

Bull’s-eye hearts of dummies bleed

shredded cardboard. Shots echo

through Davil’s cell window.

He thinks of

Beltrán, Flores, Galviz,

Garza, Morales, Prieto y Rodriguez,

Santome, Torres y Vasquez—

dead Chicanos

brutally beat

and murdered.

Their deaths

are tiny splinters of hurt,

slivered glass in every pore

of my skin, in my mouth, ears, and hands.

Twenty-Six

The end of October has always bored down deep in my blood.

The rapid speed of change. Twirling leaves

and great golden bruises of treetops. Everything

is associated, related to each other.

Brittle constructions creak out. The gray luster

of tin barns at dawn. The inward growth of colors.

Fence wood blackens, field weeds whiten, the air shimmers cold

into the lungs and against cheeks. The mare

gallops, tail arched, bucking, neck reared,

across the field.

I make soup, salad,

and a squash dish as kids run through the kitchen.

My tools lie dormant:

hammer, saw, rake, shovel, and others, like thick roots

hardening in the dusty shed. I track mud into the kitchen.

I pour myself a cup of coffee

and notice how

everything gives an opinion of itself during October.

The trees tell stories, tales of losing everything and going bravely

into the gray morning alone. Birds assess the air

like wine tasters. The intuition of things smolders forth and the pebbles

in the driveway celebrate the ancient rereading of eternal cycles—

the stones are hard bulging eyes attached to the top of the earth—

they are the eyes of the dead that have floated up,

and during the month of October

I can see them peer at me from behind the fallen leaves

as I walk along the path.

Twenty-Seven

Barrio Southside—

it’s not like tourist postcards

sold in Old Town,

it lacks the flavor of proud heritage

that towns in Mexico or Spain have.

When it rains young boys carry roses in their teeth

while riding their bicycles

and their dogs scatter pigeons bathing in rain puddles

in the street.

La Vega, Vito Romero, Isleta: these are the roads

Chicanos take,

like the ancient tribe of Aztecas

searching for a new home to build their future.

Conquistadors armored in ’57 Chevys

low-riding and panting fumes,

high on carga or mota,

the knife or gun in their pockets warmed and cuddled

like an infant in hell.

Bear the flames, brother Luis,

who still lives with his parents at forty-eight,

and who goes to church every Sunday, then

to Mike’s Bar, to drink and fight the Lord’s day

to a bloody end.

Bear the flames, Tito, sixteen years old,

playing chicken with a .38 last week

with your older brother

in your living room, until your boredom

boomed in the quiet afternoon sunlight

splattered with your brains

like fine powder in the weedy fields floating on the air.

Bear the flames, Eric,

who ripped off a jacket two weeks ago

from Mieyo’s truck

parked outside my piñon picket fence,

and when confronted, wearing the jacket, tells Mieyo,

“Call the cops, I don’t care!

I am going to prison anyway!”

And struts off, a black glove with the fingers cut off,

he wears to signify loyalty and readiness

to die or be imprisoned for the laws of Southside Barrio.

Bear the flames, Julian,

county cops visit every weekend at 4 A.M.

as you beat against the door, drunk,

screaming obscenities at your children and wife.

Bear the flames, Miguel,

arrested for DWI numerous times,

hustling spare tires and gramitos de coca

to buy eggs and dog food for your pit Diablo.

Bear the flames, Flaco,

stabbed a month ago with a bear knife

on North Fourth at the Corral,

when drunk, a puta lured you outside

to the parking lot, where an accomplice

sent the blade to the hilt through your chest.

Bear the flames, the bad flames

of addiction, Mario,

not as famous as the Kennedy or Belushi boys,

but cocaine and heroin has been your high

since sixteen.

Bear the flames, Perfecto,

county agents visit every week

to hang a red tag on your door

for all the junk cars and trucks in your yard.

“Que se vayan a la chingada,” he says, and tears

the red tags up. And without a permit,

he builds walls, rooms, sells and buys old cars and trucks.

“I have been doing this since before those kids in office

were ever born!”

And Jessie Jackson came last week

to Southside Barrio,

the chavalitos, vatos locos, abuelitas, madres,

and even packs of stray dogs looking for free beans and tortillas

crowded around this black man to hear him say,

“You have a right! Right to speak Spanish in schools!

Right to your lands! Right to equal opportunity!

Right to get paid decent wages for working with your hands!”

The Southside Cholos Locos, about two hundred vatos,

prowl at night with the right to kill

if you push them too far,

with the right to kill each other, to get lost

in the flames and die a brave death, a crazy death,

in the flames, burning,

with I don’t care, man! Let’s get down!

Louie’s in the joint! Let’s rob that store!

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen:

warrior children performing in the rites of fire,

to take life to the extreme, lose it all

in a bright all-flashing moment

as they soar to the darkness of death’s lap,

and the parents like truncated old elm trees, gnarled

and dried, smoke roll-your-own-cigarettes on porches,

thinking how their sons and daughters could not endure

the long term burning and burning need

for dignity, freedom from poverty . . . they could not do it.

And if you get past the flames,

the burning,

if you learn to become a fire doctor,

understanding the way things work in this world,

then scarred from the flames

and strong with burning needs,

you awake to the destruction of broken chairs,

cracked walls, bad memories,

dead friends, no money, screaming children,

the last warning bills from the utility companies to pay,

the broken car, the things that need to be done

and never are,

you awake to all this and smile,

because you are alive, and it will be done,

it will be done, it will be done.

* * *

Just endure.

And endure.

Endure.

That’s what the Old Town postcard

on the black wire rack would say,

to all the world—China, San Salvador, Cuba,

Mexico, Ireland—Endure!

And in the picture all our faces would be stern

and there would be empty black spaces

representing those dead ones

who have become ashes.

Twenty-eight

Poetry’s mission is to subvert, to question, challenge, provoke, to flail one’s vulnerability and voice in the marvelous whirlwind of poetry’s awe, flagging at the horns of the raging beast that is society’s gluttonous comfort, its obscene satisfaction with itself, herding young minds to doubt the heart’s compassion, trampling those who would object, goring others who do not surrender, as it fattens itself on the lush springs of employment paychecks.

So I have no money, and it’s not on purpose or planned that I find myself constantly ill at ease with finances. I never know what lies beyond the next curve in the road; all I have are my meek convictions that serve well the spiritual traveler I am. I do not mind finding myself stranded in silence. Crowds have booed and cursed and attempted to knife and strike me for poems I read that upset them. I have walked off more than one committee whose purpose it was to hand out money to writers. Their agenda differed from mine, in that they sought to follow the whimsies of fashion and not the tenets of poetry that dictate themselves in the poem and the taste of the affluent leisure class. I please no one if it means I must whore the poem on every street curb that has a bank. If white men do not like the fact that, for the most part, they have chosen to remain ignorant of the literature of people of color or the oppressed, if publishing houses choose to stifle young poets by publishing feeble academic poetry, if slogan-sneering radicals do not believe in love poetry, I care not a flea’s mustache hair what they think. Because poetry declares itself in every gasp of first breath a newborn infant inhales, in every note an opera singer manages to sing, in every black feather from a crow that shimmers in the afternoon sunlight, in every curl and bubbly spout of river water running downhill, in every young girl’s tear and young man’s cry for passion; poetry weaves its way in and out of our daily lives and will not—cannot—be denied by lip-puckering tch-tch-tch pseudo-podium officeholders and crowd-pleasing pedants.

Just yesterday I went to a prep community school, designed to take in sixteen- through twenty-one-year-old kids who have dropped out of regular schools. In return for a talk in the gymnasium and a workshop later in Mrs. Taylor’s class, I was paid $200 and given a bag with a loaf of Italian bread, a bowl of cooked beans, and golden and red leaves Mrs. Taylor had picked from her yard. I heartily and thoroughly enjoyed the beans and bread at my apartment later, since my refrigerator was empty. And with the money I paid an overdue phone bill. Before that I visited the Colorado State Prison for $100 and spoke with convicts. After that I went into Denver and visited three elementary schools for $200. The brakes on my vehicle were completely gone, and the $200 went to fix them that same day. The children cried out delightfully when I told them they were the poets of tomorrow and to express themselves vociferously, and when they cried out they were important and they were poets, stars fallen like snowflakes from the ceiling, drenching each of our hearts with light from the human heart. I am simply following in the tradition of Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Pablo Neruda, Lorca, and Rilke, and fuck the rest who sniffle and murmur ill-gotten gossip behind soft palms in the hushed rooms of academia or corporate America or city hall, because true poetry and poets will never succumb to the idle prattle and super-fly eminence that occurs when the poet panders to public taste.

Crate the little moralist brats and send them to deep-freeze storage.

Affirm poetry at any cost.

Twenty-nine

I lived in an old Victorian clapboard, trim-fringed

with flowery garlands, spiral staircase, milk-paned front-door glass.

A cemetery behind the house.

Checkered fields, rumpling in blue and yellow and buttoned with cracked shacks.

Grubbing country. Country of suicide

on full-moon nights.

On the porch my nephew aiming on the crosshairs

of his new BB gun

shot the right eye out of an owl in the tree in the front yard

at night.

It dropped, a lead arrowhead on the end of a plumb line,

full of death, gray wings dazed

grasped helplessly for air—

once an ally, air became its enemy—

it careened in dirt at the foot of the tree.

I was horrified when my nephew called me out to ask my help!

“What should we do, Uncle Jimmy?”

Its right eye splintered into a ribbon of jellied blood

reflected in its moon slime red mirror

our meaningless violence.

I tasted this stupid act

chalk on my tongue

as if I had opened a coffin and stuffed my mouth with bone dust.

I could hardly breathe. My young nephew, taught to shoot at

anything that moves,

listened as I told him the owl’s eye is his soul

one of two, it carries, and taking the right eye

destruction would now follow.

We were scared

confused

as he held the owl

blood dropped on the bare board

porch

under the porch light;

at our shoes

warm feathers

exuded omen of evil to come.

Its claws were underground stalagmites

its beak a spiritual cutting knife.

Suddenly the darkness counted our graces

we held it as coins divided between thieves

and the coldness of the hour left us alone, bitterly numb

with the act.

“We must let him go.”

There are things you don’t doctor: no vet, no forgiveness for

some acts.

The hillside beauty contoured in dark folds

gave up a minty fragrance of black spring ground worming

awake.

“Let it go.”

Bloodletting owl’s eye

is a world with no axis,

is a boat at sea with no man;

in the owl’s bloody eye

I saw

smoking mirror

plumes of gray smoke

making my eyes cry.

* * *

It was not

till a few nights later

that my sister and her husband sat playing cards

in the parlor

while I sat upstairs typing away

and through the floorboard cracks

smoke unfurled.

I heard my name cried, then screams,

and when I ran downstairs

the house was gagged in smoke

and the smell of burning picture frames;

smoldering couch wood

crackled beneath my shoes.

Standing outside, watching the house burn,

I saw the owl’s eye

throw its golden glare over the cemetery, over our face,

bronzing our guilt and the night a baroque plaque

etched with blossoming trees, white headstone, flagstone walkway

and four people standing arm in arm

at distance from the flames

guilty of the deed.

Everything we had was destroyed.

Arc of cleansing fire

cackling through recent brush memory

towering heat

giving back the sight of our frailty

and how little we really know.

I gripped my nephew’s hand

looked down in his face

I knew his eyes saw the owl’s eye

in the flame—

this house fire had given back to the owl

an eye

he took.

* * *

We walked down the dirt road,

an emptiness of wrong filled us.

My sister, hysterical, fled into the alfalfa fields and danced

twirled and twirled by herself,

then she rushed to the cemetery

and sat, back to a headstone, and wept.

I followed her, patted her sobbing shoulders,

praising what we had lost

as an event to start over

giving the fire a prayer, a cleansing prayer.

Rubble of ash smoldering behind us

a feathery incantation

of a lost eye

no amount of technology could repair . . .

only something in the heart that tells us

all life is as valuable

as ours.

Thirty

In Mexico a group of poor artists

pitched in their money and bought a crumbling four-story

and converted it into studios accommodating artists

from all disciplines—dance, painting, poetry, sculpture.

For my reading in the gallery,

old imperious women sat stiffly in the front row on hardback chairs

hands properly folded on laps

and flanking them along the walls were barefooted girls and boys,

and in the chairs behind the old women were chin-shimmering men

black-haired heads glistening with hair tonic.

The young women wore feather necklaces and turquoise-stone wing bracelets;

their dark hair terraced,

falling into smooth waves over shoulders into sighing dark storms.

After I read,

porters in purple vests wheeled in carts of whiskey, beer, and wine.

Delight blew through the gallery, their wings were testing the air,

the people rose, gliding into conversations,

when suddenly a young man came up to me.

“I wish you to come with me and meet others in my group, will you meet with us?”

His shoes didn’t have shoelaces, tongues sticking out, he wore a

rope for a belt

to keep his loose faded jean pants on.

His impassioned plea was stripped of pretension.

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you ready now?”

I nodded and followed him down a flight of rickety

wooden steps

into the chipped brick courtyard. The night filled

with frying foods and sewage and cheap perfume and corridas

and cries of vendors beyond the courtyard,

the moon, a bronze medal on a chain of clouds,

dragged itself along the red bricks.

Nightlife sparkled a fuse; a fizzle of colors, smells, and sounds

swarmed crisscrossing streets thick with whore perfume,

field-working music, legions of street-corner

refugees, armless and legless beggars.

We shouldered past hundreds of people and finally, at the corner

of a park,

an old beat-up battered car drove up; he opened the door and I

got in.

The thrust of immediate acceleration pushed me back,

I turned around and got scared.

There were three men in the back, including my host.

Their kind detachment concealed their wishes, none smiled;

they looked directly at me

the way a dog looks at a bird in a tree, seeing through me,

then one by one extended their hands with pious formality.

The driver swept and swerved through traffic. Deep silence. I felt

inexperienced in their presence,

felt myself a vain profligate, my life spilled milk on a table

because they were clean, hard, strong, their silence

mature and mine weak,

their appearance ascetic and priestly.

We were now hurtling into the outskirts of the city, fewer and fewer

houses, ominous heavy-equipment lots strung with barbwire,

cinder-block buildings beaten into bad health,

loose wire spotlights throwing an eerie net over the dark steel doors.

Then we arrived. I wanted to go back to the city.

We walked into a room where other men were seated in a circle

and we sat down. A large man, young and incredibly strong and

handsome,

started handing out shot glasses of whiskey, his gestures restrained.

He was not accustomed to pouring whiskey in glasses.

He was not used to dainty and careful protocol.

By their sunburned leathered features

I assumed they had lived in the mountains a long time.

They had something of the coarse and innocent ruggedness

of mountain stone, sharp-faced, living on meager provisions.

Crusty shoes spit-polished and buffed, shoelaces broken and

knotted, faded shirts

stiff with starch, washed a thousand times in mountain

streams

intended to look new, the men shifted uneasily in chairs

great legs creaking the wood,

and after all the glasses were filled, my host started.

“We want to know what you think of poetry.

Do you think it has any influence over changing society?

What is happening in America?

Would you be willing to take these books and papers back with you and spread

them among the academic writers and poets of your country?”

The questions came faster than I could answer.

They had been born in revolution, from many countries in Latin

America,

children fighting dictators and tyrants,

each one of them had come together

because their families were murdered and they were the surviving

casualties

living in the mountains, still fighting

for their freedom and respect and right to live. We talked poetry

with laughter, reverence, and respect, discussing what it was

until dawn light struck the torn curtains

and I shook hands with each of them, embraced each of them;

then I was driven back to my hotel. I carried the stack of papers

and books I would hand out to friends—

I realized the poet’s strength lies in the people,

in what their hearts feel and hope and pray and dream.

Thirty-one

The lizards are skittering along fence lines—blue-bellied, hearts

in throats

pulsing weedy arteries,

and the plumed partridges, in pairs, each has a mate,

blend into the gray dead tumbleweeds

and bushy sages along the arroyo.

Have you tasted sage? We call it the sacred blanket for grand-

mother—peyote—

but it’s bitter to the tongue,

yet many a time when I was driving and couldn’t keep my eyes open,

I’d have some on me and chew it, stick my head out the window,

caress my hair in the light drizzle as I prayed.

And prayer: thankfulness is what it’s all about.

I come up on the mesa and thank the black birds on the mesquites,

thank the nameless flowers sprouting red and white and blue in the heat,

thank the Creator for all that’s come down

on these poor shoulders, wobbling my knees with such sadness

that an operation is needed to repair the splintered bone caps.

You might be a stranger to yourself,

but I’m not—

I’ve been digging stones out of my heart such a long time,

biting each one to make sure I’m not throwing away gold,

no need to wear a tie to impress a white boy

and fancily flirt with a white woman,

no need for that, I’ve got friends all colors,

and I mix them up in my blood, their words

the pebbles in a creek bed shimmering and glinting

with their own beginnings to be human beings,

because so distant from their roots,

one becomes mean and ill-tempered, and if you visit

English museums in London,

you’ll find gods are men of commerce and banking,

and I’d rather be bunking with cigarette butts in a ho’-n-pimp hotel

than point to the bank as my green-feathered tribal village.

Yeah, girl, what we need to do is sit down

and powwow—

leaving behind this heated pool and beautiful Mexican garden of

mine,

leaving my dawn-early strolls as I water each sage and perennial,

each piñon tree, each evergreen that hollers to me

how sweetly life can be lived and nourished

and how there’s room for everyone—

even you and me, at the table,

even others of my people coming back to Turtle Island

pillaged and stricken with mayhem

under the guise of Manifest Destiny—

they come nonetheless, crossing miles of choppered-air

bulleted distances,

carrying beat-up grandmothers, slashed with army bayonets,

children crushed by INS Gestapo boots,

they come heeding a deeper call than yours and mine,

buried in Mother Earth,

concealed from those who would betray her,

the poverty pimps,

the strutting and sliding, the smoking and singing,

they come in silence, humble, back to their roots,

to the land of Seven Caves, the land of the Crane,

our Motherland, our roots,

and no one understands that what was written in Mayan codices

cannot be stopped,

smelling of earth drenched in blood,

stinking of sweat in rich growers’ fields,

reeking of pesticides, of hunger, of slavery, of being beaten brutally

and still desiring basic integrity by showing it to others.

Color never mattered, it didn’t then

and still doesn’t,

I love the color black, man, you should see me in a black

turtleneck,

sleek pants that snug up around my sweet ass,

how my brown limbs flow with swanlike grace on the air,

how my arms fit another sister’s and brother’s arms

for the rocking and cradling and loving.

Color never mattered,

except to the colorless,

the lost tribe seeking roots,

seeking their sacred colors,

their beads and feathers and songs,

now screaming in hatred death doom dungeon torturing and twisted

chemically induced self-destruction,

never trusting, seldom fair, often manipulative,

they dress in the fanciest suits to conceal their colorless anemia,

they cunningly score a win by cheating where they can,

they incessantly adopt and take what they don’t have respect for

except to turn a nickel into a dime—

so woman, you are full of bursting beauty,

despite the false reliance on plaques, knock-kneed innocence,

pretentious deference,

you breathe and your breath by virtue of your wonderful soul

gives black-jeweled veils to every woman under the moon,

breathing

gives every maui warrior a gut-filled arrow-killing God cry

of victory where he be, you be, I be,

all convoluted in a fireball of love and courage and sublime

spontaneity

hurling and soaring through the heavens above banks

and the six o’clock news—

woman, being who we are and living as we live

is no flip of the switch and we got Bay Watch lives—

who wants it?—our lives are never going to be resolved,

never going to find peace, and why should they,

we are poets and warriors, racists and pacifists,

and to say we’re not racist is to deny we ever lived,

because this system and every institution in this country

teaches subtle invisible can’t-touch-but-it’s-there racism.

And all these white boys and white girls

off into brotherhood and sisterhood

can’t even begin to be my brother and sister

until they deal with their own racism,

the hot and cold, the sweet and bitter,

the fat and thin of it—

isn’t in Whitman or Emily’s poetry,

it’s in our lives now

and our reaching is a way of saying we’re tired of it,

have to make something else happen,

have to stop accepting the betrayals

and the nonsense that we can’t live in peace

and love because

coming from a homeboy, and a million like me,

there’s no winning.

Not having the luxury of living in a quaint woodsy idyllic way,

not having the money or the means to do so,

we find ourselves on the freeways speeding by others

who flip us off, who look at us and seethe with hatred

at me for having my ol’ ’49 pan-head Harley low-rider,

coming up and passing them,

coming up and contributing my jewels to the land,

to the children,

coming up and offering better education,

art, dance, language,

and woman, that’s the real world,

not the poetry crowds

gulping beer and clapping drunkenly,

not the fancy hotel soap and fragrant laundered clothing

we wear,

the truth is if you put your finger in my

sweet bronze-brown flesh you’re gonna come up

with cups of the sweetest wine and such savory bits of heart food

it’ll make your mouth pucker as if you bit a juicy golden peach.

Tired of them telling me

what’s good and what’s bad,

tired of the doubt about who we are,

tired of teachers teaching what they don’t practice,

tired of the starched manners and lies of politicians,

tired of measuring a woman’s worth or a man’s strength

by the curves on her body and his—

listen to oldies,

humming them as I do on long prairie rides across the badlands,

going to my village

where richness is measured by your integrity and how you support your family

and poverty by your lies and false words.

For a very brief time

I wanted to be like them,

yet the heart-coal burned in the dark

with all the ardor and vehement desire to be me,

and all it took was a stand, take a stand,

no matter where you are,

no matter what road or paved yellow-brick dream,

no matter what path, a goat’s or a queen’s softened by strewn petals,

you can stand and be who you are—

Just have to accept the grief,

the tragedy,

the hurt,

the betrayals,

the unbelievable anguish of being me, you, us,

and make songs out of the blues, girl,

and you, better than most,

can sing them so as to make even

Snakebelly rise out of that grave behind a Louisiana prison kennel,

and burn the ears off them hounds,

the noses off their faces,

and have that fat little squat warden chewing his cowboy hat brim in

anxiety,

because there’s no caging up the blues,

imprisoning the song in people’s hearts,

none of that, no ma’am.

And what I sing to the world

is get up off that

“I haven’t experienced the clubs and cages and bloody streets,”

because if not you than yours will,

a son, a daughter, no one escapes

another man’s hatred, another woman’s bigotry,

we all suffer it down the road a bit,

we meet what we most tried to hide from,

we encounter it when answering the door;

In one way or another,

the bill collector arrives and hands us the bill.

And the time for explanations is gone,

vapid and sordid self-flattery because we handle language so well.

I don’t hear the cactus explaining itself,

nor the mimosa tree in the front yard saying why it is

the color it is,

nor the water as it streams downhill telling me it has to do so:

just is, just as we are and have been,

once we cut what we’ve been taught to believe,

get on our knees and hands and scrape up what we threw away

a long time ago, put back together that eggshell angel and prop it

on our shoulder, and by the winds and magic of our hearts,

it starts flapping wings and blessing us again.

And no,

there isn’t room for the I’m-confused chants,

for the yeah-what-about-me snivels,

for the fear that comes from talking out

in places and in front of people

who pay your salary—that noose around my neck,

I chew right through that piece of limp frayed rope,

I saw through their words and found a nest of fanged lies,

I touched their flesh and it was colder

than an ice tray in the fridge—

no room for anything

except my beautiful sister, beautiful woman that you are,

to love yourself and sing your songs

that come from a river way below the stone and the fancy clad

feet of the rich,

that black molten fire that is the tongue of all birthing origins,

that song that kept us alive,

that protected us against the predators,

the one our mothers hummed a thousand years ago

when they carried us

in a time when dinosaurs grumbled the blues.

Thirty-Two

I am

a cut-tongued sparrow

perched on concertina wire barbs

that crown the dawn

with thorns.

Prisons scab the fields

beyond each city

where even poets turn their backs

on the deafening noise of cut-tongued sparrows.

Flesh and bones forced to speak in silence,

flesh used as paper to write upon,

flesh used as a battlefield

to tear and puncture and gash and mutilate

but so resilient that gas chambers

and thousands of watts of high-voltage lightning

must be used to burn and scorch,

while on every utility wire

vast flocks of cut-tongued sparrows

mourn with their bilingual warbling

the deaths of young prisoners.

Picture a painting

of sparrows

flustering around a feeder,

embedded in each seed

a tiny razor

that slices their tongue

to silence their song.

Blood in the water,

in the city,

scattering blood

on the idyllic lotus blossoms

in the fountain pond.

We’ve sensed how the world is so inclined

to serve the privileged

and starve the poor,

but we do nothing,

tsk-tsking

the wasteland of corpses

on the evening news,

vowing to build higher walls,

vote more cops,

more prisons

as the cut-tongued sparrows

flutter at street-corner ledges

birthing demons that will maul the future, our children. . . .

Thirty-Three

Yesterday, I went to see this seventeen-year-old Dene kid

sentenced to thirty-five years

hard prison time.

After I gave the keynote address

to GED graduates,

talking a little to the rest of the inmates

on the bleachers, kids in khakis, crew cuts, tattoos.

A counselor asked me if I’d talk to Yazzi,

locked down in high security.

They brought him out into a small room—

the counselor, the warden, a couple of guards—

sneakers, T-shirt, and beige khakis,

he trembled when our eyes met,

he was me

twenty-five years ago

me with no hope, me with brown eyes,

me, totally lost and confused and scared.

I told him he was not going to do those thirty-five alone,

I’d be with him all the way,

I’d carry him through the dark time, shoulder him

when despair consumed him,

we had to do this together, he and I:

Yazzi and Jimmy,

brothers in soul,

and I didn’t care what he’d done,

there’s nothing to be ashamed of,

he is my Dene brother,

and I’ll inspire him to draw on panos (handkerchiefs),

write poetry,

share his despair and dreams and love,

be with him

as if he were me and I were him—

both of us will track our demon footprints into us,

vigilantly waiting their appearance.

Stay true to yourself, Yazzi,

keep faith in your heart,

rejoice quietly in your vision

reconcile your soul with the Great Creator,

let Mother Earth accompany you,

take the bars and stones of your cell and prison wa

braid the stones and bars like beads around the plants and flowers

of your soul and heart,

pray hard, the hard prayers

that must pass your lips

with a lifetime of hurt

and shatter them with flowers

cracking stones.

You and I, prisons they transfer you to,

my poems will follow like wind-whirling laughter

to make you smile;

my poems will carry your foods, the aromas of Indian bread and corn and chili

savors reaching your nose, making you smile;

and my words will hungrily knock at your dream’s door,

offering you a rope to escape;

I’ll pull you up

from the merciless brutality

of prison time,

and our spirits tied together,

I will scream with you at your keepers

weep with you at the tragedies,

devoutly pray with you at night,

uttering forgiveness, begging blessings,

for humble sight to see through the long dark nights;

two flames flickering in the windstorm,

keeping each other lit when one goes out,

as savage tears convulse from our eyes,

I’ll shake my head like a wild horse

galloping freely through the prairies,

letting go of remorse and guilt

for wrongs committed.

We’ll put those drug-crazed drunken days behind us,

we’ll strengthen our conviction and integrity,

we’ll not wallow in self-pity,

we’ll respect our pain and hurt,

and we’ll stay the course, good brother, cherishing our love of life,

our volcano souls

the source of fire beginning,

the original source of the waterfall’s innocent leaping and feeding rivers—

You and me, Yazzi, we’ll make it!

We’ll have our modest rewards and humble achievements,

we’ll appreciate what our senses absorb,

we’ll stretch our minds over the land

like a night sky discovering new stars,

wandering as dreamers in search of connection

to the fire, for a place to rest, one warrior

to another warrior.

Listen to me—

we can shape our sadness

into a tree,

our tears into white/black eagle feathers

our hurt into hawk claws,

our hope into hummingbird beaks,

and even at times we’ll fly so high we’ll bruise our skin against

the sun,

we’ll bathe in the moon glow, having never felt so much freedom,

Stick with me, Yazzi,

we can do it;

we can dance our birthing thanks between light and dark,

we can merge the boundaries of freedom and imprisonment,

we can piece the fragments of ourselves together again,

we can transform the darkness into a lightness,

a succulence, that life

bites into making us part of all things,

opening our wings, you one, me one,

we’ll fly together, a blur of beings, creating ourselves anew with

flight!

Good brother, don’t lose hope!

Thirty-Four

No matter how many poems you tear up,

no matter how you use all your power and money

to quiet the voices of freedom,

to diminish their poetry, to discredit them,

to exclude them from your reviews,

to burn their videos, to trash their audio tapes,

to use language as a weapon to destroy their integrity,

to label them, stereotype them as vulgar or obscene,

no matter how many academics you pay

to parrot your politics in book reviews and scholarly papers,

your fear and hysteria and accusations

will not silence their voices,

will not stop their words from reaching the people,

their free minds and golden spirits will always triumph,

will always be discovered

by people struggling to live with honor,

by dancers and singers seeking vigorous expression,

by painters enchanted with color and metaphor,

philosophers dazzled by original insight,

and teachers who want to instruct without compromise.