l.
I sit alone, a bald cricket, in a bar on “poetry” night, face in a bottle,
singing the amber waves of beer. Poetry is the excuse,
as good as any. Be true to my art. But this is not what keeps
me here. It’s the way tequila germinates inside like a knotted tree,
the way bodies darken into a sort of sunken beauty,
lights low and voices high, the way I can swim between these
back-lit walls. There is death to meet us, swollen hands
to wake us, a life that is falling into the gaps in the floor under our feet.
There are levels of delusions not even churches can attain.
Alchemists straddle bar stools, transformers and transformed,
awaiting my arrival into their webs of splintered stories
while manacled to curled ghosts called gin. I want to trace
the lies on women’s skins, to vanish in their wine-drenched eyes. I want to be flute and whisper, pubic hair and cumshot,
to warrant enough attention so they try to run me over in their cars.
I pause between lingering words, imagining their flight above me,
words to pull into my mouth, to drown into a shot glass,
words of infinite pain, a pain without words; words that claw
at the ceiling, that cough up blood, words that vomit
out of me in back alleys beside rat shit and wet cardboard;
words that slap me silly, that want to rifle through a man’s wallet
and slip a hand beneath a woman’s skirt; words that eat tacos de pollo,
with extra-hot salsa, that play muted trumpet into the reeking streets,
words to drown out the el train rumbling overhead, drowning out my
words.
Crying can’t speak. Tears only fall into empty palms. Tears & nights.
Night becomes the texture of memory, a humid breath glistening
perspiration on my forehead. Wandering from table to table,
my glass held unsteadily in my hand, I stave off hungers
even a double-champ cheeseburger with bacon cannot do.
Hungers for my friend’s girlfriend, blue-eyed, dark-haired,
Polynesian-and-Irish, whose fingers I reach out for, whose hair
I want to shampoo, whose body I long to tread upon as if it were
autumn woods or a stretch of beach, with my toes deep into damp sand.
Every smile is a door, every glance a large bed to lay my head, a pillow
of eyelashes to soften the fall. Tequila, ron, blue whiskey for a blue
emotion. Mammary glands to memory glands. Each recalling a déjà vu
of startled intent. There are feels I always want to feel. There are voices
I would rip faded curtains to hear. There are faces to break
chrome-backed glass for, reflections of a liquid stare into millenniums
of stares. I’m dawdling on the edge of this sea in a glass, this last vestige
of my mother’s fears, this grandfather poison that poisoned
my grandfather, this nectar of dried screams, this bruised cant,
this woman who presses her nipples to my cheek, whose chatter
cannot be climbed, whose kisses are stained lullabies, who tells me
I belong, although I cannot fit, who dares the fool’s lament,
the call and response of night crawlers, the tones beneath my rambling,
who has become the last shriek of tequila dreaming,
whom I now grieve, ambling to the funeral tune of a child’s cry
pulsing silent yet determined inside me.
O for beauty’s fists to pommel this mask into itself,
for taste that is candy and not porcelain,
for wisps of saliva to wither on my hair and my chin,
for words to nuzzle and soak my tongue,
for language’s naked prowlness to enter these shoes,
for a bald cricket’s lyrical death on a dance floor.
5.
…when the wasted poems become dawn and are not gray-speckled haze,
when the upholding structures collapse from their perjuries,
when the money-system no longer determines worth
and purgatory is no longer your driveway
when the factory-spawn stops lactating ‘burbs,
whose milk is dioxin, drying up earth’s blood,
when all value is inside of you,
when the wasteland’s raped-terrain bursts green,
when the creative heart is the only blossoming.
7.
Wading through the lush of memory, through speechless seconds,
seeing myself on the backhand of past lives, crumbling emotions
surround me, as this obsessive and irresponsible poetry man beckons
to write. To tell truths. Oh such a liar. I’m a sleeveless
jacket in a closet of worn clothes; I’m the incision of scarring verbs
across the faces of all my loves. This Mexican who is a stranger in Mexico,
this pocho who hates milk with his coffee, juice with his vodka, who speaks
English with an East L.A. accent and Spanish with an East L.A. accent.
This Tarahumara’s lost son, this graveled tongue, this ghost
beneath every ruin, rising like jaguar’s breath in a tropical storm.
All sacrifices reside in me, all jagged chests, all virgin hosts,
with the wreckage of two massive oceans, all bloods commingling,
this Moor whose poetry stains the library walls, this armor-plated
mail-wearing, sword-thrusting, Andalusian who flew landward
through Iberian coasts and those of Cem-Anahuac.
I am Cortez’s thigh, I am the African beard, I am the long course hair
of Chichimeca skulls. I am Xicano poet, a musician who can’t play
music as a musician is a poet who works in another language.
There is a mixology of brews within me. I’ve tasted them all, still fermentin
as grass-high anxieties. I am rebel’s pen, rebel’s son,
father of revolution in verse. I am capitalism’s angry Christ,
techno-Quetzalcoatl, toppling the temples
of modern thievery, of surplus value in word-art
—exploited, anointed, and perhaps double-jointed.
There’s a brown Goddess in my eye, a Guadalupana for the broken red
earth. The sacred is too sacred for walled cathedrals,
for incensed and baroque martyrs in vested garbs, for pulpit schemers
and sweat lodge fakers and garbled spirtualists on the best-selling lists.
I am disciple and elder. I am rockero and hip hop bandit,
rapping Aztlanese in-between brick-lined texts.
What do I know? What blazing knowledge can I spear?
Who can burn with me and not get burned?
Violence used to be great solace, alcohol my faithful collaborator, scratchin
dank words from stale corners. Now there are whole cities in my gardens,
Mexika drums pulsing from my temples. Saxophone riffs streaming
from the sky like a waterfall into the canyons of my body.
Walls carry my name, walls and their luminant fractures.
Walk with me then. Walk with me to the Maya. Walk with me along
headstones
of past loves, past plans, long-gone junctures. Walk with me through
the forest of collective remembering, shamed and honored by the trees.
I’m no immigrant. I belong because I belong. I’m no shaggy stranger.
I’m the holy villain, the outlawed saint,
the most Godless and therefore dearest to the mystery.
Where suicide is not solution. Where poems
No longer puncture the phantoms.
Where walking with me is to become brethren to rain
and night sweats and the betrayed.
this disjointed sneering
this lifting of cranial foam
this museum of oppressions
this waiting to be held, to be a musical note this coursing through a rapture of voices
this clogged heart in the traffic of hearts