G0d bl3$$ the DeaD

2010-03-20T06:29:00.000-07:00

How I Came to Be Down

There is an altar standing in a hallway.

It’s him. Surrounded by Virgencitas and velas.

At dinner, Big Sleepy was kind and spoke

of a book we both had read. A book I knew

from school. Farmworkers and pesticides

and peaches, laying together on floorboards,

two bodies “clasped together like hands in prayer,”

and the papeles guarded by the glovebox.

Perplexed, his camarada, a vato whom

he’s known for almost as long as I’ve been alive,

allows his brows to reveal his consternation.

That night was the first time I’d eaten parrillada.

It was the first time I’d worn a suit.

The first time I’d been to Olvera Street.

Never mind 3 a.m.

Never mind the boulders and the train.

In the hallway, I will later learn it was

Patricio peering up at me: Was I down enough?

Did I know what I was getting into?

Did I know how badly all of this could end?

But it’s what transpires on the bed that

spares me. Each piece of his drapes

has been lain out, the pants flat and neatly

tucked, the tie and estirantes doubled over

as if from exhaustion, the vest and chain

and saco ready to go home.

At the edge of the bed, he sits in boxers and

tall socks and a white shirt and the discourse

of so many tattoos trying to make themselves

heard. A plastic cleaner’s bag crinkles,

because he has removed his shoes and, after

wiping the black down with a cloth, has placed them

in their box. Here, let me help you, he goes.

Already, he has gathered my coat when he reaches

to unsnap these estirantes I clutch like trucha

about my pecho.

C/S

2010-03-19T06:06:00.001-07:00

Monte Carlo

for a Torcido

Outside a Southside cantina, and I, though

furious, am huffing, as I’ve run six bold blocks,

gold spackled in a patina across

jaw and tooth and septum, am five, again,

and curious, again, and it’s the torcido alone

at the far end of the bar with the

marvelous bigote and the Jesucristo tattoos

and the black Monte Carlo of my boyhood,

breathing heavily from a chrome pipe,

all the while glints of 2x4s and giants

and the slickness of my scalp seen in those

side panel doors, and I’ve peeked in that door

before (cousin Ernesto putting his dick shaft

into the rim of a Gatorade bottle, father

on top of a woman who wasn’t my mother,

a silver chain belonging to a lover’s trick

left at my sink) to see things I shouldn’t look at after

having bolted out my Fair Avenue canton,

hurdling six city blocks, thinking only of that torcido,

the veins of his forearms and his thorns,

and huffing old tinta like a maniaco out of the bote.

2010-03-17T12:11:00.001-07:00

Guayaberas

In my closet, they hung like spirits.

Six of them.

I remember the black one and the blue one, because those he wore most.

I remember the brown one because it matched his favorite tapa, and the beige one, because I have a photo of us after church, leaning in on the hood of a green ranfla, and he’s wearing it.

In that foto, I’m holding a Superman monito, and the jonque behind us is gnarled metal, a jungle of dead shit.

And the white one, I recall, only because it’s the one my Tia Reynita gave to me when he died, and my moms (and me, virtue of my blood) wasn’t invited to his burial.

2010-02-20T18:47:00.000-08:00

Men Blur

There were ice chests to lift and muscles to grapple with.

Cliffs as well. Men stream, muscles and haloes,

and blur. Horseshoes and triceps. Muscles that knot.

In August, the white ball above, a furious blot plot

high, will shimmer enough as to cause

the emerald to soon lose half its volume.

On boats tethered together like dogs out for a stroll,

men blur. Boats stall. Gyrations, hollering, inebriations.

Locking mouths together as underfed fish to hooks,

lips find nooks in muscle that has turned colors

like leaves disintegrating into stubble. Men blur. On this

choppy sheet of green, men float and blur.

That emerald: misshapen, murky thing,

an irregular watery gem whose cut

none other may mimic, illuminates my trek,

then, from the cover of thistle, where after giving time

with J., we are cuffed and dragged off by police.

Indecencies and an aching overtakes my foot.

It all blurs: house, job, colleagues.

Only the jag of limestone knows this aching part of the foot.

2010-02-20T18:29:00.001-08:00

The Pit Bull and the Fingerprint

Clambering among the freeways,

I am barefoot and without my ride.

Asphalt on either side of me,

The awful parting that has occurred

on the inside of my mouth has

Morphed—unglazed, summoning

an explication, summoning a fat tongue

or a prick:

I have something here.

Pillars and pilgrimages to the grey colossus

bridging the body and wind

and back to the ferris wheel pier where

that box of bones blew away so many Mays ago,

suddenly, sullenly, these fixtures

have become more fitting, more tactile,

more unguent than leaving behind these lofty things,

things like horizons

that spill sunlight into the gossamer foams of the Gulf

whilst monstrous pit bulls lead pelons and part the orangest

depths of Port Street. Rhomboid muscles and thick wings

bulge into daft clouds like those of buffaloes and hellhounds,

and their Dickies-clad owners nod chins, wipe sweat

with creased white toallas. Supple fingers invitingly caress

scalps and scapulars, and a pelon smirks with the whole

half of his mouth: Demon, Clown, Creeper, Sleepy,

Big Smokey, Mosco, Casper.

I have something here.

And I’ve tucked it like a coin just beneath the sternum,

just between the lungs and my loins.

And I am bound to run the gamut of disease,

unthinking my faults, my foes, my feet.

And I’ve found that smallest chamber of laying back

on the bare colchon of my homeboy’s canton to an open

throat and good brains, and this is the coin that can run me

and ruin me and return me to good times.

And with this new knowledge, I am bound to hone

the huge bone of a Clown’s fingerprint

smudged on the dashboard of my Silverado,

fixed like teeth marks onto the silvery torso

of my Art Laboe collection and my Guadalupe

clamped about my throat.

I have something.

It is the foil crushed inconspicuously into a sofa cushion,

a real crystalline skyline, a night without ice:

I have something.

This belongs to us, I once was told of a house,

A barrio, a room that did not proffer much else but

a deep throat, thoughts of the past,

and the promise of a Payasito’s penance.

2010-02-20T17:45:00.001-08:00

Pit Bulls

The tall fence does not exist

when I vault over it, Dollar Store laundry basket in tow,

and land, undetected, in Nike chanclas,

basketball shorts, and a mushroom head of dust

(at 6:38 a.m. on a Saturday in May 2008;

the sun, giant orb, already

blaring on top of this raggedy backyard

on the near Westside of town, jeopardizing our intent).

And huffing (Fuckin hurry, Joe), while accounting for

seven of what once had been nine pups,

my lover hoisted the rickety black bed-liner of a truck, which

had served as a purported shelter for the dogs

(safely in our possession, we already had the mama pit;

after a week of feeding her on the sly (cruelly, she’d been

tied to this fence, the chokehold of a rope tether cutting deeply

into her neck flesh; hence, the seventeen unanswered calls to city

animal control, the emails shot to the news stations regarding

animal cruelty and neglect, the famous councilwoman’s

special request after viewing the skin and bones of cruelty

revealed by the disturbing pics I forwarded), the owner had

moved her tie, so that the dog couldn’t, even with the most

formidable efforts of her neck muscle, reach the food and water

bowls we’d stashed for her in the overgrown alley

(GOD BLESS YOU, a handwritten sign left behind

on a discarded food wrapper placed beside a mound

of her vomit had read the day prior)

warily, the dog feasted on kibble and regurgitated

a mush of what her twenty-two pound frame couldn’t manage,

and frequently, she peered upward, contemplating

perhaps the fates of her seven remaining babies

not to mention the intents of these two bald,

tattooed men who were either saving or pilfering

her offspring while fending off, with daily advocacy

and early morning fence-jumping,

her own imminent death by starvation), firmly

over my 5‘7” shoulders, so that I could pluck each

flea-infested pup, bellies rotund, and eyes squeezed shut,

placing each tiny body in the tightened

confines of this white, plastic receptacle

functioning, now, with a bath towel, as a makeshift crib,

the whole time thinking to myself: Maybe they’re gonna wake up

suddenly and think I’m jacking their

fifty-bucks-a-pop-in-the-WalMart-parking-lot

commodities (the rest of us know as pups) and

shoot my ass dead. How would KSAT 12 report

that shit? Fuck. Almost missed one. There in the corner

by that old-ass, upturned sofa, and throughout the day,

I keep creeping back, peering apprehensively through slats in

the wood of our fence to see if I could locate

the two pups we’d counted previously,

which now were vanished. Later, we decided

to call this brave one Monster due to his gargantuan size

and this white-headed one Ling-Ling,

because of her Mestiza eyes,

this one Lil Sid with his pronounced dome head and

then Sweet P. and Rat, Big Cooter, and finally, Krunk Lil Evaine.

The mama bully we named Kimora, and one night,

while my lover slept, she crept her slight frame up onto

the hueco of our bed, nuzzled up child-like

between his chest and mine and sighed (a hard-ass, hard-life sigh);

I knew then we’d keep her as our own.

2010-02-15T15:43:00.001-08:00

Clorox

In the long lineage of ribs,

boneless ribs, containing cotton

but no cartilage,

to which connects no sternum,

no clavicle, no ligament of heart

or lung, then, this pair of Chucks, folded over

and accompanied by tallboy calsitenes,

chones, a wifebeater loaned or left behind,

don’t matter when observing one’s tio shine

and his homeboy shine

and that fine-ass vato in the blue Cutty at the car wash shine

and your jefa’s old school dude shine

and your homegirl’s brother Guicho shine

so firme, so fine--

one’s homeboy crease down so fine. Then,

this pair of tongues that whisper,

“This way. Asinita, bro.”

2010-02-15T15:27:00.000-08:00

Hanging Bed Sheets

That man you’re fighting with,

He called tonight

While you’re tugging shoestrings

off the skinny clotheslines of a trailer park childhood

and peculiarity bloats the ombligo of sky,

beneath the cackle of splintery electric poles and

tweaked-out Clowns swapping bumps, beneath stars

that droop like bolts of sweat,

you’re pinching salt near eyelids and

sponging boot prints off your cheek, and

haphazardly, the man inside me is wiping

scuff marks from floorboards

where the dancing occurred.

In thunderstorms and nightmares,

My abuelo used to strip our beds and

hang the bed sheets, stained and

fending off impotency, over all the mirrors of the house.

Other nights, he’d clamber up the roof and piss a

golden pain as we’d all switch off turns attempting

to coax him back to bed. And that’s how I learned

to hang bed sheets in front of mirrors.

That man you’re fighting with,

He called tonight.

2010-02-12T17:59:00.000-08:00

Sleepy and the Rock, 1993

a memory I lost but now have found

“See this rock.” Perched between stout fingers,

a homeboy shows off the rock, and I check the shit out

like it’s fucking magic what he holds in the

sandpaper that is a hand.

“This rock ain’t shit,” he goes.

“Til I put my arm behind it, guey.

And then, shit, watcha.

Watch what this little bitch can do.”

Intrigue flutters. Wild, gilded eyes.

I’m doubled over. A day before Valentine's.

Torpedoing and a soft whistle

across overgrown yard and a gate that won’t shut,

shattering a toothless window to an old house

that’s empty now except for the imprints of tecatos

who shoot endless brown there and

fuck and nod off and stave off life.

Now, I’m watching that rock.

Seeing it spin. Watchando.

Huffing, still.

Sleepy grabbing on me and dissolving.

Seeing it bring shit down, he goes,

“Life fucks up fast, manito.”

I ain’t huffing no more.

The sting that overwhelmed my lungs dissipates.

I’m following a homeboy who has sped ahead

of me on a rigged-up ten-speed, a homeboy who

swallows from a tallboy Schaefer as he pedals

and will put a mouth on me in the dreams that keep

me company when everyone else has failed.

The sun is hot like fuck.

The eyes of la vecina fisgona swarm around me, and

the trains howl like dogs.

My breathing gaffs. Desire stifles amongst so many

locusts and then rises up again like perhaps maybe

when Sleep invites me to kick back at his pad,

this shit might really happen,

all the cards fall into place finally.

But they don’t.

And instead, I’m here chasing, smashing

open another beer I don’t want,

always chasing the shit that I can never get.

2010-01-31T15:35:00.001-08:00

Full Immersion Baptism (in Brake Dust)

Los Angeles, 1996

In the pocket between a woman and her gallo, I was born.

Under a bridge.

Under a hard moon (alone, a fat white coin

not shining enough in a sky outshone by a city

and its crazies, its crooks, its

Concrete and intestines of rie bar), and above

these sleek and bulky buildings,

above these urban arteries bulging

of asphalt and exhaust,

the air glimmers inorganically and

has grown black as crow feathers.

My baptism, then.

Atop a rooftop, around a grip of dendrites

that snap and click (magically, synaptically)

inside a skull vividly recollecting his scalp

pressed watchfully, obligingly, to mine

on colchones that smelled of Eternity and Chicanismo

(one floor below the roof--the apartment

with the altar to la Virgen honoring Patricio

and the Daytons stacked high like coins (in the bedroom)),

the city has risen up.

Atop a rooftop one night in August,

where Cyndi Lauper crooning

for those of East Hollywood who’d open their ears

is too much to bear:

“You with the sad eyes/ don’t be discouraged...”

My baptism, then.

At the moment two cars collide.

At the moment he surrenders.

At the moment the cuffs strike wrist bone and ulna:

A high-speed chase where

I lost someone (lost for good, for

crimes, for carga, for my

epiphany (what I’ll call that

crestfallen hour I sat speechless on the

empty sofa while tv cameras

and newscasters and ghetto birds

announced a man’s flaws to the viewing world)

to come to me like a giant bird plunging earthward off

the oddly perpendicular perch

from where he’s despised me;

(never got to deliver mi despedida,

or say my last goodbye, sit atop a rooftop with

a vato and swoon to Cyndi Lauper again).

In the pocket between a man and his Regal, I was born.

Under a tower.

Under a big white sun and the Hollywood sign.

Under heavy lights and an observatory.

Under eleven hundred stars (uneven, unruly even for

the most disheveled of constellations

attempting futilely to pull themselves together

amid the weight of an entire freeway

and its wet iridescence (a recollection of his scalp

and his shine and that skin up around the canthus

of his eyes in a rainstorm as he smiles, and we push

to catch the last bus out of Hawthorne.

Despite the time, the silver velour beneath us

is his backseat, which tenderly composes itself,

assembling in the form of arms and lungs and

other things that bring people together,

hold them there, keep us from coming

unyoked, unaligned)).

In the pocket between a man and his Regal,

a woman and her gallo, I was born.

Under a bridge.

Under a hard moon.

Under a big white sun and the Hollywood sign.

2010-01-11T20:17:00.001-08:00

Hog

Tied, this man I know

had his belly pressed to asphalt

and had his wrists, thin and bony,

tethered atop his spine

(ankles there, too)--

traps and black tar and thighs

override a 9:30 sky:

while hosed over him: orange,

orange, the iridescent orange,

marvelous orange, which those

of us birthed in barrios and on calles know

(so pretty, if he was not so forcibly bound

and spitting up sludge over lips

and chin).

“Why?? Why??”

Another part of his heart arrives.

I never knew the young vato’s name,

yet, his namesake was known. They called

him Speedy, and he lived someplace down

the road, and surely, this one called

Speedy must have known

what his old man was up to.

Must have been able to figure

it out. “What the fu...!?!?”

His young vato’s voice, a harpoon.

And then, the youngster gets balls

and thinks he’ll rush to where

the chotas have his old man pinned;

“Get back! Get back!”

A scuffle. Turmoil.

I remember the way my own cora

put a fist on me that was soon a grip

above the crux of elbow and hindsight

on which I’d soon, like that youngster,

rest the brunt of all my questions and all

my kites.

On the ground, skin glimmers.

Face busted up and sausage-like,

not palpable, not meaningful.

“This ain’t our shit,” my own old

man goes. We climb our stairs.

Inside, we can hear the shouts.

When the shots come, I don’t even watch

from the flimsy bed sheet

draped grandly to the tall window

of our Lorena Street canton.

In the morning, I watch an anciana

hose the place on the concrete

where Speedy’s vato gave up his blood.

2010-01-11T20:00:00.000-08:00

And This, After I'd Hit Him up for Some Carino (2009)

2009-12-24T13:01:00.001-08:00

Balloons and Boulders

What is crime, I ask.

What is punishable if unavoidable, you go.

Say the man is twenty-nine

or twenty-five, but looks moth-eaten,

cheeks as sawtoothed as cliffs.

Say he is six foot two.

Say he is car-less and comfortless

(and that explains his females,

the appetites).

Say his arms have gone black,

intricate twists and helixes where

needles have pricked and poked him.

Say his eyes are starved.

Say his eyes are illiterate, his lungs rash.

From a window, I watch.

From a window, I count.

Seven cars in one afternoon.

A stream of them: coming! coming!

There are loud women who knock handsomely,

and men, groomed, silent as spiders,

weaving caliche into stunning lace,

their urges clutched to navels as another

would wield cash. This is the envelope of unloading:

Allotments and the burden of a balloon

as hulking as boulders.

2009-12-21T17:25:00.001-08:00

Asphalt

I’m seven.

Barefoot, my mother runs after Raul’s Ford.

Don’t leave me, babe!

Don’t leave me!

At 33, she calls.

Frantic. Dying sounds

conveyed via cellphone.

She ran over my cat.

In the street, the cat is convulsing.

If I’m crying, perhaps he won’t

yell at me, she thinks.

I’m sure of it.

It’s worked with other men.

At 33, I leave my dinner

and lock myself in a room.

I’m twenty-one.

Puke stains the tops of my feet.

I didn’t quite make it to the sink.

Don’t die on me, mijo.

Why are you gonna die on me!?

Haphazardly, I wipe the yellow

mush, enough of it, not to track

it to the bath.

At 3 a.m., I’ve parked crookedly.

In the street, I am barefoot.

Enough tequila in me to set

her voice ablaze.

I’m five.

My father fights with my mother and

leaves with my uncle.

Move, move! she insists.

I’m pushed aside. Having

just waved goodbye to them, my hand

goes through the rip in the grey screen.

Why don’t you just fuck him, too!

She yells, and the neighbors duck their

heads out trailer doors and

manufactured screenless windows.

His truck speeds off, and she’s left

huffing the dust.

Such heaps of asphalt to rub away.

2009-12-17T20:41:00.000-08:00

Sweeping after Having Remembered Mi Abuela

At the sink, the talavera

has clanked, broken water, and

chipped so that I must hide it, while

noiselessly, you sit,

paint splat across an elbow, the

10 o’clock news rattling on and on

about armed robbery and wrecks--

the pit bull curled like a

rattlesnake at your boot.

ii.

There was a time when

we were in Mexico, and I’d packed

our plates and the bowls I

promised to purchase each trip we

made; when we moved to

this house I never wanted,

these plates stayed put away,

same newsprint wrapping,

same cardboard box,

same thing that happened,

I sometimes fear,

to the knuckles we once called my heart.

iii.

In the bed, you sleep. The dogs

snore and sigh. A pillow

covering your face from the

whisk of the broom I run over the

hickory floors you laid last winter.

Te vas a casar con una viuda.

You will marry a widow, I recall my Indian

abuela stutter as she pushed

a bundle of yellow straw

over my unprotected feet

when she would come to the States

to visit us and get money

for those of us who stayed behind.

Ironically, it is you who married

the widower.

2009-11-25T08:16:00.001-08:00

Chorizo and Clouds

This morning’s chorizo blackens,

and these eyelids haven’t even slid open

enough to admonish the date--

In the shower, the milk has soured.

The soap hardens in the cold.

December isn’t too far off.

Fantastically, the steam lifts me

to a world of clouds,

wisps and tatters and heavenly shit,

and I climax enthusiastically with images

of you and a younger version of me

trekking among these clouds,

away from these splintery walls

with holes pushed through,

this hole in the unfinished floor that once

nearly swallowed me and two dogs whole.

At your seat, I’ve arranged a plate.

Orange, now, from the egg.

The corn already has mixed itself in

crisply. A long time ago, you would have

kissed me and smiled that half-curl of the mouth

you’re known for, then,

put your hands up underneath the peel

of my shirt to feel my heart

before you ate. I would have breathed

confessional paragraphs into your neck.

Yes, that was a long-ass time ago,

you’d likely say.

2009-11-13T16:47:00.001-08:00

Birds and Buicks

and there’s this road,

birds on it

blocking bikes and buicks

birds gouging pits

in asphalt, pits like sockets

like craters

like searching worms out

of rock; and there’s

this homeboy

I used to go to

when my own sick birds

dig into those

things I’ve offered

other vatos only to

have them dismissed;

things like a ride

from county one

night after a warrant got

served after a fight

after throwing my

ass outta my own house

onto concrete and steps

and that terrible scratch

etched into the back

where I slid into a nail

that burst right outta the floor;

there’s this road

where a cruise

is the next best thing for

a vato with too much alone

time, too much attachment

to what was his in the past;

this road where a bird preys

upon a dead thing left between

F150s, sun, and traffic cones.

2009-11-11T19:43:00.001-08:00

Back When I Was a Chavalon, Fair Ave.

2009-11-08T10:31:00.001-08:00

Georgia

for J.

And in the afternoon, the hardness

ascends from thighs. And this is a time

for telling what’s here amongst us four.

Within the growing and these ventricles that

Surrender their girths to throats and tendencies--

I hold his cap to my mouth,

And my chin winces.

Eyes wish this would last—this

Don’t go. Don’t go. Repeating itself

Beneath the root of the tongue

as if the syllables

Alone could manufacture time.

This is it, then: the bone’s prayer.

Lungs, lungs.

My face has his scent.

2009-11-08T10:20:00.001-08:00

Into a Fold

Of dick skin, I pressed a murmur and

imagined a big pearl.

Alive and warm in my hand

And then into the passage of throat.

Gloating, it swam.

A December passed over me like jetsam and rockets.

Armada of nimbus and space ships,

they came and lifted my big pearl.

Pearl of all the ocean.

Pearl of the Gulf and the Nueces and

the arroyo just east of the Courts where I come

to remember things.

His ear wasn’t there but he could hear me.

From my toes that grabbed at planks of flooring--

vibrations, an echo, a shoe marooned at the

far end of the room.

Sitting on his belly, I rock.

I, too, can give pearls,

Which I do: a messy string of them encased in

Chest hair and cachete.

I pant. I squat. I feign I would

Not miss the man or my pearl.

A melody. I dug for one that I could hum or

tap or suck on and that would occupy me

For the night. Toothless giggle.

Stare at the tangle of pearls in my palm.

Smug ruthless crinkle of it:

inhabitable, drying.

2009-11-08T09:13:00.001-08:00

Ovals

We creep up softly to the monte obscured by

Flores Street and freeways.

Urban comets whiz above. Taillights

and the spectacle of a Tower watching out

for us.

ii.

I could change shit for you.

Stay. Dig the meaty parts of your calves

Into my shoulder blades. Sigh.

Press your feet into my throat. I could make

Ovals in the sod. Endlessly. Irrevocable

impressions, tattoos and toes.

iii.

I could make it so that you’re the only one.

Could conjure an arroyo to make mud that

will mask our tire troughs and raise the

earth-scent. The 10 has torn hapless gaps

into this photograph:

atop my bike, this colchón and my

Southside longing.

2009-10-31T18:01:00.000-07:00

Saliva to Thread, Sternum, and Scalp

an escapulario has snapped;

kneeling, fingers fumble,

nimbly wishing to

fuse the broken thread

whole

traffic lights do not wait;

midday, a sedulous task:

a tallboy and lotto;

PikNik doors swing shut and

open in unwitting applause;

shuffling feet miss

him.

I could offer the young vato

what I have around my

neck;

he will soon find saliva

will not fuse

a broken escapulario.

I could offer homeboy

a hand, the repose of a

vato’s shoulder,

words of advisement

(trucha, homito. looking at me

like that, you already know

the bulk of what there is to know).

I could offer

my scalp, stubble, salt, and

pressed to

the slick section of his neck

where he will dream

of others after me

(the permanence of ink si vale),

could offer

the sternum, where he

has never felt a vato’s lips form

crisp ovals, has never felt

that crushing weight of a vato’s

goatee inching up your spine that

first time, where

the prick of his name enjoining

the wall of your cora is a

new thing;

could show him my own

shit, those losses and aguantos

where another’s

letters dangle atop cora flesh

and rib;

(be down. know how to not fuck a good thing up,

yet, know when to say fuck it and leave

that shit behind)

and then,

my own saliva

might accept

his own scraped scalp;

Clown, I will learn they call him.

he will tell me it all,

and intently, I will listen;

(can’t ever say nobody ever gave you a chance)

glistening brown, scarred,

his scalp touching

my thigh or the flat of my belly,

a twist of the mouth

sets that space inside him

where the

thread has broken

ablaze

what’s your pit’s name? he says.

Cucuy, I say.

parking lot has emptied, a place

as vacant as my bed.

works best if you just put it on,

make a knot.

(some things, pa, can never be fixed)

I spit. crack my neck, go slow.

2009-10-31T16:15:00.000-07:00

Sweets

Entwine a mesquite. Surreptitious

embrace, potato vine and an eyelash—

(I wished for you. I did.)

Stunned, your turgid loops rile

whooping Cranes. Venting

Thistly neckbone suspicions!

To pace and pause, the rigor of

so furtively happening upon your

ventricle of a leaf. This sweet vine harnesses.

It chides. Chokes. Climbs. And I’m

Imposing implausibility, now.

Juddering, halted growth!

From here, the potato vine world is

Ungainly, untrimmed. Friction is a pebble

Reciprocating for the improvement of

Gravity and a slack kidney

(I fear it will not heal).

Fathom pelvises and viboras, wobbly

Helixes, and adept spines.

Kindling is the mindlessness of

forgetting shit (street names

and lists), fodder of recuerdos,

torrents, really—

Foolish fuel, rambunctious neurons,

a tangle of dendrites and oily, jolly kites

amid Nino huffs and a Eucalyptus tree

that has lost its grip—

Elegance of condors and night trains,

Elegance of unflustered swine and tortillas

turning brownish.

(You’re at the bars, and I have not slept.)

2009-10-31T15:22:00.000-07:00

New Years underneath the Tower of Las Americas

Softly, in the dusk, a cholo is whispering to me;

Taking me back to the formica table of a prima’s tamalada,

where corn husks gather expectantly in the hard waters of

blue speckled tin, poised for smears of masa.

Dutifully, corn skins part themselves for the girth of warm pork

pinched in rows and mounds.

A window reveals condensation and palm fronds,

which quiver and quake, unaccustomed and yet, determined

to tolerate an Arctic wind inordinately thrust onto our streets.

A cholo whispering in the hours before the year unwinds itself,

the cold on us like a barrage of ants at my toes. Taking me back to when

the air was cold, and I stared at homeboy’s shoes

as he put the red of his lips to mine as the two of us huddled

in the dirt of the back yard as we threw out his tia’s trash.

A kiss that exploded in the form of clouds and candy canes and

the scent of new promesas. Later, keys jangling in tow,

I stared at his shoes again and at those of his Tio Juan,

a man as old as my own father whom I never knew,

a man thick with years and jokes and who torched metals.

Forged, joined, sewed the alloys violently into seams

and joints and unsightly buttons.

The moon belongs to us, the welder said of his wife, who nodded

at this sweet thing produced by his mouth, and folded

the corn husks, packing them tightly into a deep pot.

The New Years is a night of lovers.

Antes, we used to drive the loop and see what the city offered--

The most beautiful night in the history of the world. The tio toasted

generously to our health and finances and to love and to the Spurs.

As vibrantly as a skyline of sparks, the Spanish fluttered off his jaw.

Strangely, I thought of my own father.

This cholo whispering as we cruised the 10 to the 90 to 281 to the 35

alongside Brenton Wood and this vato’s homeboy and his heino, who’d

spent a year apart from his cora while he got sent away to the TYC.

Four of us agreeing with his Tio Juan on the blueblack beauty

of our city at night. Great and simple beginnings came upon us that year.

The appassionato of a midnight cruise thrown in a 1985 Regal.

Southside streets impassable because of smoke and explosions.

Rooftops and the black, naked limbs of oaks and

the hard grey lines and loops of all these freeways and

my heart as tall as the Tower of las Americas--

the skyline glimmering beneath the tonnage of so many man-made stars,

the sounds of so many cuetes, and a Fair Avenue apartment where the four

of us pledged love atop mattresses and other necessary things

amid the cold.

2009-10-24T07:12:00.001-07:00

Where I’m From (la Mera Neta)

I’m from cigarette smoke and kneeling on sea shells to recite Our Fathers as punishment for fighting, mouthing bad words, and talking back.

I am from altares to la Virgen de San Juan and nopalitos.

(Green, sizzling, cactus meat filled our plates at Lent.)

I am from Severa and Jose Rocha, from Martha Garcia and an unfaithful grandfather

from Saltillo, Coahuila, whose birth name never made it to me.

I am from running barefoot on the grey asphalt of night, street warmth

permeating my soles. I am from never believing my Mom’s boyfriends

were ever good enough for her.

I’m from bingo at the parish hall of the Immaculate Conception Church

and women who gather around telenovelas to discover things about themselves via

the characters on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday nights.

I am from Gregory, Texas, and East LA, from Lorena Street and Corpitos,

from the Southside of San Anto, Fair Avenue and Hot Wells Boulevard, from

the white dust of dirt-road trailer parks in Ingleside and Aransas Pass, Texas.

From broken bones and digging ditches, from rooster fights, food stamps,

and tattooed devotions to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

I am from tricked-out Oldsmobiles and Silverados pushed up on fat 20s.

From boxing lessons when I was twelve and metalflake glimmering

in the sun of a lowrider show that I never wanted to end.

From wanting to grow up to be like my Tios and my abuelito, imitating

their walk, their talk, their clothes, their placazos, their dreams.

I am from Guayabera shirts, estirantes, tapas, and Stacy Adams.

From creased-up Dickies and Ben Davis, Charlie Brown shirts and Nike Cortez.

I am from barbecues on Sunday afternoons with a hundred and one relatives

and fajitas, chorizo, brisket, rice, beans, and potato salad for days.

From rosaries whispered over sick relatives and unpaid bills--

cancer, diabetes, and money for the light bill that was lost in a street bet and

never found.

At the kitchen tables of my childhood, we played Loteria and prayed before Thanksgiving; we learned that my cousin David went to prison for armed robbery, that my cousin Rudy had died after being attacked by an army of ants, and

that my mom had developed cancer in her uterus.

I am from those hours of men, women, and children--

the waiting, the praying, the hoping.

2009-09-06T09:19:00.000-07:00

Notes on Manteca and Fists

It’s the flight of a beer can. The trajectory of a half-consumed Miller Lite. Witnessing this shit, I am six. I am spineless and sick.

A beer can cutting through air. Bird-like. Irretrievably launched. All silvery white and streaked boldly with gold and black.

These beer cans are rockets and starships.

The aluminum—I can smell it.

In my jaw. Stuck there in the folds of throat muscle and each of my many movements. In the tunnel of eyesight that lines up these years of vatos and violencia and this voice that has stomached shit. Aguantando. Peleando.

An intoxicated, furious flight of a beer can.

From my father’s jaw, vicious breath emerges. Maldiciones and mandados. His proclamations and demands are enormous worms. Enraged and gloating.

A beer can in full flight.

I am six years old.

Vatos. Violencia.

My moms standing in the doorway. Yelling something back at my father. Her hair that was as long as the river and the openness of her throat. Gritandole.

Great taste.

Less filling.

On my way to school, I can hear it. The sound of aluminum hitting bone. I remember the insignia. The precise lettering of the brand name in my father’s hand, leafy dark fronds that converge in my eye as proof of what he was. The imprint the can left on my mom’s chest.

Miller Lite.

Great taste.

At the end of the tunnel, the tattooed cross digs into his thick, dark muscle, this bicep, which is swollen, and is the type of arm I crave to rest my cheek against now, to smother in my mouth and leave saliva like papers and hairs and other things lovers leave behind so I am never forgotten.

Projectiles and premonitions. Trajectories. Proclamations and worms. A beer can and starships.

His moustache, fat and prominent, above his lip. I’ve kissed this moustache before. Sought it out. Have stalked it and photographed it, dreamed profusely about it. A magnificent bigote. A magnificent smell of a voice as he whispers shit into the slope of my neck or the hole that has become my chest or the mouth that I’ve freely opened for him in anticipation of that which comes next.

Great taste.

Less feeling.

I was six. We lived at the Plaza Trailer Park and then the Barker. Ingleside, Texas. Back when my parents were still together, before the Navy settled in town and changed the way we lived, before I fell in love with a pinto, before my Moms took us to Nuevo Mexico one day because she’d had enough, enough of all the bullshit of men and life, and she heard it was real pretty up there, a place to go and start over when you reach that day when you just don’t give a fuck.

My mom with her hair so long, so fucking long, which fell along the spine of her delicate five foot skeleton, down to her ankles, which moved like a long flock of dark sparrows when she danced, which admittedly is her favorite thing in the history of the world to do. My younger sister, morenita, skin as brown as pecan meat, and named after my father’s ex-girl. My baby brother, so young, an infant, still, when my father left us. My mother named him for a man who spoke to her heart--Juan Gabriel.

I have my father’s name and my grandfather’s name. My birth name buried beneath the front porch of our traila, interred between the unruly pink oleander and the China Berry tree, the cuartito of my dreams and pesadillas, the ramshackle dog pen of pit bulls, and the caliche road on which I learned to run.

My name is buried unforgettably in the difficult dirt of our old trailer park, buried in the field of my tattoos, of the culo and corajes, buried beside camaradas and that pedasote of my cora I left in LA.

Beer can. Birthcord. Burials.

I am this instant, this moment, this movement.

Trajectory. Projectiles. Birds.

Great taste.

Less feeling.

My name is my father’s name.

One time he told me I wasn’t his. Your mom, she called out another vato’s name when you were coming out. She isn’t as good as you think she is. One time he told me I wasn’t his. Soy del? And am I my father’s inheritance? Am I his tattoos and bullshit? His biceps and infidelities? Soy el?

Less filling.

Great taste.

Less feeling.

Baseball bat and tatts. Screen door that flings open menacingly, exposing a sudden, torn sky. Clouds shred into the eye slats of stars, huge stars. Wispy, fiery orange clouds and so much white dust. The starships that never came. The stairs beneath our feet are incandescent, and a caliche horizon that extends to all of genealogy and all of—

You’re not mine, my father told me. Your mother fucked some other dude. Called his name when she was having you. Carlos.

That was the vato’s name.

Am I this Carlos? Am I this man I’ve never known?

Those were different times…

And this is the time of birds. Giant metal birds. Livid birds. La cacaña and aluminum cans. Trajectories and rocketships.

Less feeling.

Great taste.

Proclivities.

I wield weapons in these fists that fit together like a heart, and in this tangled throat, I swallow recompense, and will there be remorse for all the things I’ve done?

This blood that spirals, soothes, and shoots.

Trajectories. Projectiles. Inheritance. Insignias. Trailer parque. Learned behaviors. Pit bulls and beer cans and baseball bats and shit like that.

Great taste.

Less filling.

Great haste.

Less feeling.

It’s the memory of my hand reaching through our torn screen door as my father drives away and the caliche road explodes into billows of beautiful, beautiful white polvo.

It’s the memory of reaching through the slit in the front of my first homeboy’s boxers, feeling it, his pedasote.

It’s putting my hand into a mouth--the saliva and sangre and the texture of tooth on knuckle that stings.

It’s putting my face through a tree, my fist through a mirror, my neck through a sabana and into the arms of my one and only vato.

It’s the trajectory of a beer can.

It’s the memory of walking to my abuelita’s house one morning because my mom wanted me to go see if my dad was there, since he hadn’t come home all night, and when I’m there, my grandma says she hasn’t seen him, doesn’t know a thing about him, and then, as I depart her porch, I see my dad get out of a car with another woman and go inside.

And then, there’s the beer can. Flying. Full flight. Soaring.

Significance. Significance.

I am walking to school. I am spineless and six.

That blue bird in pursuit. Elusive. Evasive, angry as a moth marooned in the dark. Floating beer can. Bird-like. Missiles and miscues. I am waiting hard for that rocket ship.

Not mine.

My mother’s hair. So long. So black. Crystal Gale. Her proudest possession could turn my brown eyes into blue thunderbirds and lazy winds. Hair. So much hair. My father’s fistful of her hair. Dragging. Dragging a human by her hair and her heart. Dragging and she’s kicking, and she’s screaming, and I’m there.

I’m on my way to school.

Mrs. Bliss’s first grade. Soon, I’ll climb monkey bars as high as I can, and we’ll read a story about kites. I wish I could put down a kite ahorita—to Lil Gabriel and Juan and Big Smokey and Sleepy, my one and only, and my old former silent self.

But, my dad’s dragging her to the back room, and what atrocities did I witness, then, in that tiny trailer park hallway in Ingleside, Texas, where the walls squeeze in on you like two hands crushing rocks, like lungs punctured and aveola screeching, the pinnacle of asphyxiation, the acceptance that this is the way it was, the way it is and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

2009-09-06T08:57:00.001-07:00

An Inclination to Deliver this Message to Old Camaradas from Back in the Day Regarding Something I Said after my First Time Back to Kick It at Griffith Park Once My Vato Got Sent Away

Big Puppet said it.

Nothing changes.

Not shit.

Long time back.

Tempo going on

Without us;

While his young vato ran into the Sears

So fast

His feet flew over the street

Like dragonflies or

Hasty moths.

But what if things did

Change?

What if life was cut up

Into seasons--

Some parts frantic as blizzards

and huracanes,

That destructive;

Other sects

Pleasant as caterpillars,

Unruffled as whispers?

All of it fitting together like pie?

What if?

Today, I could show them.

Years after the fact.

Splay it onto a table top

Like a blubbery cow tongue,

A chunk of la verdad.

Now, I have that ammo.

Proof of the hurricane

Exonerating its own muscle,

Giving sediment,

Clearing the way;

I could show them my shoulder, now.

13 --. All my hickeys.

All my Aguanto.

I could show them these poems.

I could show them both.

2009-09-06T05:05:00.000-07:00

Determined to Dump this Old, Beat-Down Wallet and All Its Contents Deep into the Texas Gulf

I scrape my scalp, vato.

Examine chupetes, old cicatrizes.

Damn this mirror.

Think.

Once the foam dries up,

Pores seething beneath hair tonic

Splashed like holy water,

I imagine myself at the edge of

the Gulf.

Stifle a yelp.

Why?

I don’t give a fuck to know.

I’ve trekked to the end of the continent,

Tossed old bones like fish back to the

Pacific. Watched that box

Submerge, vanish like

Pier legs and sand.

Thing is

I love like a typhoon, I’ve

Convinced myself.

Like a man on a mission.

Persistent. All-giving,

Lacking a plan.

Resolute. Indomitable as

Monarchs journeying home.

Willing to offer all parts of myself,

Even memory. For you

To love me stronger, longer,

Por Vida. That love no one’s ever seen.

All these things.

More.

See, vato, I’m loyal as fuck.

That’s the thing. Down til the end.

Ready to follow Love to the fiery gates of hell

and back, if that’s what it takes--

That’s my cache.

Thus, this wallet. These tatts.

My Pendleton. This impasse.

2009-09-05T16:50:00.000-07:00

A Few Loose Thoughts on Why I Come By Myself Instead of Holding It Down, Holding Out Until I See You Again

Never does it make sense.

Not like equations, not like rubrics.

Not longitudes, latitudes or destinations.

Seldom happens. Rare vertex of an hour.

Twitter of furtive hubris.

But when I’m alone, guey,

Knuckles on end,

Sun punching through a window,

Whole globe suspended, and

I’m huffing,

Stroking myself wild.

I whisper your name to the sink.

Call you that. Call you other things.

Blame the mirror.

Blame the heel of the heart.

Blame hope, that paunchy puppet, that whale.

Never does it fail.

Infallible as thistle.

Mangled as gators--roadside, futile.

Trust me, vato.

Come spurt loosely down the drain

Instead of saved or eaten.

Spout like truth onto your chest or belly

or leg, if ever you allow me to.

Doesn’t make sense, but what’s right

Isn’t always proven so, isn’t always convenient,

Isn’t always proud.

Blame the mirror.

Blame the marrow.

Blame my ganas, verve of a decoy, that eel.

2009-07-14T15:55:00.000-07:00

El Plato

i.
And his abuelita, her old back rolling over itself,
Forgetting the magnetism of a favorite novela,
Forgetting the phone and the year and
the pack of smokes she needed to buy;
Tenderly, in the grip of her Westside porch,
making a Sign of the Cross over us
as if gestures and 9 pm whispers to God
And an anciana’s tacit approvals were all two
homeboys in San Antonio needed to
watch over the things we’d done when no one else
would see all that her nieto and I had become.
Asking God to bless us. Pediendome:
“Take care of him.” Mijo. Holding my shoulder. Mijo.
“Guardelo.” Mijo. As my own mother, abuela,
vis-abuela had never done.

ii.
Still keep it, that plato. Perimeter of florecitas.
Painted pastels accompanied by two Dollar Store forks.
Still remember her simple gift of arroz,
frijolitos, tortillitas recien hechas, three or four chile
piquins. That offering of nimble fingers, arthritic, devoted
articulations. So much toil over a hot stove,
toil to nourish, to display. Carino and the inkling that
duty outweighed Judgment. It was an old woman’s palabra
that came to me wrapped in silvery aluminum this
one afternoon in June when the furious 410 had given
Up its clutch on the endless line of trucks like mine,
And her nieto and I had traversed the Southside and all of
Downtown to cross the Guadalupe Street Bridge—

iii.
If she knew what we knew about foils.
If she knew what I did to her nieto in the private
Hours of my Fair Avenue canton when the radio had
Already shut itself off, and my mouth, scented of Colgate
And Lone Star, soon, smelled of his pecho and between his
legs and of all his twenty-two years.
If she knew how his mouth felt on my parts.
If she knew that he wrote me poetry--firme, hard-ass
Homeboy poetry.
If she knew he wrote my name on those
Parts of him that mattered more than skin.
If she knew he called me, “pa.”
If she knew we said prayers together, nightly, me clutching him
As “Padre Nuestros” fell off our lips like beads of sweat
And sweets.
If she knew he promised to love me.
Por Vida. Para Siempre.
If she knew I was the main reason he moved away.
If she knew I broke his heart, that he still thinks of me
From time to time, writes me a poem, offers me a kite.

2009-07-09T19:10:00.001-07:00

The Coyote and the Old Man

And way off in the distance, a coyote sang,
And the earth spun for the sun and absorbed
the coyote’s song. That sadness tunneling into
topsoil and bedrock, into the spidery tributes of
roots and the skeletal remains of animals that had
long ago given themselves back to the womb.

And way off in the distance, an old man banged
Clothes onto the flattened backs of boulders, and
Imagining the man he no longer had, the old man,
too, began to hum the coyote’s tune, a soft crooning
that billowed, soon erupting into an exhaustive huffing
and gasps--the echo that was his cariño’s name.

2009-05-07T15:28:00.001-07:00

Knuckle Poem Written at the End of a Tumultuous April

In my throat I hold it--
That roused note which swaggers and sways remorse
The way only this delay in the
fascia of time, intelligence and incongruous muscle
know to do.

Gawking, scoffing, I wobble.

Obliterate the fumbling of it.
Wrist bone that hones its unbeknownst belongings—
Atrocities, atonements, artifacts, artifices
for uttering shit too loudly;

It is my tibia that has shaken.

And this mulled over audience has swollen to more
than just one eyelid and peers back
before my knuckles, shiny, shiny knuckles,
ultimately shoot their juice.

It’s the release that drenches my shorts, the jaw line and lips.

I’ve glazed my knuckles rouge, and
now, I am pinned at the ankles and
wrists like a huffing hog languishing in
the good wooden slats of this strong man’s floor.

2009-04-29T12:02:00.000-07:00

My Father’s Seed Has Spilt atop My Fist

By the time the feet stagger, the wall has surrendered its stars
And all its salt, and the eyes have squeezed out several thousand
miserable things, which like tall sentinels have amassed
on the floorboards and nails to watch me
Put my fist through shit, disassemble, grunt—
As my father has done,
As his father had done,
As all the men of my family have done
In those times when the world crumbles and life does not go our way;
And where the glass of the hall slices the tender muscle of the hand
With which I learned to draw watchtowers and payasitos and to throw good hooks
and other chingazos, a tiny heart the width of a chayote seed now glows.

2009-03-11T14:24:00.000-07:00

Jawbreaker
for JS

From the trunk that holds his jaw,

A tunnel of a place: moist, fleshy-pink
Juncture wherein a voice, not just in any chord,
But his voz, emanates, and it is heard, here, these

Intonations, this warm glaze of pronunciations that
Like a fist can grasp my far width

In two quick grips, motions unlike any other gesture
or twitch I’ve come to know from a vato.

Saliva, and the entire circumference of it is, herein,
Surrounded magnificently, deeply; the soft muscle
I meet, that muscle I pound and punch, squeezing,

Teasing, and I am at the slick brink of the muscle’s own
dark paradise. Huffing. Huffing.

An influx, my nut. Jawbone protrusions,
Melodies from our good times ensue.

2009-03-09T10:39:00.000-07:00

Regalitos for a Homeboy Boda that Never Went Down, 2006

2009-03-02T17:30:00.000-08:00

Swallowing the Afternoon a Spider Bite Overtakes My Leg

Muscles steeped in the sounds
of us.

The ball called sun is falling, so sallow, so full—

In the courtyard, the ribbons and knots of
Red, and the tiny eruptions of seedlings;
entrenched, my penchant for swallowing
renews.

I pursue you.
I recall the heaving of your pecho:
Leaving me, leaving me.
Tepid breaths break off.
Concrete has fractured underneath their fall.
Little pieces, little deaths.

2009-02-28T16:32:00.000-08:00

Chicano Love Poem at the End of Winter
for JS

Two nites ago, they jacked our ride,
And at 4 am, the spider bite has injected this leg of mine
With a poison unbeknownst to a vato like me.
Beside our bed, the 10 is a knuckle throbbing, and
at such a little hour, with the love of hood cats agonizing
over aloneness, and the malosos who stay in the shithole
behind us, all fucking twisted and unruly,
you take your rightful position inside of me.
I’ve asked for this all these years.
The ink on my back reveals me for what I truly am.
Gnarled, the roots that are appendages and thumbs
Fixate on the hard parts of me that try to get away.
Three, four times, before we’re finally done, and
what your mouth has done to my neck—

Wood has shattered wind.
Inaudibly, your seeds seep out of me.
I’ve allowed myself to slip you a grip of whispers and 13 rosario beads.

2009-01-29T15:53:00.001-08:00

Poem for a Shirtless Homeboy Whom I Catch Scoping Me out at Charlie’s
Austin, Tejas (a long-ass time ago)

And now, how muscles have stretched
and hardened,
Worn taut from eyes,
My eyes, which stiffen lats and obliques and
I could place my tongue like lips that lock
Onto his Mexican lips and his thick cock, and
I am full of these types of fat sayings
That fold slowly across my chest like arms
And black tattoos;
Indignities clump, and my heart will flail
Bravado and a midnight meeting that warms
The lungs. “That’s what I like,” he goes as
Friends pry him away.

2009-01-10T21:09:00.000-08:00

Stray 20s on Culebra

Crouch underneath a Crown Victoria that’s
Crippled as fuck; suspended on cement blocks,
mid-surgery, spokes and spindles and this
nickel chrome that won’t show its keyhole
magic or give what
I’ve known about the cone entering from only a backside,
Passed on by Big Spooky, my old camarada from La Puente,
Who passed the shit onto me like an heirloom jale
confessing the accumulation of
loads and loads of it,
this shit cooped up like flocks of
pelicanos and postponed exonerations
in tire shop garages while electrical wires go soft, stilted
as asphalt and burned spoons and lilacs;

it’s the kites that fetter me
so faithfully to images of Dayton chrome and 85 Regals and chases.

2008-12-24T11:01:00.000-08:00

Used to Know How to Throw Down, 2004

2008-11-12T15:34:00.001-08:00

A Serenade of Bricks
An old school love poem

Trucha!
I serenade you with homeboy poetry
and light velas to protect what is ours;

I got you in my head like bricks, that fuckin heavy, babe;
So fuckin firme—

Each nite,
See, I bust a load on your ample pecho, guey,
spell words like:
Por vida
Confessin a Feeling
Para Siempre
Con Safos, guey;

I groan.
Like the first time you go inside me and pump a crunk load between my legs, or
the moment your own hole clenches round my dick and coaxes out a hard-earned Mescan nut.

And sabes, guey, when you pressing that fat uncut pedasote behind me, nudging your cuero into my cachetes, or down on your knees, vato—
Mamandome, tragandome,
Then I scrape my scalp, spit all my loneliness
Alongside forlorn pelitos washing away
Like condemned fish into the silver hollow of drain;

As you lick the name on my neck, guey,
and grip my dick full in your palm
or your mouth; slobber my cock, vato;
lube me con tu saliva—
let me grip your skull from the sides and talk my shit—
suck that dick, guey;
eat that fuckin dick, pa;
never stop loving me, having me, knowing me—
I do the same shit for you. Neta

And I write chingos of fuckin stanzas,
all devoted to you, my most firme vato ever, guey;
my one and only—
I know you now in the memories of my muscles;
I know you from the mass of all my dreams, all my corajes, all my sufrimiento, all my god damn soledad, all my fuckin ganas and deseos and years of aguantando.
I know you. I finally fuckin know you.

2008-11-11T17:23:00.000-08:00

Chilaquiles in a Vacant Booth on Blanco Street

where a taut-voiced waitress avoids me;

Guadalupanas huddled over other people’s mess;

noise, no traffic;

deliberation is the flat land of a cushion;

absorbed by tortillitas, threads abscond my lips;

(impalpability);

I reckon that the clang of bolts in my swollen throat has entangled itself in junctures of soft apprehension and that bothersome appetite that hushes the part of life that pines over shit at 3 am, sorts these amalgamated losses (old love, homeboys, dog, silver Azteca ring, sleep, valor, the past 2 years of my life, youth);

an elbow dug into this windowsill on which I rest my barrio sadness;

categories of unblemished disquietude and penance;

levers that will not budge and my view of the Tower from my canton on Fair Avenue;

chilaquiles trace so many ineptitudes that do not wipe away

2008-10-29T17:01:00.000-07:00

For His Vato, He Cut Squash

And thinking that perhaps one day that knife would occupy my own hand, I watched.
In the folds of my lung, I jot notes: Seventeen wedges. Three-quarters
Of the pot. Girth and deposits of cumin that were not in the appearance of pods.
I’d never seen cumin take any other form. A flame danced.
“He gets home around 7.” Wide-mouthed.
Chin lifting. Inspections. Inheritances.
At nineteen, I am a witness.
Expectedly, circles of the calabaza proved buoyant.
Fat thighs waddle then sink. Drunken meat plops after its sheath
Has submit its flavor.
And “They’re fucking with him at work.
I don’t like for him to be hungry, to go without.”
Creeper confesses of his vato, “He works his ass off,” and
Though we all have had long days, I believe immeasurably at that moment
that his vato’s day is somehow longer than ours.
My camarada has already put in his shift. I still owe hours of my own.
Diligence, devotion.
For others, he’s cut things before. If not this dish, then, radish
And espinacas that bleed the axis of fingers green, flautas, camaron,
Picadillo, guisada. I will learn.
With no abuela or jefa, brown water shows its irregularity—
comino and the blue pot I now cook in for my own.

2008-10-26T18:13:00.000-07:00

Mud and Roaming

And in the foothills, the undefended slope of the Clown arm
Plucks corn from tall stalks; the throat opens unkindly
For their girth. Unfertile soil, inconstant and wet, splotches
The knees of my Bens when nothing else but the muddy ruin of
my pantalones harms me—he gave me these. I peel
back ojas vigilantly, hungrily.

Rhythm. Reflex. The soquete seeps into me, and
the corn dodges teeth, goes deep, yet kernels scrape teeth.
Forgiveness awaits its place atop wrist skin;
Three crosses deem me over. Maize, mush, slobber
All over my chin, I delve and forage and lunge
toward the thin cadre of sick jesters talking shit,
where memory, like my footing, has slipped—

Prodding him, inciting shit. Someone better out there.
My face has its own day in mirrors. It’s the volume of
what I cannot absorb: texts and hearsay.
On a night when my first lover died, and I’m alone, honing
The will to not join him, it’s someone else he’s with.
A neighbor. A bear. A man he’d rather spend his hours
Beside. I don’t know where they’ve gone.

And thus, it’s the coraje in the wall of my throat that bloats
The eye, the unsoundness of the ear, the unconscious
crack in the fourth rib where life has kicked the shit outta me,
and I’ve allowed it to. I own it. I have accountability.
This coraje like the coyote behind my Tia Leecha’s cuartito
howls, sniffs, roams. My coraje, too far from home.
Soon, my mouth will begin to foam.
Old boy isn’t around when I’ve come to knees and knuckles.

The floorboards embrace what buckles in my knees.

It’s his roaming that hoards me. At 3 am, it’s hard to unload.

2008-10-26T18:10:00.001-07:00

Repentantly, I Embrace the Jolt Inflicted by the Strange Fit of an Heirloom Traje

A bid for drapes, guey.
Routs of the agile homeboy and his tapa.
La corbata. Estos estirantes. Ay, jaino—

9:51 pm. I pay my respects.
And this velvety arm of nite unhinged,
So flaccid, and whose apologetic aguilas
magnify a root;

Lungs veer. The tripas leer. And the pupil is
a stout veneer of pinstripe and oyster shell.
Admire. Admonish.

This is not 1941. I am Stranger in these
Penner Baldwins.

Looking, looking but no cliqua. No ride.

2008-10-25T15:34:00.000-07:00

Untitled, Old-Ass Poem for JS that I Forgot I’d Composed until the Hour I Reminisce after One of Our Saturday Night Fights

And the chupetones!
Placid now that you’re gone:
Explosive beneath the tongue.
Y cuando regresaras, when the Midwest
relinquishes you to me, then,
fade, fade--this grip of tristesa
of not having you, of knowing you;

The house has taken you away.
I am crimson and Orchids!
Because of you, I swell.
Vessels, guey, venas, and this tussle of sabanas:
Blossoms. Tu bigote. Tu vergota.

And the throat it’s own violet, it’s own
Verge of salt milk, and the whole rotunda of
All the horizons and the silent spin of the earth
And the Spook Lights,
Imperceptible, except to us; that
Ripple in your breathing that only I detect

At 5 am, while 37 whirs like vacuums and
Mechanical virtues. Voracity has never perplexed me
Like this. Vexing me when I want and want
After not having wanted shit for years.

I peer into your Seminole life.
Target the perrito’s eyes, his limp leg and compulsive
Kiss, the three dogs in bed with me--
They look for you in the window.
Fair Avenue, the xolos, my ribs await you.
You’ve put it in me. Blamelessly.
Si, guey. Si.

2008-10-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

Dominoes

Into dots and spinners—disavowals, tallies.
Out of furrows and double sixes: fanaticisms and freak shows.
I’ll mangle bones and twist trombones because this
longitude sits at the end of the farthest pier where I
Deposit our box of bones and the toll this year
Has taken on me, and, and, and… For so long you
were mine—inconsequentially, posthumously mine.

Perspiration. Big Sleepy watches over me now. My company,
My guard, my connect. Malt 40s uncouthly sketch globes,
perfect orbs out of the fret inflicted by the one bald bulb
perched like a broke-down star atop the summits of our scalps.
Brenton Wood, Sunny, Mary Wells, Otis Redding, others…

And the homeboys’ tongues roll:
risitas, miradas, these estirantes clutching clavicle and ribs.
I remove my tapa out of courtesy. Place it top-down out
Of herencia and honoring of the ones that came before you.
I have not been by the pad on Lorena Street in months.

I cannot say what’s happened to our shit, though it feels as if
All of it is in me, now, rolling as if cerros were sequestered
Syllables unleashed, and these blue dominoes in rows before my
Fingertips are a queue of soldiers unquestioningly, stalwartly,
awaiting decree.

Answers. Prior to all this, I was chromosomes and mere soliloquies.
Afterward, I’ve put this pack of bones at the bottom of the sea and
what giving is left but to give and give and give the rest.
At this odd hour, the ferris wheel goes luminously, and
I’m armed with little more than my bus ticket and this
bag of kites and paños, which surely will devolve;

His paños involve hours and clever assemblages of watchtowers and
webbing and clowns. Does this bone in the lung ever dissolve?
Does this queue of soldados get resolved?

2008-10-21T16:13:00.000-07:00

In the Front Room of Our Canton, 2008

2008-10-19T06:08:00.000-07:00

Pompadour

i. Impeccability
Beneath the girth of Texas skyscrapers:
Gleam and circumstance never
Cease to amaze. The Esquire, 2004:
Turiqueando. The exiting that follows,
Caló falls from the Chuco’s mouth
attached in saliva and descuentos to
Toothpicks and unremitting frajos
revealing 1933 ain’t too far away
from Commerce Street and archetypal
Aztlan handshakes, homes;

ii. Extolment.
Pompadour, whose svelte firmesa forms
When clenched teeth like fingers and
Pomada have chiseled—‘ta de aquellas;
Tangibility. Adulate. I walk indebted to
Estéicis and drapes, estirantes, esquina,
vaselina, rolas, tapa and chain.
I am missing my own feather.
The Lion’s Den is a million miles away.

iii. Ya estuvo.
From my abuelito’s cantón, the
2 x 4s and shotguns surmise
A similar tacuche tie and chocolate traje once
dangled from a fucked-up chandelier
we needed to cut down as if it were
rancid fruit or flotsam;

iv. Watcha!
Faultless, stiff fact of cotton. Whetted,
the white ridge of one undershirt, now,
me pica; In this parietal lobe, this camiseta
clings to our skins and harrows ancestry
and the technologies of spray starch and planchas and
what I devote my Southside mornings to;

2008-10-16T19:29:00.001-07:00

In the Form of Dead Leaves and Torcidos

I called for backup, and what came caused dissonance instead, and the kind I was unable to scrape away with heirloom fileros or assuage in stages.

And December arrived unapologetically.

And offerings like tortillas and sacrificios render shit useless when days accumulate into solitude, which rises, de una manera, where satellites or the moon should stand.

Withstand. Aguantate.

Immediately, the unwelcomed aniversario. A veterano’s passing, and again, I am unarmed. Down-ass memorias. A down-ass vato.

Immediately, the deconstruction of altares and egos, and the things I lost to la pinta never, never remit. Marigold petals shred themselves and rot.

I ran. Season of placazos. Epic shit. Clowns and alebrijes. Watch towers and praying hands. Heavy shit. The untold fortunes of taggers and contraband Sharpies.

To Lorena Street. Phone calls and other viajes. An escapulario clings to my rotund shoulder. Atop my wrist, I situate three crosses: Forgiveness and Brenton Wood.

I like the way he loves me.

Paños, kites, cruzitos. El Monte and santitos. Sureños and 63 rosario beads. His Ben Davis.

2008-10-11T10:06:00.001-07:00

On the Search for Good Chile and a Bag of Ice

Listen to what we consume at the 7 am hour—
If not fried pig mixed with egg, then cleverly pickled
Slivers of cactus paddle aside the innards of cows stewed
Amid the reddest of the red liquids. I am steady now
In how I squeeze a .$79 feast into my esophagus
Into fuel for a day’s toil. Steady yet rambunctious in
Squirting seeds from plastic containers of the greenest
Serranos, and it’s this acquired joy:
the nicest chile punching the throat followed by
gulps upon gulps of Big Red, and is it too late to
wake this eyelid, too late once the seeds have
lost their own vesicles and the chicharron has found
its way off my plate? I am worthy. A bag of it
melts in the bed of my truck, too earnest to flee.
The asphalt on Fredricksburg wrinkles (unwilling, unworthy glow),
beneath the weight of a squinty sun and tire treads that
push and propel ice toward upper deck freeways,
high rises and casitas in other sides of the wide lens
this place is known to harbor amongst its Westside
cache of nopalitos, menudo and Big Red.

2008-09-16T16:02:00.000-07:00

Backroom 1, Planchadito (2008)

2008-09-16T15:57:00.000-07:00

At the Half-Stove While You Slept, I Prepared a Meal for

Soledad and Tonatiuh and the handball in tow,
And the Redwood, recessed,
Silent at this milky hour where clouds
Confound skylines and schemata;
Rigor, rituals—awake, and the soy fussing
Over a meandering flame,
And I’ve stitched sink water into rustlings, into
Reckonings and eyes and

Jawlines affect temperamental dreamscapes
of island Life, where after fucking, we
lay exposed and new to one another along
crooked, oyster-cased shores
and nascent sands suggesting—accuracy,
irritabilities;

and rousing the fat root I venture, then, at
this sweltering hour of no sun and sparse
words to lure us tepidly into Patchworks and
piss and tufts of chest
hair and the moisture of
Your underarm and that majestic odor between
my thighs when you take me in your mouth
and the scars and The thought that I once
was your beautiful Mescan man—possibilities,
accuracies.

2008-09-14T20:32:00.000-07:00

Schematics from a Homeboy Discovery of What It Means to Be Down for a Lorena Street Vato Made Only of HEB Creases and Folds

I want to see drops, though I know how
They menace.

It happens. Like 500 stars happened
to the effervescent hummingbird
That happened to Baby Huitzilopochtli, then, who happened
To the flower-warrior cycle I knew so many wombs ago
as Jefita, and that fateful feather, sly as foxes and absent
fatherhood, duplicating cells beneath the waistband
that happened to the whole belly and body of our moon:
Coyolxauhqui, up in my sky now—slivers
And quartered and, in the heaven of my tripas,
so full.

So, I’ve happened, now. Happened in drops and
Penner tapas, to this pecho of the San Anto
Express News--all classifieds and obituaries for nipples
And a valley of black-grey piel. Can’t put these lips to
your pecho no more. Can’t say why.

Can’t read the narratives or retrospectives foretold
In ballpoint paños and Pelicano cartas and beautiful kites anymore.
Sabrás. Man of creases and thumping. Oh, thumping, guey.
All saliva and synchronicities,
homeboy hecho de mi piel. All mis pesadillas.
Josefa Salinas, Angelita de la Noche.
All my pensamientos.

I’ve opened a month of Spurs statistics and
happened upon your origami-jaguar
cora that’s all HEB sales flyers folded up exquisitely,
tautly, tautly. You’ve chorizotes in tus ojitos. A paquete of
weenes slapped upon the throat. Roma tomatoes and
Hill Country Fair twelve-packs for hands. A brisket and
bucket of yellow potato salad buy-one-get-one-free
combo for a kneecap. I see them.

And all I want is to see drops. Though I know
I’ve happened to you like the palo
Happens to the tripas of a Ninja Turtle piñata;
That shit that happens to us—time and longing and disease.
Aging and swallowing. All folds and cicatrizes.
Simon.

2008-08-28T19:37:00.001-07:00

And My Hoja Santa Cannot Eradicate this Bout

of lament:
Silly, so silly to think it possible for
photosynthesis and autotrophy to salve that
shit, though she promised me
genuinely to accomplish this;

In her robust leaves, at three a.m.,
I find something, nonetheless.

Not tenderness. Not sulking.
In her stalks that pose and pirouette--
The limbs of tall birds like herons
like amber cranes lit by stale street bulbs,
Though so far from foam and coast and
storms churning follies
In the rambunctious Gulf, and
nonsense and tragedies and
thousands of seedlings riding salty troughs,
And grains of castles
like neurons and nonchalance
slipping through toes—

Fondle carbon. Manipulate nitrogen.

Hoja santa, grow for me.
Give me momentum. Give me millimeters
And moths and velocity. Give me that much.

2008-07-22T08:42:00.000-07:00

The Story of a Kite

2008-06-30T20:11:00.000-07:00

Regals, Acequias, and Bomb-ass Cuttys, Homes

i.
In this sprawling asphalt, Southside arithmetic and
Homeboy wonderland; Look at me—
Doting, groping esperanzas like corn truffles;
Aqui, we all are fledgling visionaries,
Fledgling camaradas, homes.

Thunderbird dreams. Dexterous fingers trace starched-up
Ben Davis seams. Heavy strawberry sweets, a throatful of blunts.
My lofty rosario heaving hope inside this Impala.
1965. Hardtop. Primer grey and believing
In these hard times, homes. Signs, thighs.
Down-ass pelons fondling
Watch tower tattuajes alongside
Charming payasitos placaos on silver-candied hoods
Of majestic Regals and true blue Cuttys; Trust.
This is my Aztlan.

ii.
Where resurrected xolos groom
Legendary Mohawks, and metalflake and Daytons
Hungrily gather, esperandolo.
Watchalo!
Scalps and pompadours! Tallboys and firme creases.
De aquellas.

Big-ass mesquites and retamas burst sinewy fronds
And yellow miracles that mimic faith; Blindly.
For all our vatos, For the marvels of this baby
waterfall that trickles and tries, billows of humo
emerge from mouths like spirits and suspiros and shit.

iii.
Black Magic llantas shiny as the womb of the
Five hundred star brothers and sisters—Military Drive,
Mi cielo, mi tierra. Watchalo!
Lonely Boy. Laughing Boy. Sad Boy. Y el Sleeper.
This vela in the shell of the sun swells and dwells and
Swallows these acequias. Industry in the city.

Ditches. Manmade rios. Shut down baños and
Choques of unrequited deseos and unreturned llamadas to
Isolated-ass vatos sitting, waiting,
Watchando, while the whole world passes on second-hand sofas
at Fair Avenue and I-37;
Heaven has gone the color of summer calabazas and fading hickeys.

Above us, el cemetario of clouds:
departed homeboys that never made it this far.
Honor. Corajes and cariños. Homenajes.
Schedule me a bout of Southside rolas.
Schedule me a car wash at the corner of Roosevelt and Military—
Sunny Ozuna, Laura Canales, Los Manhattans.

iv.
In the acequia, afloat are pachuco effigies and
Fluidos; Loves lost and knuckles knot, tripas
And tracheas on the brink of kingdom come, guey.
Veteranos loving veteranos, the magic of backseat velour
On piel! This is our San Anto, guey.
The symmetry of chorizo!

2008-05-15T16:36:00.000-07:00

Pachuco Dreamer Falls Hard after a Classic Rosedale Low-Low Show & a Firme Cruise Thrown in Big Sleepy’s 85 Regal That’s as Sleek as the Aztec Moon

1
A la verga. That’s how it began.
A pinto. A pachuco. A presencia.
Commerce Street in his eyes.
Stacys and pomade giving a vato the magic
We all know as the shine. Like that, guey.
Two vatos--placas and ganas. Asina.
Estirantes pulled down to the waist and cuero pushed
As far back as the moist hollow of the throat
Allows. A love
In the back of ranflas and saloncitos.
A love to float cuentos to lonely homeboys.
Te lo juro.

Rimes y piedad.

Cargandomelo. Pensando del.
Love happening in the soft soul of my mouth
like a word about to come out.
Purisima. Sleeper. Those kinds of words, homes.

11
Baños y parquecitos.
Inside of himself--shit, the whole jale goin so fuckin good,
so hard. Tan firmote. Sleepy could see it—
One long, slow-ass cruise. His tongue
In that pelon’s throat, and the Regal as silver as all of desire.

Sabrás. The shit was inexplicable. De primeras.
And just when it got good,
Just when todo el borlote se calmo.
The guato goes down, el baile se acabó,
and all that’s left is the loneliness of the Westside
Moon and us. A little Temptations. Los Delfonics, guey.
Manhattans on El Monte Street and West Avenue and
Ribs that crack open like seeds and sombras and ojitos
And truths—

De verotas.

This is the sky of the most beautiful nite in the history
Of the world. A thousand cuetes and the freeways avail.
The end on their piel like worms and guantes.
He remembers. Always and forever.
Final haul to those pearly gates
Of incarceration, imminent separation.

Big Sleepy con Young Sleeper.

The nite la jura might bust down a door,
Blow open a wall and come for us, cuz
What we were doin was all wrong,
All wrong. On the outside looking in.
He could see it.

If this world were mine, homes.
Put me in jail.
Un minuto más.
I found love on a two-way street, homes.
Love will cause an inferno.

111
Today, the vato wields paños like pulque, and love sworn
Tlaquaches hum Sad Boy melodies about this one Flores Street
Dreamer who dreamed shit like no other Southside vato he’d
Ever known had dreamed before. A torcido’s love--
Barrio love at the Pearly Gates of San Anto County. Torn bedsheets
and tiny kites and visiting hours that
Never end. Simón. The view from below the
Watchtower. A la verga.

C/S

2008-05-09T12:58:00.000-07:00

Southside Afternoon Spent Wishing for the Good Times to Come Back Again
In Memory of a Homeboy from the San Juan Courts

i. Zarzamora Street

Rims, rims, metal flake and vergüenzas!
Vengancias flare while ranflas nod.
Trucha! That tapa, that placa--De aquellas.
Bulges and spit, guey.
Congratulate me for my endurance and mis sufrimientos.

ii. Dominoes y 40s: Travels to the C&L

I watched. Homeboy takes it in the lung.
Down. So down. Couldn’t hear the air
Leaking outta him but I could hear his suspiros.
Write me a kite. Just write.

A knee never caressed tierra like yours.
Never knew in the vast bend of hard cartilage and
permanencia that scent we old school homies know
as Eternidad, 3 Flores, 3 gueys.
Ay te watcho.

iii. In the Name of the Father

Less vatos. Billows of humo and mescal.
Huezo will dangle like Puppet-veins and disaster.
This homenaje. This feria.

The sun, that sun, wide eye one of the sky unleashes:
Melancholy, barrio symphonies.
And Road construction abound!
Armies of ojas blot the horizon.

iv. Espalda, Mi Ofrenda

That thump. Brenton Wood and my bass.
River overcomes its banks. My cora, eyelids,
Cuero, the amp: bump, guey. Can you feel that bump?

Clowns and pompadours hold tight vigils.
Watchtowers wait for guato, and
we are all veteranos when love is involved, all of us.

La Virgencita aglow atop this old homeboy’s back.

2008-04-26T15:21:00.000-07:00

Little Papers

i. Acquire

I fathom shit; Monumental shit; Lumps of Meaning and
Palpability slant the yard—handsome, idle things; microchips
and melancholies; turds and all things new;
Nonchalance gone askew—
Elephant dung and strong Epiphanies
swelling at the end of short charismatic films;

Longing gone amok;
Nonchalance…

ii. Plastic Release

Organelles. Irreparable limps and mimicry:
Long ones. Undertones. Origami silhouettes, flat bones,
Small cranes, Changuitos and sticks!
Bougainvillea for show; meanwhile, I’ve fibroblasts roaring;
to renovate memory; to renovate time;
I watch their bursts of shit (bougainvillea, fibroblasts)—
admirably, admirably…

Flora. Pinkish cysts. Fiery folds and fields of shit. Intricacies.
Little promises like chandeliers and chokeholds:
Transgress, trespass. Transcend.
I am. I am troubled by pharynxes and little papers, little flowers,
infancies…

iii. Cytoplasm

and odd Bouts of piety, bouts of piss; little promises;
inconsistencies; little bits like moths and monsters and
mobs, I fear these doubts, these little fits and
papelitos.

2008-03-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

SELF-FLICA con 1960s-Era Fedders AC

2008-03-23T09:56:00.000-07:00

Pajaritos
for JS

We might be birds, they say.
Hollow-boned, radiating. Taking flight
amid the weight of disobedient winds.
Birds, they say, feeding on florecitas, and hearing, then,
such infallible sounds as our aviary travels allow:
the marvel of nectar, so volatile, and of wing-flapping and crooning,
and these verisimilitudes, these piqued feathers and calamities—
A palm snapped in two.
Two ends. Madagascar palm. Exquisite oddity. Two spindly beaks.
Extraordinary! And are two heads the future?
Such miracles! Milestones!
Beneath the whispers of a skyline, we watch these palms now
Sprout under the watchful gaze of grackles and little dogs.
We might be birds, they say.

2008-02-21T16:42:00.000-08:00

experimental Valentine’s after Work Poem I Would Otherwise Name Saliva If It Didn’t Focus So Much on Bones and Longings and Other Such Homosexual Latitudes

If I lost eyes--and these intestines that are raucous and all bone hard-ass bone bone like limestones and sonnets and heavy heavy-ass bones that thwack bones that speak bones that sulk and saunter and see things when the tongue of the heart goes numb as a star, and does not talk does not talk. then perhaps. this one thing. no one sees in me) but you) you can see it) you) latitudes. only you) perhaps you) that one thing one beloved thing one and only one only thing inside me and from you one thing) goes far far farther than anyone ever perceived human see humans like me like you; latitudes. we believe in things no) know things) no one else can hold in those flimsy-ass palms or fucked-up elbows but I’ve got eye sockets now empty as fuck but virtuous and vast as universals truths and inklings all inklings what I’ve lined up for us) people like us) people who see things) people who can dig inside an eye like mine and see the real shit the shit no one else) sees) me like you) cause what I got in these tripas) in these lungs and longings is you (it holds) it hold;

2008-01-01T13:52:00.000-08:00

Sirena Poem

Part 2 (Yesterday)

3 a.m. and I’ve sent a sirena
to her second death.
Into a jillion little pieces
I shattered la pobre, and
all I could do was run.

I ran to LA and
to Revolución, and from Tijuana
I ran to the Gulf
of Mexico, though my feet
never left the room
where I’d clumsily bumped the comoda
on which the unsuspecting sirena had posed.

I dropped her to the floor;
Ran for la frontera—
Of all places to run.

I don’t have eyes
in the back of my skull.
I knew she was falling, nonetheless.
Could see it happening.
I know she was destined for death again.
Pedacitos. Regalitos.
And what could I do but allow these eulogies
Like waters to fill the girth of my hands?

2007-12-31T08:29:00.000-08:00

We carry this village on our arms--

2007-11-17T17:16:00.000-08:00

Planchadito, November 2007