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.