Saturday, February 20, 2010

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.  

1 comment:

john said...

This made me fall in love with you a little bit. :)