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.

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.

SELF-FLICA con 1960s-Era Fedders AC

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.

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;

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?

We carry this village on our arms--

Planchadito, November 2007

Cicada at the Cusp of Eyelid and Socket


Even the machine in the window cannot hum louder.
Nor the autos sputtering and rocketing determinedly
across tin timidity and sky. Throbbing metropolis of tripas and hidagos;
This sprawling device I’ve devised down to the twist of a wire--
Snip and scorch. I’ve mattered prior to this. To this fluid
Where we convince cicadas to prowl relentless ballads for majesty that
Won’t exist, not for insects; I conjure mattresses on which to expound
this thing that’s happened between me and you. I say I may be
back—watch my diligence expand, watch my red mouth bloom so
astoundingly.

Citlalin


You were the one I called two-star,
Obsidian-skinned and tiny enough to swallow!
A thousand moons ago you embarked to us.
Trajectories of comets and cataclysms, amid
Asteroids as large as worries: the sound of your
Fantastic flight—the voyage of a xolo’s howl.

Ay, how I could cup you in my ear, chiquito, and
hear all that you’ve seen and have come
To us to impart, correct, heal, illuminate—that drum
That pounds elemental messages like constellations into
The velvety mouth of dawn. I see you still, Citlalin,
A journeyed star, strong enough to
explain the bleakest patches of my own failed eyes.

Arrivals. Arrivals. Infant as wise as the light of an ancient
Life form. Today, I set light to the earth, and cried and tried, yet,
no trumpets to announce you’d left us arrived,
except this hardened conch swollen up like a heart that yowled
in this cavity I’ve known as chest.

so this homeboy thinks heavy on his babe unaware of the cora swelling in the other room

Papaya Poem Half-Composed at the Poteet Swap Meet One Afternoon While a Silver Virgencita Gleams Lovingly along My Babe’s Formidable Chest
for JS


With this papaya, I
Cultivate hours that are soon an amalgamation
Of years; this span of prickly stillness, that nimble blur,
Which is already bone and tongue; and
My heart has stirred and parted,
That lucid, timid part that no one sees, no one privy,
But you—

You have the eyes for such a sight;
Precise, that vast intensity you carry
Like breath in the pocket of the lung of the eye,
Simón—esos ojitos; and for this, I promise laughter
in the portraiture of our truck,
Uninhibited laughter, colossal as air;
Promise, herein, to hold your thick
Familiarity in the cavernous expanse that is
My belly, the quinto chambers of the nopal
I’ve assembled into a corazón;

Tonight, the rabbit of the moon on my thighs, where
Your lips dance as Catrinas and Cortezes
Pirouette; a crescendo of
A painter’s suspiro;
All these seeds of papayas, all these seeds of promesas
Cascade over throat muscle and the hard
Arroyo of the vein that runs the terrain
Of all I have to give and have had taken in life and
Am offering to you, guey;
Remember when you said,

Damn, chulo, with those lips and those eyes,
I could spend some serious time…

I-37
for my Hyperion


i. Eyelids
Ajar. Tar. Tar seethes
Into asphalt wounds. Wonderland never
Appeared so thawed. Rueful equilibrium!
Appease me, now, hours. For soon, I’ll soak these
Tattered toes in gentle buckets of
Milk so white, the fur of doves will emerge
Goat-like and inveterately doomed.


ii. Faith
And the clouds have all curdled. Testaments:
Traffic gnarls. Exposes jagged rows of
Metal. Casualties so contorted and
Impatient—entire jowls serrate, separate.


iii. Downtown San Anto
To the beat of aluminum alloy beasts,
Jaundiced eye sockets twitter. Attachments.
Allowances. Barbados and pajaritos!
Anxieties toss cakes of silence beneath tire treads;
My ardor for you is explicit.
Ay, monarca wings and 5 am unrequited clutching!


iv. Accordions
Resolve enigmas among these odd clots of clouds.
I-37, I favor pechos festooned with blooms
of xoloizcuintlis, Spook Light cicatrizes.
In las palmas, I ascend to summer and reconcile
the stars. Incurably, I carry away the sun.