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.

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.

Regalitos for a Homeboy Boda that Never Went Down, 2006

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.

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.

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.

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.

Used to Know How to Throw Down, 2004

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.

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

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.

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.

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.