come home

anabel walk into the stream the last vein of a dying desert town, stream of mercury and arsenic anabel feel the pollution of baptism, the water melted about your legs pregnant with a thousand sunglinted seasons of excrement, filth, lillies and held breaths, greying blue potency flowing around your fingertips from the north, see anabel, from the north the aurora borealis boiled ice caps steam and hiss, from the north hear the sound of frozen faith dissipating, a faith in an eternity now heaving cancer laden death, so look for it in the rising little anabel flower lean to the breaking meagre skyskin sunsoaked in blood painting the baby blue gauze, nowadays that blood light's ever a little late in seeping from the wound, anabel wait for the screeching tires, the yelp of a dog and in the silence thereafter turn, turn your face to the south, suffocate in the song of tribal beat vibrating in a stagnant wind, the muted wavelength of equatorial genocide, the steel flashing on the apex of a swing headed for flesh, exhale the smoldering of the ghettos, breathe a rhythm of bombs fireworking desperation/fear/hope up into the daylit sky, ash snow falling upon the machete gripped knuckles, upon the mighty tossing children, the evidence, into deafeningly deep wells dark, neural twitching in cold until, anabel, until you face the falling, the cooling, the sweating sleep and worry that there ain't another step you can take to get away from it, ain't another step to get away from the ever encroaching wolf howl, the lion stalking down from the hills. anabel, you set sail an empty boat to get away, to sail west, to meet a sun that may never come round again, the wind at your back a black and blue fugitive slave with nothing to do but turn back to face the east with raised fists, nothing to do but turn back around and leave your ship faltering, stranded dead still taking in the sea, taking in the failed momentum of an insatiable humanity, sinking under the weight of wasted, directionless timeflow. so look up anabel, the vultures are circling in weakening thermals, you will not get better, the sky is draping about you in a death gown. oh anabel, there is no place for you, the seasons are ending, dearest anabel, release your footing and be flowed, carried as you are to disintegrate again into the gaining and the losing, into the escaped and unbound, into the flesh of our convict universe fleeing breathless and bloodhounded neath the moonless night

slowly melt us down

child you don't know who you are open your eyes wide step onto the earth aspinning into your view the fiery dawn a warrior blood crazed and draped of golden red skin and a painted face sweating silver clouds. step into the earth, child, it is for you. awake from your deep resting and see the twitching butterfly laying on the boiling asphalt with only one vibrant metallic turquoise wing as the infinite methods of death. child you are in pieces, come down to the clear waters running through the heart of the city choked with diamond detritus of your people's intoxicated reality, see the oiled duck whose top bill has rotted off, her tongue exposed and scabbed, unable to catch its nourishment as the long starvation that will overcome you on some quiet night as you sleep. child you are humbly eternal, as the rusted train rattles heavy and violent on the bridge above you see the headless corpse of a stray dog decompose and confetti the acidic air around you with flies bestomached of your infinity. child your fabric is the weak spiderweb of a rogue, disheveled galaxy, see the man pierced upon a wooden cross begging for mercy, see the man walking away from his bodhi tree meditation, limping towards the brothels, in them feel your fear of the winds prowling about the cowered lands, carrying with them the blackened skies of your days. oh child! feel us forgetting your existence after you ran naked and boldly from the city for several days into wilderness. could you hear us, child, hear us trying to keep our shit together, trying to vanquish the thought of you lying on your back as just another poisoned cockroach in the cooling desert sand, your tired eyelids slowly closing out the universe once fireworked dazzling and powerfully streaking now silently paling embers into the ash snowflake drifting down upon your spilt bones and blood

when it all fails

where is your heartbroken susana to keep fresh flowers upon your tomb, trinidad frausto? your lineage, frausto, who are they to hasten into your abandoned cemetery to strengthen your crumbling headstone, layer it anew with a vibrant torquoise and kill again the ever mounding fire ants? will you not beckon into your bosom, frausto, the hawk striking steeply upon the venom snakes coiled above your cold concrete slab, will you not claw wild against the gates of your heavens and come back, come back to see what your village has come to be? do you hear the horseless vaquero stumbling down the pale orange lit alleyway, drunk and muttering, tapping his golden belt buckle and wondering where things went wrong? only black cats now roam the streets frausto. the sands now are drifting your people away from you into the sunset cliffs. death here is like the breeze now. will you not come out of your dark devotion to your small stake out in the desert plain, come to your senile susana's side, sip from her mescal, kneel beside her in front of her saint shrine, watch your grandchildren dance with their young lovers in the town plaza, will you let this slip farther from you, frausto? will you rise, frausto! will you paint your skull gold and blood reds, will you storm into this town with bleached teeth blinding death grimaced and as strong as when you were laid low by time, will you not cloak yourself in the vibrant cloth of starved children swimming in the captured wild waters, of lovers losing virginity in the shadows, of the frenzy of people trying to save their souls? oh, frausto, the moon is alive once again and she does not see your silver bones on the march. frausto, she reaches out and touches the dust of a lily that for so long rested upon your aged crumbling pillow. frausto, through her cataract cloud eyes she sees your fear from her window shrink away into the distance, she sees the hawk soaring back into the morning rising.

no other world for your dead light

fastestar you are broken the people of the city are writhing in sweaty immortality their enemies, all of your fantastic ways to die encamped in the surrounding dusty hills, exhausted of ideas they're eating up stray rats their cunning weapons have turned to dull stones. fatestar you are weakened yon child born into a gilded bucket from a throned, disinterested queen squirms and wheezes out his tuberculosis lungs while you know we all know the babe needs be to grow, to harden and callous, to die vaingloriously on the barren battleground of his lover's heart. fatestar you are the spoke now no longer the center fatestar you are the hangman's rope now no longer the old sacred oak for no longer do us junkies seek your face in nebula we seek forgetting we seek an obliteration tantric, excessive, careless we scalp each other and paint our brains white with moonlight. once, fatestar, once you sent us to die upon wooden beams silhouetted on the burning horizon, you trembled when we pressed our fingertips into the earth, you shone your brightness upon the decapitated heads tumbling down from atop our temples. now, fatestar, now we all look to the hills we all see the tornado of buzzards vortexing above your ruination no need to race into the desert to find your body no need for burying you no need to see the fattening death birds pecking at the meat of your eyelids no need for our hearts are become feral, for we will burn the sky away ourselves, we will satiate infinite hunger and ravage the motherly soil into a grey, brittle lifelessness, no need for we have robbed you of strength and with it we will rape and impregnate the universe with an eternal impermanence

these fading things

they sewed a lion's heart in you, Ann, from the get go, they sewed it in tight and tried to keep you in a plastic cage for years. they gave you a label, Ann, and tried to keep you from knowing what there was to know. but I saw it coming, I knew you'd bust out. I saw you rampage out into the city streets and lay low the skyscrapers, cut them down out of your horizon just cos you wanted to see everything how it's supposed to be. Ann, I saw when you were leaving town on the only bridge out. You stopped there at the apex and listened to a distant train howling in the dark, I smelled it too Ann, the lingering reek of carbon fumes, vaporized poison, something so familiar, the residual exhaust of so many before you that have given up, accepted that, yes, maybe, they weren't supposed to know where they were really going. But you're not just passing through Ann, they're keeping something from you, so I followed you out of town and into the wild desert plains, I raced after you until thick clouding black covered the sky. I came upon you laid down, the rain catching in your eyelashes, pooling silver about you. I'd hope you wouldn't fall in love then and there but when those clouds cleared out, when those ringing sunshine bells tinctured the sound of morning come anew with gold, I heard those lion heart sutures strain and rust. I saw you go wild, as if in these shadows we cast you can see our infinite genealogy until another night disappears us, as if all that is hidden away from us can be harvested out of the winds and spun into the hangman's rope ever gently torqued about our throats as time passes as we keep falling from the heavens until the snap of our necks just before we land. I saw you unbound and fierce, rising back up the rope, a roman candle flaring untamed and charging into the night sprawl above you. Ann, I saw it all, the molten lead stars, the poacher's bullets shoot you down just before you kissed the cheek of your destroyer. I followed the arc of your meteor descent. I found you laid low empty handed and forlorn in a wilderness, the scavengers hungry and on the run. Ann, I excised your beast heart and threw your body into a nearby stream. I walk back into the city, heart in hand, listening for the sound of some broken thing on the verge of being born

travelling in tracks

Gabby, is that you, yonder calming your trembling bones with cigarettes, leaned up against the lonely yellow light post downtown while the cinco de mayo tejano beats slide from bass strings onto the dance floor, the trumpets vibrating the vaquero crowds, gyrating the señorita's hips. No babe, this isn't you. No, this couldn't be you, Gabby, this woman sitting in silence at your dinner table awaiting your man, ever late, ever suspicious of his whereabouts, it couldn't be you letting your heart go cold in anticipation of another night of swarming, innocuous dreams. No darling Gabby, this can't be you sitting with your soul so quiet and still listening to the church ring those godawful bells, to the rooster crowing, the late night freight train burning through town, listening with smoke leaking from your mouth and your babies breathing soft in their cribs. Gabby, dear, you're not the one waiting for everybody else's day to start up, are you? I asked about you girl. My oh my, they said the moon gave you the name of gold, they said I could find you between the ripples of the stream burning diamond bright, so honey, you know I dressed in my finest, I left town with much owed, much promised and a hope that I won't falter with you, wishing I won't fuck up like the last time when you floated off with the wind. So dearest Gabby, I'm miles and miles out of town and freezing in the desert like a shepherdless fool. But I found you, eventually Gabby, I found you naked with your arms up and bracing the stars above you anext the old seminole canyon where it meets the rio grande, where no man has been in eons. I found you out here in the dark staring toward all civilization writhing and degenerate in a cage of electricity and concrete. Oh girl, you know I'm burning my clothes for us, flaming up them old native cave paintings to a dancing fever cos they ain't got nothin for us in that yonder eden, cos babe you need to come here anext to me, you need to let them heavens slip on past, let them city blues fester and rot where they be. Jus acome over here honey and keep warm and come morning we'll scale down these cliffsides and slip on into the river we'll slip on into the flow and let the old gal take us to where we need to be

ode to the passing through

oh I said I could hold your fears, I said I could hold them in my hand for you, I would use my infinite strength to keep them from your heart. Behold this stream's might. Behold my clenching fist aweakening. I am become weathered and my weariness burns. Unto the water I let slip, one by one, what you had entrusted to me. Unto the water in increments I let slip what you asked me to carry. And they pool and swarm and pool until back into your bosom you are left with a violent ocean for which you have no means to tame. Upstream the weight of my mistakes rot above us in the gathering clouds. I slice a piece of my heart, a bloody flesh downstream I send in desperation that it will help stand you and ours back up tall. Oh I said I could bring you peace, I said soon I will embrace you as brother, as sister, as myself. Just see. Just wait and see. Into the spider web ether I reach up my hand and feel the strength, strength enough to bond us forever and I bring to you a fistful of bright burning atoms. My brothers, my sisters I see you all stare shimmer eyed at the sky. I open my palm above you. I let go the stars for you. I let go the death shining of a billion suns hourglassed sands pouring. Oh brothers, oh my sisters, I hear you never more. With my dirty fingernails I excise the last ounces of my heart. Upon the snow'd mountain tops I build a fire and upon the flames I lay the flesh. I watch my mistakes as ash diaspora and flutter and settle as an insignificant dust all over your glassy tombs. Oh god, I said I can throw my light into your wasteland but I am become lost and seek peace in your darkness. Oh enlightened, I said I can be so still, so unwanting in your lotus bloom but with my insatiable yearning I sneak around your gardens blooming and plush fruitful, leaving poison in the roots. And, for you, I have no heart left to give. Oh I said to you my love, my family, my world, I have this for you left. I have a fistful of cancer black bestomached. To you all, as my silhouetted life stragglers walking and burdened neath the lonely yellow street lamps, I have for you all the insecticide bitterness of my mistakes tingling upon my tongue. Hear them scream Hear them yell I will become hoarse soon enough soon enough I won't say a thing and you will be free

pase que lo pase, pase que lo pase, pase que lo pase

Gabriela's 5am chanting wakes me up, from the streets, through my open window letting in slow balmy winds and her voice, her voice throaty and beckoning me out of my dreams, out of sleep. Gabi's siren chant leading my feet onto the quiet boulevard. The unseen sun illumines a weakly heaving lung writhing upon the sidewalk. I lean over it to hear the force behind her pleas made to whoever'd listen, her pleas to bring home the land's children from blood soaked warfronts, the force behind her calming lullabies sung unto her suckling babies. I hear the chain link gate creaking in the breeze at the end of a walkway overgrown with weeds, overcome with bulging ant colonies and leading to a home humming in the dissipating heat of a family's warmth. From there echoes of domestic hatred, of domestic tenderness trembling out into the quiet city leaving a cold inside, a cold like the bottom of the seas. Gabriela's walking through the vacant town plaza now chanting ever still, toward the newly arched sun on the horizon. I left the dilapidating house to catch up to her when I see butterflies flutter out from the empty housing lots. As they snowflake drift into the road sulphur alit they become by the headlights of the first fired auto of the wakening city. It is a white flapping massacre as they are consumed into the engine, into a violent beating steel pulsing flames. It is a death too quick. Tis Gabriela's heart when she realized love was real, pervasive, a tumbling magnificence of futility that'll rip all of your wings apart. It is a beauty keen to be destroyed, the auto rolls out of sight, exhausting poison into the morning air. Yet her awful, rhythm chant lingers in morning fog. At midday she makes the river. I find her clothes perfumed and turquoise, her black silk parasol floating amongst the reeds. The sun burns oppressive. I find her skin tanned and wrinkled in the boiling sands. Her lips are crackling, mouthing look, look yonder, there is hope and hope and hope. Yonder I see the carcass of a painted horse, a man who come storming from the mountains but got lost trying to find her. Deeper into the desert, far now away from the city, I find a pile of muscles and tendons scar tissued and frayed as freshly slain rattlesnake, her strength yearning for burden, with a venom no longer potent enough to kill. Back behind us man is feverishly building palaces anew, arisen they be by the power of her unyolked and forgotten ghost. At dusk I find her bones standing anext the precipice of a canyon thermalled by golden hawks. The rollercoaster steepness sinks into our stomaches. The setting sun lights her spine afire. I see her yellow teeth are clenched, her shallow ocean blue shimmer eyes sunken, vibrant, exasperated in anticipation. I say it's ok. I whisper it's alright. I take her delicate hand in mine. And so still, so still are we, together spun once again into view of the frail embers that so long ago released us into the night

que están malditos

Antonio, the city's black haired, mestizo skinned child, he's sitting on the banks of a dry river, he's picking a knee scab and waiting for the ancient storms to flood out the plastic bag brimmed riverbed, he's falling in love with the notion of a million years of rain that'll purify the ever concentrating sewage, that'll blow away the circling buzzards awaiting the blood to go cold for the next parched, fleshy life who finds the last desperate hope of a swallow of water soaked up by a pile of dusty bones. Antonio flicks the scab into the dirt and listens for his storms, hears only the city, the fucking city's wheezing in the desert, hears the city's toxic fuel powered, combustion gasps trying to maintain a ruthless routine of neatly chorded trees, synchronized traffic lights, the food rationing hustle and of minimal, standardized opportunities for subversiveness as a clattering of keys and locks. Antonio stops trying to hear it coming, he looks to the horizon for his clouds, his skin feels for the winds that'll herald in the reckoning of his rejuvenation dreams. Antonio feels nothing, sees nothing. Antonio's tasting blood from his knee, the coagulating bitterness sputters his seething heart, the city jolts like it missed a gear and spills his abuelita from her adobe box, she shuffles by him with her slow tapping cane resetting the false infinity pulse she had spewed out of her womb so long ago. Antonio follows her to the catholic church sinking into the encroaching dunes. Antonio watches her cup her hand into the blessed water and lap it up when the priest ain't looking. She turns turns and sees Antonio staring at her from the gilded doorway, her wrinkled wet lips mouth mis jovenes, mis jovenes, estan malditos. Antonio turns his back on her, he turns into the city streets again, directionless Antonio goes to meet them, those black flashing violent clouds hidden away beyond the vaporized acid fortress exhausted by his people's existence. Away from the city he drifts, turning into the storm's emanating, long estranged and delicate winds as they find him, the city's bastard child with whitened knuckles and feverish heart beat echoing the quickening thunder

liliana of the no place

liliana, she's walking down chapoy street, past the block of gently dancing white dresses clipped to backyard wires, it's getting dark in the desert and she ain't a place to dream tonight, she ain't a place but she don't got the hips to carry the wet linens of a man and family, she don't got the calm in her fingertips for all the hanging, she don't know a way to stay there, she's closing her eyes to the setting sun but she knows it won't go away for good, the stray ant hard on a vagrant scent drifting it to an alone unknown, a scent vague and putrid to the rest of the colony, the wing beats of a moth rising high above a quieting world to the glassy ghost light of a star, rising high above the steady pulsing moth littered carnival neon, rising high for it's all it can see, it's all there and won't go away so liliana opens her eyes now, she braces herself against the gaining southerlies, arms folded she leans into it, headed off to rest in the reeds of the san felipe stream, surely somewhere her forgotten home is embraced in a carefully tended coal stove warmth, liliana leans into it with nothing but a persistence of breath, a persistence of the unanswered question of who she is as what she has come to be and surely, come morning, the children bathing in the waters will stop their splashing and see liliana of rags, liliana of the down and of the outs, liliana of the hopeful, liliana paled and frigid grinned floating to the sea