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