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