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